The Densha Otoko Controversy of Two Decades Ago, and the Culture Wars of Tomorrow

Back in 2004 there were (we are given to understand) a series of postings in an Internet forum by an individual telling the (supposedly) real-life story of a twentysomething "otaku" who becomes romantically involved with a woman he rescued from a groper on the train, over the course of which postings sympathetic readers helped him with advice along a path that led him to put otakuish things behind him and join the mainstream in order to be with here. Novelized as Densha Otoko (translatable as Train Man), the book became a bestseller that quickly launched a popular multimedia franchise that included a TV series, a feature film, and several manga adaptations.

All this may sound innocuous enough to Americans hearing about it, the man who has "failed to grow up" (which is how the "geeky" and "nerdy" tend to be seen in America) but finds love, puts away "childish things" and remakes himself according to mainstream standards (getting a "good" job if he doesn't already have one, getting a "makeover," just like that somehow) is a standard plot formula, and indeed well-worn cliché, as a result of its use as the basis of any number of independent films, Judd Apatow comedies, etc.. However, it was not received that way by Japanese otaku, who unlike their counterparts in supposedly less conformist America attacked the conformist message of this narrative formula--the view that otaku are not what they ought to be, that they can, should and must abandon their interests and pleasures and join the mainstream in any and every way, "because reasons." Indeed, the furor was sufficient that a previously obscure man named Toru Honda became famous on the basis of his version of the critique (apparently, a bestseller as these things go), which held that like everything else love had dissolved in capitalism's cash nexus, which also devalued human beings who do not meet its standards and serve its purposes (those without money and other desired traits)--and that it was entirely valid for those who had no place in that order (who did not, because they could not, work and have children) to find their satisfaction in those "childish things," and even take "2-D love" with fictional characters in place of a "3-D" relationship with another human being that, even when it was attainable, was not necessarily more "real," and perhaps less so, certainly less pure. (In spite of his references to capitalism his taste in philosophical reference--Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc.--is suggestive of an inclination toward an idealist-subjectivist ontology, and the individual's "getting along" as best they can in society as they find it, rather than any project of social change, with his one hazy reference to Marxism as "in decline" implying that he is dismissive of such notions.)

All of this has had little attention in the West, both Densha Otoko, and the outpouring of writing that followed it, even his best-known works remaining without any authorized translation, and secondhand discussion slight. (Indeed, a handful of translated interviews apart--the highest-profile of which was with the Asahi Shimbun in 2005--most of what there is to read about Honda and his ideas in English is to be found on comparatively obscure blogs referencing at best a portion of his work.) This is, I think, partly because of the extreme disinterest of American cultural commentators in social life in other countries (i.e. save when they can use it to show the "badness" of some state policy elites want to designate as an enemy), but also because his ideas offend against those of the mainstream in multiple ways, and even seem too "bizarre" for them to take seriously. Indeed, looking at the comment threads on blogs discussing Honda's ideas I constantly found Honda dismissed as a "pseduointellectual" wrapping up retrograde thinking in "first year philosophy student" references--with the fact that this reading was asserted rather than argued, and rarely challenged, confirming the ease with which many incline to this view. Still, given how many of the relevant issues--growing questioning of a vision of adulthood that seems less attainable and perhaps less desirable to young people in the straitened times, the country's fraught gender politics, and even advances in artificial intelligence that may well make it a source of companionship for many--we may yet see argument for views like Honda's become part of cultural controversy in America.

The Collapse of Joker 2's Box Office Prospects: Do We Have Another The Flash On Our Hands?

I have, I think, been less bullish on Joker 2 than others since I started following the news about it. While acknowledging the colossal success of the original and the factors that may make a follow-up similarly successful (indeed, last year the film seemed to me the year's best chance for a billion-dollar hit), I have also remarked again and again all it had going against it. Not the least of this was the extent to which the first film was a beneficiary of a rare moral panic-fed barrage of hype, and it increasingly seems, a bait-and-switch selling the story of Arthur Fleck as a Joker origin story--neither of which will be as helpful this time, all as the media may not be terribly friendly (a lot of the opinion-makers feared and hated the film and may be looking for revenge this time around), while there is an undeniable gamble in making what looks less like Joker 2 than Arthur Fleck II: The Musical (All talking! All singing!), with the precedent of Joker producer Martin Scorsese's following up Taxi Driver with New York, New York inauspicious. Indeed, if I saw the first Boxoffice Pro forecast for the film's opening ($115-$145 million) as portending the film's possibly matching its predecessor, I wrote that

the question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it.

