Looking Back: Pauline Kael in the Temple of Cinema's Doom (Some Words About Her Old Review of Raiders of the Lost Ark)

Reading Pauline Kael's review of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg's cinematic milestone The Raiders of the Lost Ark ("Whipped") some years ago I was surprised less by Kael's appraisal of the film (much of which I disagreed with, not that I expected much else) than the insightfulness of her appraisal of the kind of film it was--a big-budget action movie of the kind that was then still a comparative novelty (especially for American filmmaking) but which we have since come to take for granted as the backbone of Hollywood production and the commercial and even artistic basis of the medium--and, too, what the making of the movie said about Hollywood circa 1981.

As Kael observes, the film, rather than telling a story building to a climax, gives us a long succession of "climaxes" as, with only a fairly perfunctory narrative thread connecting them and little regard for logic (the plot at once ultra-simplistic, overfamiliar, and full of holes, presenting which the film "cuts corners and takes the edge off plot points"), the movie packs visceral thrills together so closely, tightly and efficiently together that, the movie's makers lingering on nothing, savoring nothing, they leave room for nothing else--character, dramatic tension, suspense, while the film even races through the funny moments Kael found its liveliest and cleverest. In the end the result can seem like a commercial for the movie itself ("an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, raced through at top speed and edited like a greater trailer--for flash"), which, for all the undeniable technical skill invested in putting it all together (indeed, the editing seemed to Kael so tight it was "as if the sheer technology had taken over"), fell flat for her as entertainment, never mind art. (Raiders, she wrote, is "so thrill-packed you don't have time to breathe . . . or enjoy yourself very much," especially as the movie goes on and the audience gets thoroughly exhausted, even if the performance, which requires the movie to open with a bang and then keep topping itself, had not faltered by that point as it seemed likely to do.)

Kael's being so unimpressed with the movie seems important given that it leads her from appraisal of the film to the state of the film industry that produced such a movie--a "collapsing" movie industry where the marketing came first, with this not because of any "special effectiveness in selling pictures" they had (however much the marketing folks shamelessly claimed undeserved credit wherever they could), but rather their "keep[ing] pictures that don't lend themselves to an eye-popping thirty-second commercial from being made," or if such a film did happen to be made in spite of them, keeping those films from "being heard of" by the moviegoing public. Thus the movies that really needed a big marketing push to help them find an audience (and given their quality, deserved that help) were deprived of such resources as all the backing went to the movies easiest to sell, namely movies made by directors, who, especially given their talent and integrity (Lucas "one of the most honorable persons who have ever headed a production company"), were sadly "hooked on the crap of [their] childhood[s]" like "old Saturday afternoon serials," and equally "hooked on technological playthings and techniques." Indeed, Kael closes the rather lengthy essay with the observation that Lucas, whose then still novel attentiveness to the quality of the Star Wars-brand toys she remarks, is ultimately "in the toy business." Meanwhile, "anything to do with people's lives belongs on TV," such that this is where one goes for intellectually and emotionally more satisfying fare.

Thus Kael, after laying out just how the action movie works (if in rather a sour fashion), very neatly summed up how a financially pressed Hollywood seized on the logic of "high concept" film dominated by simplicity and striking visuals, the way in which it this elevated a certain kind of blockbuster (oriented to action, pace, spectacle, youthful and childhood nostalgia above all else, often as artistically empty as it is technically accomplished), marginalized other kinds of films, and increasingly relegated old-fashioned human drama to the small screen in a way that not only stands up very well four decades later, but feels very contemporary--those critics who actually dare to be critical essentially saying the same things over and over and over again, such that much of what Kael wrote could as easily have been written this week as when she actually wrote it, before most of the filmgoers in this country were even born.* Indeed, for all my disagreements with Kael's broader outlook and her assessment of Raiders (Criticize that magnificent score? How dare you, Madam!), I would strongly recommend Kael's essay to anyone taking an interest in high concept filmmaking, the "poetics" of the action movie, or the history of Hollywood since the "New Hollywood" era--the more in as, as Hollywood flounders amid a crisis far more severe than what it faced in the 1970s, with the strategies it adopted then these days in doubt, it seems an excellent occasion to gain the perspective offered by such a backward glance, and the contemporary commentary dominated by Hollywood's courtiers and claqueurs offers little to compare with it. I also recommend the review as a reminder of just how very, very good this major figure of her era could be when she was at her best, even in this very late and less celebrated phase of her career.

