The Last Third of 2024 at the Box Office: A Few Thoughts

At the start of 2024 the expectation was circulating in the media that bad as 2023 had been for Hollywood (with an epic string of big-budget flops leaving the box office gross down more than a third from the average seen in the pre-pandemic years of 2015-2019 in real terms), 2024 would be even worse, finishing up about another billion dollars down from what 2023 managed, significantly due to the thinning of the year's release slate by strike-related delays.

The early part of the year certainly bore out the expectations as one movie after another managed only weak grosses. By the end of May (a May which opened with The Fall Guy and saw the year's biggest flop up to that point, Furiosa) 2024's box office gross was running $900 million behind that of 2023 at the same point. In spite of the spectacular debut of Inside Out 2 things were even worse a month later, the year $1 billion behind--and by the end of July, over $1.2 billion behind.

However, the five months since have seen the year close the gap, with the help of a strong August (largely thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine picking up $300 million that month, accounting for over a third of the whole theatrical take), a surprisingly strong September (the Beetlejuice sequel's quarter of a billion accounting for 42 percent of the month's receipts), and then after an admittedly weak October things really picking up in late November and December, especially relative to 2023's particularly lousy holiday season. Where that period saw Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2, Wish and the remake of The Color Purple all flop, as Ridley Scott's Napoleon epic and The Hunger Games prequel added to the list of big-budget underperformers (so that with a gross barely north of $200 million Wonka was the champion), Moana 2 and Wicked both look like they will finish up with about twice what Wonka managed (both having broken the $400 million barrier as of December 31). All that meant that where in November and December the box office gross was just $1.3 billion in 2023, in 2024 it was a comparatively robust $1.86 billion, these two months alone closing the gap by over half a billion dollars.

Still, even if the situation is not so dire as it was looking at mid-year, when the trend threatened a gross in the $7 billion range, the end result still confirms the prediction we saw at the start of the year of a marked drop in the take over the twelve month period as a whole. As of December 31 the gross for 2024 was a bit under $8.54 billion, as against the $8.91 billion figure for 2023, and the $9.25 billion it is in inflation-adjusted November 2024 dollars (which works out to a real-terms drop of about 8 percent).

The box office figure for 2024 also affirms the reading of the data from 2022 and 2023 as indicating the contraction, and increasing fickleness, of the American movie market to a degree demanding some hard thinking and bold decisions on the part of Tinseltown's executives. Of course, given sheer inertia (it can be years between the greenlighting of a movie and its hitting theaters, even when there aren't delays of the kind seen in 2023), the release slate of 2025 represents the thinking of a period before 2023's disasters, rather than any rethinking of Hollywood's filmmaking. After all, we have (just to cite the most obviously relevant offerings)

four really first-rank superhero movies, including three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films (Captain America 4, the new Fantastic Four, and reclaiming the first weekend in May for the MCU, The Thunderbolts), and James Gunn's Superman movie . . . Zootopia 2 from Disney . . . live-action adaptations of animated classics [with] Disney releasing such versions of both Snow White and Lilo & Stitch . . . more of James Cameron's Avatar saga (Fire and Ash), more Jurassic World (Rebirth), and more spy-fi from the Mission: Impossible franchise (the second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning.

Will people come out for all of this stuff the way the Suits who greenlit it all must be hoping, or will we see the kind of epic string of colossal flops we did back in 2023? The box office-watcher may have an interesting time following how things go--maybe more interesting than they will watching the all-too-familiar stuff of the movies themselves.

What Can We Say of Gladiator II Now?

Gladiator II opened in North America below expectations that had not been particularly high for a $250 million movie, let alone a high-profile sequel to a New Classic hitting theaters the Friday before Thanksgiving--grossing $55 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period (against the $60-$80 million Boxoffice Pro had consistently forecast for the preceding month). Of course, rather more than in the summer the holiday season sees films open less than impressively but much more than make up for it with very long legs (as James Cameron's three movies all managed to do on the way to high rankings on the all-time blockbuster lists). Gladiator II, however, did not prove one of these, as of its sixth weekend not much more than tripling its opening weekend gross ($163 million), leaving it with less than the original Gladiator took in current dollars, and maybe half what it made in real terms ($188 million back in the summer of 2000, $345 million when adjusted for November 2024 prices). The movie has done a little better in the international market than the original--as period pieces tend to do--but as the fact that the domestic/foreign split's about the same indicates (it was 42/58 in the case of the original, 38/62 in the case of the sequel), not enough so to make much difference. The result is that the $450 million mark the much cheaper original reached at a time when that was more impressive than it is now is one toward which the movie is still straining, and may not quite make it--calling into question the movie's profitability. It will take a really robust post-theatrical performance to get the revenue to the break-even point, never mind past it--all as room remains to wonder if come the spring we will not see it on Deadline's list of the year's biggest money-losers.