The following week, alas, we saw the range collapse, from $115-$145 million to just $60-$100 million, and then $60-$90 million the week after that. And things got worse still over the following two weeks, with the just published forecast of the week of release presenting a range of just $50-$60 million for the opening weekend.

About 40 percent of what the forecasters expected a mere month earlier, this is a faster, farther drop to a lower point than was even seen with The Flash, for which the same publication anticipated a very similar $115-$140 million initially, and then watched the prediction decline to $72-$105 million by the last, long-range, forecast, all as the forecast from the Wednesday before opening day predicted, at worst, $69 million.

Of course, a movie may disappoint on opening weekend and be rescued by "good legs," and/or the international market, but the opposite seems more likely to be the case when there is such a trend. Certainly it didn't happen for The Flash. That movie opened to $55 million, and did not quite manage to double that domestically (finishing out at $108 million), while if it did a bit better overseas this was only in the sense that there was a relatively decent foreign take relative to the domestic one, which worked out to a global total of $271 million. The result was almost certainly a nine figure loss for the studio, and possibly the biggest flop of the year (my math indicating at least the possibility that The Flash and not the even lower-grossing, couldn't-make-it-to-the-$100-million-mark-in-North-America Captain Marvel 2 registered the biggest net loss for its backer).

In the worst-case scenario Joker 2 seems to me now in danger of making no more than The Flash did, all while having a $200 million production budget (triple the original Joker's, and approximately what The Flash was at least initially reported as running its backers). The result is that this movie, which such a short while ago looked as if it could be one of the saviors of the weak 2024 box office, could instead serve as yet another reminder that even if they can still score big (as the dynamic duo of Deadpool and Wolverine did this past summer) big sequels like this one are less reliable performers than they used to be in today's shrunken North American and global film market, as it not only makes its way onto Deadline's list of the biggest flops next year, but very possibly goes to the very top of that list. Possibly, I say, because it may yet have some competition for the dubious honor of that list's #1 spot given the number of high-risk big releases due out this fall in the present, rather finite, market (not least Gladiator 2, the first forecasts for which we may start to hear about very soon).

How Big a Profit Might It Ends with Us Turn in the End?

As I remarked after seeing last year's list of the most profitable films, we may increasingly see the biggest profit-makers prove to not be the bigger-budgeted and higher-grossing "tentpoles," but the lower-cost films aimed at a narrower market that proves just big enough to, between the limited budget and the gross, produce a bigger margin than its higher-profile rivals.

Where this summer and this year are concerned I think the stand-out that way is It Ends With Us. Not even a top ten hit of the year, it is still the case that on its budget of $25 million it has grossed $325 million so far in theaters, before beginning what is almost certain to be a lucrative post-theatrical career.

What might the profit margin look like?

For comparison purposes let us consider Where the Crawdads Sing--also a bestselling book aimed at a not dissimilar audience, which was also similarly budgeted. That movie made $140 million gross and $80 million net in theaters, then netted almost twice as much from the post-theatrical revenue streams (as smaller films often do). Counting in the final costs (prints and ads, residuals and participations, etc.) the final bill came to about five times the production budget--$123 million. The result was that in the end the "studio net" was $75 million.

With It Ends with Us taking in well over twice that much on a similar production budget, much more money will be coming in--but more likely going out as some of the non-production expenses take a bigger bite out of the gross. (Higher grosses mean more "participations and residuals," in particular.) Still, as one can expect the movie to net $150 million+ in theaters, and make as much if not more post-theatrically, it seems a safe bet that in spite of the added toll the profit will break the $100 million barrier, while $150 million or more would not be out of the question. Last year that would have got the movie onto Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbusters" list, and it may well suffice to do that for the movie this year--while failing that it is virtually guaranteed a spot on the accompanying list for smaller films with high returns.