* It seems to me notable that Pauline Kael, in discussing all this, did not once reference the James Bond films that were an important inspiration for both Lucas and Spielberg in the early part of their careers--the regrettable omission pretty standard in discussion of Hollywood's embrace of the action film.

Are Glorified Autocompletes Going to War?

Ever since the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) became "hot" again in late 2022 we have been inundated with coverage of any and every hint of an imminent (or not so imminent) development in the field, as well as speculation about what it all might mean.

Those who are bullish, of course, get more attention--the idea that "Something big is happening" more interesting to most than explanation as to why that supposedly big happening is really "Much ado about nothing." Still, watching this field these past few decades I have consistently seen the hype far, far outrun the reality--certainly to go by what Kurzweil predicted in 1999, the possibility that Frey and Osborne argued in 2013, what Musk promised over and over and over again. Meanwhile Robert Gordon's skeptical views from back in 2000 have never been far from my thinking, and with them the implication I still argued this year--namely that any real artificial intelligence revolution will come when engineers advance AI performance in those key areas of perception of, navigation through and dextrous manipulation of the physical world to the point at which they can reliably perform physical tasks like moving about and handling objects as well as an adult human. And even as AI programs astound observers with their capacity to generate words and images, that prospect still seems remote.

Still, amid a profound remilitarization of international relations the world's armed forces--which necessarily take the view that they cannot afford to dismiss what is only "probably" hype just in case there really is something to it (and frankly, have historically been very susceptible to mere hype themselves)--the longstanding interest of those forces now seems to have a sharper edge as what may have seemed like unrealistic aspirations a few years ago are now being tested out, with this the case with such systems as fighter aircraft. Where a short time ago it seemed as if air forces were drawing back from their earlier, extravagant, expectations for the next, sixth, generation of jet fighters, the U.S. Air Force is now putting the "X-62" through its paces--an F-16D equipped with AI (a fourth-generation fighter with a sixth-generation control system) that has, reportedly, permitted it to take on a human pilot in a mock battle.

Is this the beginning of a process that will go all the way to a new "Revolution in Military Affairs," or is this line of development going to fizzle out the way the promise of so many technologies has in the past?

I suspect that we will get a clue as to the chances of that in what happens with AI in the civilian economy, where the stakes are apt to be less great, the tolerances not so small, as they are in high-technology warfare--and it must be admitted, even mainstream business news coverage is increasingly using the word "bubble" to describe the situation.

If they are right about that it would be far from the first time that defense planners "jumped the gun" in thinking that a still-developing technology was ready for the battlefield.

"Method to His Madness"

I have always disliked the phrase "method to his madness" and the assorted variations on it. This has, I think, nothing whatsoever to do with the remarks of Polonius in Hamlet from which the usage has derived ("though he be mad, there is method in't"), as they never bothered me when I was reading the play or seeing it performed.

Rather they seem to me to have had to do with the particular variant of the phrase that it seems we hear so much "There's a method to my madness" (emphasis added).

This is, I think, because I have a pretty low tolerance for braggarts, and for obnoxiousness, and this is a particularly obnoxious brag.

"What I'm doing looks crazy, but really it's genius! You're just not smart enough to see it because you're not a genius like me!"

"I'm playing 4-D chess and you can't grasp that with your 1-D mind!"

"I'm thinking on a whole other level than you!"

This behavior would be pretty bad even if it were absolutely true--graceless in a way (contrary to our pop culture's stupidities) probably not characteristic of those who might actually be geniuses. However, it is worse than that because the supposed 4-D chess-playing, whole-other-level geniuses just about never prove to be anything but persons of sub-normal intelligence setting themselves up for disaster. So does it also tend to go with cheerleaders for such persons, passing off foolishness as if it were genius. (Admittedly that was not what Polonius was doing, but at this moment I can't help thinking of how things did not go too well for Hamlet . . .)

Hopefully people will start associating this reality with the phrase, and stop using it. But one might as well hope that they would stop tossing around that other famous phrase of Polonius', "To thine own self be true"--and, alas, here we are, enduring the ceaseless warping of the meaning of those words involved in that other cliché.