Declining Movie Ticket Sales and the Decline of the Middle Class

In the decade after the onset of the Great Recession North American movie ticket sales dropped from 4-5 a year per capita to 3-4 a year--and then after the pandemic dropped to more like 2 a year (certainly to go by the evidence of 2022, and 2023, and 2024 so far).

There can seem any number of reasons for that--like the staleness of the product that studio executives dementedly foist on the public, or the competition from a small screen both more convenient and offering more varied and frequently more intelligent fare, but one factor we should not overlook is that a public that has seen itself financially very pressed in recent years (never has the pretense of generalized "middle classness" looked more threadbare) simply has less time and disposable income for entertainments such as a night out. After all, going out for a movie is rarely just about the price of a ticket (or several of them), while we are seeing drops in the consumption of everything from meals out to live concerts.

Of course, don't expect to hear the entertainment press make too much of that, the more in as pseudo-intellectuals who keep calling themselves "economists" at every opportunity are telling the public that it's doing JUST FINE!

How Will the News Media Cover the Last Weeks of the Presidential Campaign of 2024?

Last year the Columbia Journalism Review published an article discussing a quantitative examination of the last two months of the coverage of the mid-term election of 2022 by the New York Times and Washington Post. That study's authors found that their front-page stories, at least, almost entirely disregarded questions of policy--what the candidates promise, and what they might do in office--in favor of the palace intrigue and campaign horse-race crapola that the addicts to "showbusiness for ugly people" who staff the media think the general public love as much as they do.

I cannot see how any intelligent person can regard this as anything but an execrable performance on their part.

Will they do any better in 2024?

As it happens, this campaign season has offered much, much more fodder for palace intrigue and horse-race crapola than most, and in spite of the self-important proclamations of the editorial boards about "how much is at stake," they absolutely lived down to my lowest expectations as they made the most of the opportunities it gave them to be on their absolute worst behavior. I see no reason to expect that they will suddenly start acting like the "professionals" they pretend to be where this election is concerned--though of course whatever happens they will congratulate themselves on having did a wonderful job, because that is what they always do.

Of the Word "Upset"

It seems common to define the word "upset," when used in the sense of a person's emotional state, as a synonym for "unhappy," "disappointed" or "worried." These are three quite different terms, the result is that the word comes across as vague and mild, and as is often the case with words that seem a bit vague and mild, used to soften an account of the state of the person being described--a person who may be miserable rather than unhappy, outraged rather than disappointed, or frightened rather than worried, described as merely "upset."

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all that the use of the word "upset" to describe a person's emotional state seems to me less than respectful of the person being described in a great many cases. It always makes me think of a parent speaking of a child, with a child's presumably limited mental faculties and understanding of the world in mind--the "adult in the room" telling others that they have an "upset" child with which they must deal. Few adults, I think, would care to be thought of in such terms--especially in any matter of great importance.

As a result Rebecca Solnit, while making an important statement in a recent piece in the Guardian, seemed to me to have made an unfortunate choice in writing its title: "The Mainstream Press is Failing America--and People are Understandably Upset."

For many of them, upset doesn't even begin to describe it--as we find when we read the item for ourselves.

Boxoffice Pro Has Put Out its Estimate for Joker's Opening

Boxoffice Pro has put out its estimate for Joker's opening weekend gross.

Their forecast currently stands at $115-$145 million--which means that not only before but even after inflation Joker 2 could make considerably more than that earlier movie's $96 million (that figure equal to $117 million in July 2024 terms).

I am not shocked by this forecast, but did not count on it either--as I remembered what it took to make the first Joker a hit. There was what some saw as the bait and switch involved in making a movie about Arthur Fleck appear as if it were the Joker's origin story. There was the atmosphere of moral panic cultivated around the film, which made many prominent film critics disgrace themselves with calls for censorship. All of this helped make the movie's release an event of a kind very hard to repeat, while it seemed to me far from clear whether five years later a sequel to the rather idiosyncratic movie, without that kind of atmosphere surrounding it—whether, with less and less pretense that Fleck is the Joker, with the critics having done a one-eighty and trivialized the movie that made them briefly show their totalitarian true colors and no moral panic in evidence this time, a Joker movie would still be of interest to a wide audience. (Indeed, especially hearing about the sequel's musical aspect I thought of how Martin Scorsese followed up his triumph with Taxi Driver with his flop New York, New York, and how history might unhappily repeat itself.)