The American Press' Love Affair with Emmanuel Macron

There seems to me no question that Emmanuel Macron has had an excellent press in the United States since he first appeared on the American news media's radar. Certainly that media is an elite-loving, Establishment-sucking up "respecter of persons" that is deeply deferential and even inclined to flatter heads of state and government, with leaders of the G-7 countries ranking particularly highly with them--so that simply holding the office that he does gets Macron positive treatment. To the extent that such a figure conforms to their expectations of the "international elite" they so exalt (it is a point in Macron's favor with them that he was an investment banker before entering politics), and their stupid fantasies about Euro-aristocrats in particular, they are still more inclined to flatter him--certainly to go by how they praise his looks and alleged "charm" and even his arrogance (all consistent with the image of an aristocrat in those cartoons in which they think, and in their minds especially fitting in a French one). It would seem yet another point in their favor that just as they think anything spoken in English using "Received Pronunciation" must express only the greatest intelligence and refinement (it is Rita Leeds over and over and over and over again with these people), people of their type imagine the same of anything said in French (especially to the extent that they have little or no command of the language, as is generally the case). It may also be that Macron's comparative youth is fascinating to journalists from a country where politics (just like in the old Soviet Union in its later days) has come to be dominated by ungainly gerontocrats who were never much "in their prime" and are now publicly displaying evidences of dementia--while some, even more stupidly, seem to approve of him the more in as they so heartily approve of the, ahem, unconventional, tabloid/Lifetime Channel movie-of-the-week details of his marriage.

However, all that would count for little were it not for the thing about Macron most important to winning their admiration, which is exactly the thing about him that the French public detests him for--not as some fools might have it, his being "too intelligent" or any other such nonsense, but Macron's being a rabid elitist, centrist, neoliberal-neoconservative openly contemptuous of the working people of his country, and of their thinking that they have a right to say in their own government. It is this, after all, that assuaged the hatred many in the American press felt for France and for "Old Europe" twenty years ago, such that they treat them far more favorably today, and which in the wake of his ill-conceived and ill-managed response to an "unexpected" far right victory in the European elections has publications like Politico running articles about Macron as a "tragic" figure of "magnificent mind" rather than discussing his "mind" the way that Emmanuel Todd did last year in his interview with Marianne.

For my part I find Todd's analysis in Marianne far, far more convincing, and suggest that the interested will get far more out of his remarks than any of the piffle that the mainstream of the English-speaking press has to offer.

The Prospects of Deadpool & Wolverine: An Update

A few weeks ago reports of a likely $200 million opening for Deadpool & Wolverine got the entertainment press talking--that kind of thing still very impressive for an R-rated movie even pre-pandemic, and that much more spectacular now. Subsequently Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast confirmed the expectation (more or less), and has since reaffirmed it in the two updates the site has published since (the last one as of the time of this writing still projecting $180 million-$200 million for the debut).

In contrast with the way the estimates crumple in the weeks before opening for so many movies (most spectacularly, in the case of the ballyhooed The Flash back in June 2023, as expectations of a $115-$140 million opening already thought disappointing in light of the hype fell to one of $60-$80 million that itself proved overoptimistic), the expectations for the third Deadpool movie (and kajillionith Wolverine movie) are holding up, with very little way left to go.

The result is that, barring a profound upset at the last minute, the question is not whether the movie will open big (even a significant drop from the $200 million figure would still be reason for those cheerleading for Deadpool's success to feel good), but how the film's legs will hold up. Will this be a case of the interested all coming out at the outset and the movie's revenue falling hard in the coming weeks, or will the movie get a good multiplier for that debut? And, moving beyond the undeniable North American interest in the movie, will this movie do as well internationally, and so give Disney-Marvel something to really celebrate?

One way or the other we will learn the answers to those more difficult questions over the next month.

The Box Office Prospects of It Ends With Us: Some Thoughts

As Ryan Reynolds stars in what may be the biggest movie of the summer, the year and his career, his wife will also have a film hitting theaters--a big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us.

Why bring it up when I rarely consider the box office chances of movies that are not big splashy sequels to comic book superhero films and the like? From a box office point of view this movie interests me for two reasons:

1. Where adaptations of bestselling books--and not just young adult books or adaptations of children's classics but recent bestsellers for grown-up readers--used to regularly become blockbusters substantially on the basis of readers' interest in them, this has become less common these past many years, with adaptations of publishing sensations in fact tending to be commercial disappointments, as happened with Where the Crawdads Sing and Killers of the Flower Moon. I suspect this is partly because books are mattering less in people's lives (that books become bestsellers after selling fewer copies as the market shrinks, that people less often read the books they buy, that those books they read leave less impression on them, etc.), and partly because what people look for in those movies they go to the theater for increasingly diverge from what they are prepared to enjoy in their books (or on the small screen) when they bother to go to the theater at all. The result is that looking at this movie I wonder whether it will buck the trend, or confirm it.