This forecast seems to settle the matter to that extent, evidence apparently existing that a sizable audience does want to continue following the Saga of Arthur Fleck. The question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it. Even after its big opening the first Joker made three-and-a-half times its first three-day gross ($335 million). It is not wholly out of the question that this movie could do the same--and supplement its domestic take with a robust foreign gross. (The first Joker more than doubled its domestic gross internationally.) The result is that the movie might not just plausibly match the billion-dollar take of the original, but do so in real, inflation-adjusted terms--a feat requiring $1.3 billion at the box office at late 2024 prices.

Does it Change Anything if Arthur Fleck isn't the Real Joker?

Considering the possibility, or even likelihood, that we are not supposed to take Arthur Fleck as the "real" Joker, it seems natural to ask what that means for the 2019 film--especially if we take it as a Joker origin story, and find it wanting that way, as I admittedly did. Indeed, I saw in the gap between Fleck and what we would expect of the Joker a failure of imagination on the part of the film's makers in their making Fleck such a pathetic figure; in their apparent inability to imagine that a marginalized, ill-treated working-class man might nonetheless be a figure of intelligence and force, rather than just a "clown" who because of his own inherent personal limitations and nothing else failed to make something of his life the way the stupid and repugnant patrician Thomas Wayne makes out the discontented working class to be.

Thinking of Fleck as other than the Joker we knew renders that criticism moot (if Fleck isn't the Joker anyway then it doesn't matter if he doesn't convince us as the Joker)--but it still seems to me plausible that the makers of the movie, reflecting the prejudices of our time, could not imagine anyone living the way Fleck did as anything but a "born loser," in line with the prevailing tendency to dismiss those who have not "got on" as undeserving of success, and by the same token, as equally undeserving of interest or sympathy from anyone else, all as challenge to this attitude is rarer than before. After all, in the early twentieth century the idea that the American Dream as epitomized by Horatio Alger is a cruel lie was one of the great themes of literature, producing figures from Jay Gatsby to Clyde Griffiths to Willy Loman. What compares with that today?

Apparently not Joker's Arthur Fleck.

Why Do "We" Care About How Much Movies Cost?

Apparently the budget of Joker 2 has been the subject of some critical comment--specifically because it was (reportedly) much larger than the budget for the first film.

Apparently Todd Phillips has had something to say in reply, remarking that reading the items in the press "[i]t seems like they're on the side of the multinational corporations," and indeed "sound like studio executives."

The reason for that, of course is that the entertainment press does significantly represent the views of the corporations, and the studio executives, just as the business press and the press generally represents the views of corporations, executives and the rest--as, of course, social commentators going back at least to Upton Sinclair have explained to the public over and over again. And negatively remarking a big budget has been part of their repertoire for pushing an agenda--specifically attacking a movie and its makers as "out of control" in that way we saw so much of when the studio bosses were out to crush the New Hollywood.

Of course, the desire to see New Hollywood crushed extended far beyond studio bosses looking to regain control of the industry to include those on the right ideologically hostile to the movies Hollywood had started making (and has rarely dared to make since).

Is there something like that afoot in the case of Phillips and Joker 2? Given how uncomfortable the first Joker made the elite stratum from which those who write for the upmarket review pages derive (not least because of those aspects of it that were what we think of as "New Hollywood") it does not seem wholly inconceivable that there would be. If this is a matter of what is actually in the second Joker movie, rather than just a residue of the critical hostility to the first film, then the movie may well have more bite than I suspected.

The Possibility That Arthur Fleck is Not the Real Joker: Some Thoughts

While Todd Phillips has dropped hints that Arthur Fleck's "Joker" may not be the real Joker since 2019, the hints have grown more numerous and stronger in the run-up to the release of the sequel. Indeed, as Kaitlyn Booth recently remarked over at Bleeding Cool News that Joker increasingly seems to have been "one of those times when an original story has some recognizable IP painted over it to make it more appealing to the general public."

In other words, Mr. Phillips and company pulled a bait and switch on the public, making them think that a movie titled Joker about a homicidal lunatic clown in Gotham City with a grudge against the Wayne family was a Joker origin story until, after the movie became a cultural phenomenon, no longer requiring the ruse--and even finding the ruse an inconvenience, because the gap between the sales pitch and the actual movie was getting awkwardly large as people looked at Fleck and said "This man's no criminal mastermind," and the follow-up seemed likely to mean even more dissonance for anyone really looking for the Joker--they backed away from the earlier marketing in a manner they hope will allow fans to ignore or forgive the earlier deception.

It is easy enough to picture Hollywood pulling such a maneuver--given that, to the little extent that it shows any alertness or creativity, we are more likely to see it in the smoke and mirrors of its public relations and marketing efforts than in the cinematic art that is the raison d'etre of those efforts, and given too the fact that a movie about "just Arthur Fleck" rather than the Joker would have made nowhere near the stir that Joker did. Still, given that if the movie was far from perfectly faithful to the Batman mythos the makers of the film displayed enough cleverness in utilizing the relevant elements that the character of the Joker plausibly contributed a good deal more than a paint finish--that if the film Todd Phillips made was not truly a Joker story, the Joker was at least an influence, or even creative point of departure, for what he did in the end put before the audience.

This Summer Kevin Bacon . . . Discovers What Everyone Else Knows

Back when publicizing his horror film MaXXXine (it came out in July) actor Kevin Bacon claimed to have had a special effects makeup artist create a disguise for him so that he could try going about experiencing life as a non-celebrity.

According to Bacon the disguise worked--and very well--in that when he went to a shopping mall "no one" there recognized him.

Apparently he couldn't stand more than a few minutes of this, talking about people "pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, 'I love you,'" while he "had to wait in line to, I don't know, buy a f---ing coffee or whatever." And he concluded "This sucks. I want to go back to being famous."

I have no idea how seriously Bacon intended for us to take his remarks, which can seem like a parody of entitled, clueless privilege. (Is it really the case that complete strangers tell him "I love you" and that he was shocked to not have strangers tell him "I love you?" Did he really have no notion of what it is to stand in line for a cup of coffee?) Still, the relation of the anecdote did seem interesting in that in a society where the conventional injunction is to "Be grateful for what you have" (stiffened with endless regurgitations of propaganda already stale two centuries ago about how the rich have it harder than the poor) Mr. Bacon admitted that, yes, a "regular person" is treated pretty badly by other regular people and it is far, far better to be a celebrity. To, as Upton Sinclair put it in Money Writes!, be "waited upon, flattered, caressed, loved, stared at, cheered, photographed, talked about" the way a celebrity is. And that this is why, in spite of so many celebrities' self-pitying whining about how hard it is to be famous, a "victim of such conditions" as ordinary people endure--living the life of a nobody, treated as a nobody, with all its material deprivations and psychological injuries--"driven to desperation" makes extraordinary efforts in the hope of sudden transport to the world in which the Kevin Bacons live, and is all too often disappointed, staying in the same world they can't bear and dying that much more and that much painfully of the fact every day.

That's reality.

The Box Office Run of It Ends With Us: A Few Thoughts

Boxoffice Pro's first projection for It Ends with Us had it opening in the $20-$30 million range. However, they revised their estimate upward considerably over the following weeks, so that it stood at $45-$55 million just before release, expectations to which the film lived up with a $50 million debut. Since then the movie has not had spectacular holds, but at least decent ones, with the result that 31 days into its North American run it has amassed $141 million. Meanwhile the movie is doing well abroad, actually outearning its domestic gross in the international markets (the split 46/54 in their favor), such that it has already broken the $300 million barrier ($309 million collected at last count), which is very good for a $25 million romance put out in high summer, and enough to mean that, while the movie is already out of the running to be one of the year's top ten grossers, it may yet prove one of its top ten profit-makers when Deadline makes up its list of the year's Most Valuable Blockbuster next spring, way ahead of many movies that grossed much more (or failing that, a near-certain spot on the accompanying list of lower-cost moneymakers, of the kind rarely going to non-horror films).