2. In Deadline's list of the most profitable films of 2023 we saw an unusually high share of smaller and lower grossing films. These movies succeeded not by selling the most tickets through appeal to the widest audience, but the combination of the existence of a limited part of the audience whose interest was high, with low costs. Thus did such movies as Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film beat Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in absolute profit, never mind relative return (the net on Taylor Swift's movie twice the total expense, as against a little over a fifth of its expenses with Guardians), all as, with a little help from marketing revenue, the PAW Patrol and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the cut as well (the latter movie actually taking the #4 spot!). The result is that if It Ends With Us looks small next to a Deadpool it might find its way to success by that path--with the trajectory of Where the Crawdads Sing suggestive. Where that movie took in a mere $140 million worldwide at the box office (gross, not net), the combination of that figure with the limited outlay for production and promotion made it not just profitable, but translated to a very respectable cash-on-cash return that did not get it on the main list of profit-makers, but did get it on the accompanying list of what one might call "honorable mentions" for lower-budgeted movies. For now Boxoffice Pro forecasts a $20-$30 million opening for It Ends With Us, but for all that it might well end up on Deadline's honorable mention list come next spring--or even better still should the big movies continue to falter as they have done so often this past year and a half. Indeed, it would be all too symbolic of the trend were It Ends With Us to rank higher on Deadline's list than Deadpool come next spring.

Is Bad Boys 4 a Hit or a Flop?

Back in 2020 Bad Boys 3 (Bad Boys for Life) came out in the dump month of January and proved a comparative success, grossing $206 million domestically and $426 million globally. The global figure actually compared favorably with that of the preceding film in the saga, 2003's Bad Boys 2, even after adjustment for inflation (the equivalent of about $520 million versus $470 million in June 2024 dollars), all as the newer film scored its gross on a much lower budget. (Made for $90 million, this may have been just half of the $130 million that went into Bad Boys 2 when we adjust for inflation.)

Such success made Bad Boys 3 the highest-grossing film of 2020 (if only because pretty much every other major movie was deprived of its chance by the pandemic), and probably let it turn a very respectable profit. (There was no Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament in 2020 because of the exceptional circumstances, but I could picture the movie netting $100 million+ very easily on the basis of the numbers, not something that $90 million action movies do much these days.*) This likely made a sequel inevitable, with, just like the gambling on summer by the backers of The Fall Guy, the studio probably hoping to do better still with a June release than one in January, the more in as this summer's competition was not terribly strong in that patch.

How did it go?

Domestically Bad Boys 3 opened to $63 million domestically, or $77 million in June 2024 terms. The "multiplier" for the opening weekend was about 3.3--the movie more than tripling that opening gross over its fuller run.

By contrast Bad Boys 4 (Bad Boys: Ride or Die) had a weaker opening--debuting to $57 million, or about a quarter down in real terms. The movie has also not had better legs, with its take as of five weeks of play about $181 million--or about 73 percent of the former film's gross in June 2024 terms ($250 million or so).

Meanwhile, the international market, once again, did not come to the rescue. Bad Boys 3 made 48 percent of its money domestically, 52 percent internationally, while the fourth film has had a rough 50/50 split so far, leaving it with about $365 million globally--against that aforementioned $520 million or so. The result is that without much further to go the new movie has taken in just 70 percent of what its predecessor did--a significant drop rather than a significant improvement, suggestive of the obsession of Hollywood with running every success straight into the ground and beyond. Still, if the makers of the film really did keep the production budget down to $100 million (in real terms, a smaller budget than the $90 million budget of Bad Boys 3 four and a half inflationary years ago) it is possible, even probable, that this sequel will in the end eke out a profit as well--though likely not one so great that the Suits will rush to green-light a Bad Boys 5 if they have any brains at all. Alas, one is far more likely to lose than win betting on that, and the vehemence of the unhinged sequel-nobody-asked-for-mongers grows only more desperate all the time.

* Taking the $90 million production budget, and estimating from that a final outlay in the $200 million or at most $300 million range when everything is added in; and weighing that against the movie's making $200 million net at the box office and likely matching that in home entertainment, etc. for a total net revenue of $400 million; and we get a $100 million profit (or maybe much more).

In the End, Just How Badly Did Things Go For Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga?

A few weeks go I devoted a couple of blog posts to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga--the disappointing debut of which should have come as no surprise to anyone who remembered how the last Mad Max movie actually did, as against the entertainment press' crowing over it as if it were a gargantuan blockbuster (Max Max: Fury Road making a pretty mediocre gross by big budget summer movie standards, and probably losing money). And even if one was less than clear on all that the memory of how franchise movies about side characters from the franchise's main line generally do would have prepared them for how things actually went. (From the first Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga recalled Disney-Lucasfilm's Solo: A Star Wars Story, which proved a franchise-derailing flop--all as, let us be honest, Furiosa is no Han Solo pop cultural cachet-wise.)

Of course, even allowing for that one may have wondered if a weak opening might not be redeemed by good weekend-to-weekend holds--especially as fairly decent legs helped the Mad Max movie make what money it did (the movie picking up a not bad 3.4 times its domestic opening), and there may be a trend toward movie grosses being less front-loaded. Alas, far from bouncing back from a weak opening with a good run of that kind, the movie did less well than its predecessor that way (its pretty much ended run seeing it take in just 2.6 times what it did in its first three days). Meanwhile the international markets were no source of salvation--the domestic/international split in the global gross for this one pretty much the same as with Fury Road (a 39/61 domestic/international split in the take against 41/59 for the 2015 film). Accordingly the $105 million it has picked up internationally so far compares poorly with the last movie's $226 million back in 2015 (and nearly $300 million in today's terms). The result is a total of $173 million in the till--about a third what the original made in inflation-adjusted terms (its $380 million equal to some $500 million in 2024 dollars).

Am I surprised? Not really. After that opening I thought even $200-$250 million for this one optimistic, a figure I contrasted with the nearly $400 million I thought the movie might need to eventually break even. The result is that what I said in late May still stands:

the movie may have as good a shot at making Deadline's list of biggest box office flops come April 2025 as anything released so far this year--though it is also the case that this year is young, and many bigger movies seem likely to have receptions no better than this before New Year's Day.

Inside Out 2's Staying Power at the Box Office

Speculating about Inside Out 2 as its opening approached I suggested that as a sequel it could not be expected to have the same box office "legs" as its predecessor, especially in the event of a strong opening, with all the front-loading of the gross it tends to portend. As it happened the movie has had a rather stronger opening than the original (even after adjustment for inflation)--but is also at least matching the original with respect to endurance in theaters. The first film roughly quadrupled its opening weekend gross in North America (opening with $90 million and finishing with $356 million). The second film is well on its way to doing the same, with 3.7 times its opening taken in on Friday night ($572 million now in the till), while showing every sign of making up the rest of the distance (another $40 million will do the job), getting so near as to make no difference, or maybe even exceeding it, before it departs theaters altogether--though whatever happens there is no denying that it has already been a major success by this measure, like every other.

All this is, of course, welcome news to Hollywood--clearly hoping that this is a sign of a return to the pre-pandemic norm with regard to the ability of brand name franchise films like this to get people to theaters at the old rates. Yet one can also see the performance of the film as indicative of something else, namely the same thing that helped make Top Gun 2 such a hit back in 2022--the combination of particularly intense media cheerleading by the media with the unusual faintness of the competition. (Family films like IF and The Garfield Movie proved less than colossal hits, and the Despicable Me sequel came along only when Inside Out 2 was in its fourth weekend of play, and even then achieved a respectable gross rather than a sensational one, taking eight days to hit the $150 million mark that Inside Out 2 did in its first three.)

The same combination of cheerleading and weak competition will also work in favor of that other big brand-name Disney production which will be hitting theaters just as Inside Out 2 is fading from them, Deadpool & Wolverine. Along with the undeniably great press for the film, it has had very little to compare with it with regard to big, splashy action this summer thus far (cough, cough, The Fall Guy, cough, cough, Furiosa), and seems unlikely to get any in what remains of the season after its release--the more in as the expectations for Twisters run so far behind those for Deadpool, and by big summer movie standards the prospects for Borderlands look as bleak as the latter movie's space Western landscapes.