The movie would seem to confirm the trend I saw last year--namely that the profit-makers reflected careful selection of movies that had a limited but still appreciable audience of very interested filmgoers, and low costs (the animated features based on Nickelodeon animated franchises, Taylor Swift's concert film, Five Nights at Freddy's, in a way even the animated Spider-Man film and Oppenheimer), rather than a mindless pouring of money into gargantuan franchise-based productions in the faith that "Make it and they will come" (which, of course, failed so miserably that year). Right now, as the entertainment press fixates on successes like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine they seem determined to stick with that "Make it and they will come" business-as-usual approach--but I say again that things may not go the way they hope, and if only out of the concern for the bottom line demanded by their Wall Street masters the studio bosses would do well to attend to this movie's example.

The Summer 2024 Box Office: How Did it Go?

How did the summer of 2024 as a whole go at the box office? The four month period saw theaters take in about $3.59 billion (and only marginally more, $3.62 billion, if they treat the summer season as having extended from the first Friday in May to Labor Day).

By contrast the figure was $3.95 billion in the summer of 2023, about 10 percent more before inflation.

This is a retreat, not an advance, for the box office. And given that the May-August gross in the pre-pandemic years of 2015-2019 averaged $5.4 billion in June 2024 dollars (even with the numbers skewed downward by how Marvel put out its big Avengers events in the last weekend of April rather than the first weekend of May in 2018-2019) it seems safe to say that this summer's gross was a third down from the pre-pandemic average in real terms. It is also the case that even more than the summer of 2023 the summer of 2024 was, to the extent that Hollywood managed at all, carried by just a handful of hits--the three biggest movies of the summer of 2023 accounting for 34 percent of that summer's gross (Barbie, Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy taking in $1.33 billion of the summer's near $4 billion), but the three biggest of 2024 accounting for 44 percent of that summer's weaker gross ($1.6 billion of the $3.6 billion), testifying to how little business the rest of the releases did.

Of course, allowing that some will incline to the view that this was because this summer was a bit on the thin side where big movies were concerned--and I do not entirely disagree. Still, the summer still had Planet of the Apes, Mad Max and Bad Boys, for which there were some hopes (certainly Mad Max did a lot worse than its backers and cheerleaders thought it would), while some hoped for a lot more than they got from the original IF and the not-so-original Twisters--while it is worth remembering that if 2023 had lots of big movies many of them also proved big flops (most obviously The Flash, Indiana Jones and Haunted Mansion, all as to varying degrees Fast and Furious, Transformers, The Little Mermaid, Pixar and Mission: Impossible disappointed). Thus the explanation still leaves us facing the reality that Tinseltown is trying very hard to ignore--that if as Inside Out and Deadpool and Despicable Me demonstrate franchise movies can still make it big after all, only the most in-demand ones are likely to pay off big as films from the weaker franchises underwhelm in a market not what it used to be.

The result is that I stand by what I said earlier this year: within the existing structurally downsized market, rather than mindlessly milking any and every franchise with megabudgeted productions they would be obliged to choose their projects more carefully, and make them with an eye on the budget, with August's biggest in-month success, It Ends with Us, reaffirming that reading of the situation. Even now the movie is not of the year's top ten hits in North America (standing at #11 it can be expected to keep falling down the list as the year progresses)--but even if it did not have the makings of a "tentpole" there really was a sizable audience out there for the material, and between its low budget, and one might add its rather robust overseas earnings (the movie a far bigger hit there than Twisters, and the Quiet Place prequel), such that it may well prove one of its top ten profit-makers when Deadline presents its list next spring.

The August 2024 Box Office

August was, by 2024 standards, a fairly good month for the North American movie box office--only the second month this year to overtop the gross of the corresponding month in the prior year, after March. Just as in March this was principally attributable to the success of a single film--the second part of Dune in March, and Deadpool & Wolverine in August, with the latter film's contribution the more striking. Deadpool, after all, came out the month before, and had the first six days of its spectacular-from-the-first run before August 1, during which it took in $280 million (about as much as the second Dune movie made in its whole run), before accounting for over a third of the month's entire box office revenue. (For comparison purposes consider that where Deadpool accounted for 35 percent of the gross, even that savior of the summer of 2023 Barbie the year before managed just 28 percent.)