On the Word About Shrek 5

Back in May I wrote that Hollywood was desperate to see Inside Out 2 be a hit because it would take the movie's success as a signal that it could go on doing what it wants to do--instead of actually get creative, keep milking brand-name franchises, not least by greenlighting sequels no one ever asked for. Now mere weeks after Inside Out 2 hit theaters, and not much more than a week after its breaking the billion-dollar barrier in that way that no animated film since 2019 managed bar last year's The Super Mario Bros. Movie (even Minions: The Rise of Gru only made it to $940 million back in the summer of 2022), we hear that a Shrek 5 is coming our way. A fifth installment in a franchise that had its last movie way back in 2010, which fourth film was, as is usually the case with these things, regarded as pushing it, and a significantly lower-grosser than its predecessors, it is no accident that the main line of the franchise was moribund for so many years.*

In their seizing on the excuse to try and squeeze more blood from that particular stone Hollywood's decisionmakers prove just as predictable as their movies--all as it seems we have every reason to expect more news of the type in the weeks and months ahead.

* Shrek 4's domestic gross of $238 million in 2010 was, in real terms, about 27 percent down from that of the 2001 original, 53 percent down from that of the 2004 sequel, and 30 percent down from the immediately preceding third film in 2007--though admittedly the international gross compensated somewhat for the domestic shortfall (the movie making twice what it did domestically in the international market). The only other release the franchise has had since 2010 was a sequel to the spin-off Puss in Boots, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which took in a comparatively modest $186 million back in 2022.

We Are More Than Halfway into 2024. How is the Box Office Holding Up?

As I remarked June 2024 saw the box office (in spite of the success of Inside Out 2) take in less money than it did a year, when June was seeing flop after flop. As one might guess the result was that if the month does not look so bad as those which preceded it, this is only because of how horrible those months were. It is still the case that in 2024 five of the first six months (all but March) have seen the 2024 box office take in less than the same month a year before.

Altogether, where by the end of June the box office had collected $4.4 billion in 2023, as of the same point in the year in 2024 the box office has taken in a mere $3.6 billion. Adjusted for inflation the figure is worse, with the 2023 gross edging toward the equivalent of $4.6 billion in June 2024 dollars, leaving it down about 22 percent. Compared with the 2015-2019 average (calculated in the same terms) it looks worse still. In June 2024 dollars the box office was usually up over $7.3 billion by this point, so that the box office grossed only about half of the pre-pandemic norm.

Of course, one may argue that the second half of the year promises better. Inside Out 2 has already added $100 million more to the month's box office, while Despicable Me 4 has had a respectable opening. Many are also at least somewhat optimistic about Twisters, while of course, Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters in the month's last weekend. Still, the month will have quite some ways to go simply to match the nearly $1.4 billion take of the month that saw both Barbie and Oppenheimer make their debuts, never mind compare with the still stronger real grosses of 2015-2019--while that will still leave five months to go in 2024. Even a considerably better performance during these next six months than was seen in the first six months of the year could still just get the box office to the $8 billion mark that entertainment industry commentators treated as such a bleak prospect last year, all as the kind of improvement on what we saw in 2023--for a minimum, think a gross closer to $10 billion than $9 billion--seems a very tall order indeed. (We would have to see theater business double from its level in the first half of the year during the second half--or putting it another way, moviegoing bounce back much closer to pre-pandemic levels than anything seen since 2019.) The result is that while Inside Out 2 has been an undeniable success, and I think there is good reason to be bullish on Deadpool & Wolverine's Excellent Adventure and perhaps a few other films, I am more, rather than less, persuaded of my reading of the market as facing a fundamental structural crisis as Americans go to the theaters less, not least because they are becoming harder to draw in with the same old crapola--and, far from the sequel-obsessed business-as-usual remaining viable, Hollywood doing well to look at some new strategies for keeping itself in business.