This is partly a matter of Deadpool's real draw, but also the lack of other really big successes in late July, and certainly in August (which probably helped the already seemingly played-out Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2 add $80 million or so to their takes over those weeks, all as Twisters picked up a little more than that, but not much more). After all, the adaptation of the hit video game Borderlands failed just as badly as the buzz said it would, as did the attempt to relaunch the Crow franchise, while if Alien: Romulus will probably break the $100 million barrier it will not be by much. Indeed, the only performer in the lot I would count as worth much of a fuss in any commercial sense, and that mainly relative to its low cost, is It Ends With Us, the $25 million budgeted adaptation of the Colleen Hoover film likely to approach $150 million before it is finished in theaters.

The result is that, with Deadpool and other July releases doing so much to carry the box office (including a Despicable Me 4 bespeaking the franchise's being past its peak, and a Twister movie a far cry from the phenomenal success of the 1996 original) and the successes of August's own releases mainly that by a lower standard, "fairly good" is a very different thing from "sensational." August 2024's final tally of $892 million is just a bit better than the $813 million North America's movie theaters grossed in August 2023--about 10 percent better before inflation, maybe 6 percent after it when those figures are in, while if one removed the highest grosser from each month (cutting Barbie out of August 2023 just as they cut Deadpool out of August 2024) they would find that August 2024 was actually a weaker month than its 2023 counterpart (the gross down by 4 percent in real terms, perhaps). Meanwhile, even with Deadpool's help, if August 2024 bested August 2023, it would seem to still be well down from the $1.08 billion or so August averaged in June 2024 dollars, with just 83 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the month--an improvement over the figures for past months, like the atrocious 43 percent of the pre-pandemic norm seen in May, but all the same, no grounds to imagine business is returning to pre-pandemic levels, precisely because hits like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine do not grow on trees, however much Disney acts as if they do just that.

What Will the Fall Movie Season Bring?

Last year, in the wake of the weak audience response to many franchise films intended for blockbusterdom, and the thinning of this year's release slate by the delays compelled by a historic "double strike" in Hollywood, the expectations for 2024 were not very high--and so far the year has lived down to them. As of August 31 the North American cinematic box office has pulled in some $5.6 billion--as against the $6.6 billion it managed in the same eight months last year (a billion behind!), and what, in June 2024 dollars, is the $10 billion the box office averaged by that time of the year in pre-pandemic 2015-2019. Moreover, it seems significant that the situation would have been far worse if not for the overperformance of a couple of hits--Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine by themselves accounting for 22 percent of the entire year's take, testifying to the general weakness of the market.

Will the box office get a much-needed bump in the year's last four months? Well, as I write this the sequel to 1988's Beetlejuice is hitting theaters, while box office analysts regard the sequel to 2019's Joker as having fairly bright prospects--both expected to open well north of $100 million. After that there is Venom 3, and Gladiator 2, and Moana 2 and a Lion King prequel, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, among others. Those sick of sequels and prequels may be annoyed by this Hollywood-business-as-usual slate, and indeed it seems certain that some of them will prove the bad ideas some of them sound like, but all the same, I see no reason why at least some of these movies will not sell a good many tickets collectively, such that the rest of the year looks a lot more like July or even August did than May (yikes).

Still, my expectation is that this year will not refute my argument that the box office has seen a structural change--that the market has shrunk (North Americans on average going to the movies twice a year rather than 3+ as before), with franchise movies tougher sells (that they came out for more of the gimmicky, cult-y, genre-subverting postmodernism of Deadpool is a questionable basis for thinking the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been saved), with the terms of box office success altered, all as at a minimum North American ticket sales adding up to the $9 billion 2023 managed by New Year's Day seems a longshot. Indeed, this year Hollywood, running a billion dollars behind last year's box office at the same point in the year, would have to at least match the grosses of the last four months of 2023 just to hit the $8 billion mark envisaged for it last year, and considerably outdo it to reach $9 billion, all as one should remember that, as the past summer should remind all concerned, a few overperformers cannot be expected to all by themselves make up for a great mass of underperformers.