The June 2024 Box Office

Inside Out 2 is, at this point, a confirmed hit, breaking as it did the billion-dollar barrier as it topped both the domestic and international grosses of the original not only in current dollar but real terms.* Hollywood, which was desperate to see this movie be a hit (as a signal that big franchise movies are still salable and the human refuse in Tinseltown's executive suites have an excuse to go on greenlighting sequels no one asked for), is of course completely ecstatic--so much so that amid the ecstasies one might easily overlook the larger picture. After all, even a hit this big cannot save the industry, its year, or even its month--with the result that, as Furiosa proved a flop, and Bad Boys 4 failed even to match the merely middling gross of Bad Boys 3, even Inside Out 2's mighty performance left June 2024 a lower-grossing month for Hollywood than June 2023, which was itself no prize. With Fast X and The Little Mermaid sputtering out well below expectations, Elemental opening disappointingly, the latest Transformers installment continuing rather than bucking that franchise's downward trajectory, and Indiana Jones and The Flash proving themselves two of the three biggest flops of the year, June 2023 saw the box office collect just 70 percent of the 2015-2019 norm in real terms (calculated in June 2024 dollars). June 2024 saw less revenue than that, failing to break the billion-dollar barrier the way the box office did a year before (with some $966 million collected, as against June 2023's $1.004 billion). Adjusted for inflation this works out to just 93 percent of what June 2023 did in box office revenue, and a mere 65 percent of what would have been expected for the month of June in the years before the pandemic.

The result is that Inside Out 2's success is just part of a more complex picture, however much Hollywood's courtiers in the entertainment press may prefer to think otherwise.

* The original Inside Out made a bit over $850 million, some $1.13 billion in today's currency. The new film has made over $1.25 billion thus far, and counting, with a domestic gross of nearly $550 million in the till (versus the original's $470 million) and an international one of $720 million (versus that one's $660 million).

More Superheroic Nostalgia--and How We Really Remember the '90s (Cory Doctorow Reviews Austin Grossman's Fight Me)

After recently writing about Deadpool as a distinctly '90s creation, and the films as an experience of a bit of the '90s in our day, I happened across Cory Doctorow's review of Austin Grossman's just released novel Fight Me--likewise a superhero tale deeply evocative of the '90s in Doctorow's appraisal.

Doctorow's review, as is usually the case with the novels that he covers at Pluralistic, was strongly positive, but rather than the book's merits (or demerits) what really interested me about the piece was Doctorow suggestion that the book can be read as "The Avengers Meets The Big Chill," and his turn from there to considering Generation X from the standpoint of 2024, with, as the evocation of The Big Chill indicates, the generation's activism foregrounded in that.

This surprised me. If the '90s, and the Generation X that was young during that decade, undeniably had its activism--in which Doctorow was most certainly a participant (and remains one, most obviously on the "tech" front)--it would never have occurred to me to compare Generation X's activism with that of the '60s in the way that he does. Recently writing of the period it seemed to me that, in Robert Merton's terms, rather than "rebels," the archetypal nonconformists of the '90s were "ritualists." These are persons who are not out to change the system the way rebels are, but do what they have to in order to get along in spite of not believing in the system--as with the '90s "slacker" going through the motions with ostentatious unenthusiasm, "ironically," for lack of hope that the world could be anything else in that day in which the conventional wisdom held us to be at the "end of history." Moreover, the slacker was themselves only a counterpoint to the prevailing ultra-conformism. (In what other sort of era, after all, could one sell "market populism?")

Indeed, more than any other part of the '60s in that '60s-nostalgia-saturated period, the activism of the '60s seemed far in the past, with that '90s cinema classic The Big Lebowski, for all its characteristic postmodernist superficiality and incoherence (or perhaps because of it) summing up the situation in its juxtaposition of its two Jeffrey Lebowskis. One was a washed-out old hippie who, in spite of having been one of the Seattle Seven on the eve of the Gulf War shows no sign of any oppositional stance whatsoever as he quotes without irony George H.W. Bush's rhetoric of a "line in the sand" and hangs around a bowling alley with a caricature of John Milius; while the other Lebowski was a Dickensian businessman who despised everything the first Lebowski had ever stood for as a "revolution" that was happily over with "the bums" having lost.

That still seems to me to represent the essence of the '90s that way--but every era has more than one side to it, and if, by comparison with the movements of the '60s protest in the '90s was a marginal thing, the period did have that other side to it, as Doctorow reminds us in his review.

Is Deadpool Actually Hollywood's Most Successful Piece of '90s Nostalgia to Date?

I remember how when it hit theaters critics received Deadpool as a great novelty because it was a dark, edgy, R-rated film that took an ostentatiously postmodernist, "meta," approach to its material.

Instead of being struck by how novel it supposedly was, I was struck by how familiar it was, and especially by how '90s it all was. After all, dark and edgy R-rated superhero films were fairly common in that decade--when we had The Crow, and Barb Wire, and Spawn, and Blade.

Those films may not have gone as far down the path of "meta" as Deadpool, but they had their share of self-aware silliness nonetheless, quite naturally given how this sensibility absolutely saturated, even defined, the film of the decade. Indeed, watching the first Deadpool, with its combination of edgelordism in the surface details with conventionality and even triteness in the underlying essentials, its ceaseless and often self-deprecatory fourth wall-breaking and rapid-fire pop culture references, its barrage of tasteless humor, I felt myself to be watching a '90s indie movie in the tradition of Smith, Tarantino et. al. about superheroes.

Indeed, it is entirely relevant that Deadpool was himself a creation of the 1990s--a Rob Liefeld co-creation who first appeared in the December 1990 issue of New Mutants who was entirely in tune with the period's notorious penchant for anti-heroes and general edginess and the "extreme"--and snarky irony about the whole thing. And in fact I found it strange that few commented on this--an indication that the increasing overgenerousness of the average film review reflects not only increasing claquing, but plain and simple ignorance of their subject among the current generation of "professional" critics.

Still, if few have remarked it, it strikes me that, between the intense "'90s-ness" of Deadpool and Hollywood's failure to have much success with evocations of the '90s, Deadpool may well be the most successful piece of '90s cinematic nostalgia to date, with Deadpool & Wolverine continuing to walk that path--not least by teaming Deadpool up with Wolverine in the costume a generation remembers from the still well-loved '90s-era X-Men cartoon to do battle with the just-barely-missed-the-'90s-chronologically-and- arguably-actually-really-'90s-in-essence Cassandra Nova.

* Spawn, of course, was trimmed to get a PG-13 in its 1997 theatrical release, but the R-rated Director's Cut later came out on video.

Why Hollywood Needs Deadpool & Wolverine to be a Hit

Not long ago I wrote that one of the reasons why Hollywood was so bullish on Inside Out 2 was that it needed for the film to be a success because, unlike those more idiosyncratic films that were successes last year (Barbie, Oppenheimer, etc.), such a success would affirm what it so badly wants to believe in, namely the continued salability of brand-name franchise films of the familiar kinds--like sequels to past Disney-Pixar animated spectacles--that had such a miserable time at the box office in 2023 and early 2024, yet remain so important to Hollywood's business model.

The same kind of need is operative in the anticipations for Deadpool & Wolverine, which box office-watchers are looking to not only for more proof of the broad salability of brand-name franchise films, but more specifically affirmation of the salability of the superhero film that has had an especially bad time (2023 bringing The Flash, and Captain Marvel 2, and Aquaman 2, and Ant-Man 3, as well as lesser failures like Shazam 2), and in which not just Disney-Marvel but Sony and the WBD remain so heavily invested. (Thus does Disney's Bob Iger actually seem to think that putting out a "mere" three Marvel movies a year is some display of great restraint on the studio's part!)

At the time of this writing Inside Out 2's status as at least a commercial success seems unquestionable. (The sequel has, even after adjusting for inflation, overtaken the domestic gross of the original film as of its third weekend in play as the film continues to show fairly good holds, and broken the $1 billion mark globally, so that its overtopping the original at the worldwide level also seems all but assured.) Deadpool & Wolverine has yet to hit theaters, but thus far its chances of being a major hit seem excellent, with an opening weekend in the vicinity of $200 million looking not just possible but probable--and with it a billion dollar-plus gross for the film that will be a franchise best not just for the Deadpool trilogy, but the now quarter century-old X-Men franchise of which it is a part.

Of course, even if the film performs as so many clearly hope it will indicate only so much given how idiosyncratic the Deadpool movies are, as "edgy" and "meta" R-rated oddities of which audiences have had less than most of the other heroes around, which in this case has had its prospects boosted by the difficult-to-repeat gimmick of Deadpool's teaming with longtime audience favorite Wolverine. It will thus be far from solid proof that the audience is feeling its Phase Three eagerness for more Marvel Cinematic Universe films--but all the excuse that "confirmation bias"-driven Suits will need to greenlight another slew of big-budget superhero films that could easily blow still more holes in the balance sheets of studios already buckling under the insane financial battering of the last half decade, because to them and their masters that is so greatly preferable to changing how they do business especially if the pattern of 2023 was anything but a fluke.