Is the Charge of "Fan Entitlement" a Red Herring?

When we speak of an adaptation of, for example, a play by William Shakespeare or a novel by Jane Austen it is considered eminently respectable for observers knowledgeable of the original material to judge an adaptation at least in part by its makers' evident respect for the original--and their complaint about any lapses in such eminently respectable. This is in spite of those authors' work being so far removed from that of our own time in authorship, and outlook, as to make appraisals of faithfulness relatively difficult. (I, for one, incline not only to the view that at least some of the playscripts by which we know Shakespeare's play are less complete than they might be, but more importantly to the view that Shakespeare was a Medieval rather than a modern in the ways that count most, with all that means for our experience of his work.)

By contrast those who would comment on the faithfulness of adaptations of superhero comic books are dismissed contemptuously for doing so at all--for caring about faithfulness at all, which brings forth a charge of "fan entitlement" such as would never be leveled against Bardolators or Janeites.

One can see this as a result of how the conventional-minded adhere to a hierarchical view of cultural production that puts Shakespeare and Austen on one plane and comics on another much lower plane, far less worthy of the reverence and passions of a purist--all as there is a profound difference in cultural standing between the person who reads Shakespeare and Austen and the person who goes to a comic book convention (the more in as fans have, in recent years, come to be so demonized in so many quarters politically). However, what one can fairly call that snobbery would seem to me to just make the dismissal easier, rather than entirely account for it, because one can easily see the discussion of "fan entitlement" rather than "respect for the original" as changing the subject from respect for the content of the original to the presumably pernicious attitude of those who would ask for respect for that content.

The (rather cynical) intent in doing so where the big superhero movies and other films like them is concerned is shutting down the critics who would undermine the efforts of producers as crass as they are illiterate to wring as much money as possible out of the movies they make, art be damned--and I think it may be said that there is far more incentive to do so in the case of the comic book fans, with the career of Michael Fassbender exemplary. Fassbender starred in a film adaptation of Macbeth which made a whole $16 million worldwide, with the modest figure not really surprising to anyone. By contrast the four films in which Mr. Fassbender played Erik Lensherr (aka Magneto) made $1.9 billion--over a hundred times as much. Were adaptations of Shakespeare and Austen doing nearly as well as X-Men movies I suspect we would be hearing the equivalent of accusations of "fan entitlement" directed at those who criticize the adaptations for offenses to purism--and that we ought to remember that during the inevitable next round of cheap fan-bashing by the elite's courtiers in the media.

"Why Don't People Appreciate My Hard Work?" Whines the Nepo Hire

When a "successful" individual has benefited from personal advantages such as coming from a wealthy, powerful and well-connected family anyone's pointing out the fact has a way of making them defensive--the relentless defense of extreme inequality that is the basis of so much "conventional wisdom" becoming for them a very personal fight now. Thus rather than saying that yes, life has been very good to them, they can't deny that and they know that it has made a difference and appreciating this they feel some humility, some responsibility, something, anything, that makes for a more complex emotional life than sheer egomania, they trivialize their advantages, as they insist that they have earned and deserve all that they have, for they are not beneficiaries of social "privilege" in the term's true and proper sense (Heavens no!), but instead owe everything they have to "hard work," speaking those two words as if they were a magical incantation that must secure the acquiescence of anyone in anything they have to say.

"I worked hard to have what I do," they say.

Or, expressed in more blatantly self-pitying terms: "Why don't people appreciate my hard work?"

In doing so they are oblivious to how unbelieveably insulting they are being to every person who "works hard"--often far harder than they ever did, if indeed they ever did any hard work--for far, far less than the world has given them. For to say what they do is either to deny others' hard work--or to raise the question of why they had such an extraordinarily higher return on their effort than other people with those personal advantages ruled out as a possible answer, such that one can only conclude that their superior return is a matter of their being superior people.

Putting it another way, the "Why don't people appreciate my hard work?" they are so quick to speak is translatable as:

"I worked hard, and you losers didn't, that's why you're not rich and famous like me," or

"I worked hard--and my hard work got me somewhere because I'm BETTER THAN YOU, so just SHUT UP AND ACCEPT IT LOSERS."

One may add that on top of this undeniable and rather severe insult--the at least implicit claim that those who do not have what they have either failed to work hard, or were in some way deficient--the statement is a great insult to the intelligence of the listener, regardless of whether they are aggrieved in this particular way. For as anyone who is not a complete idiot (i.e. smarter than those throwing their claims of "hard work") is well aware, without opportunity, in many an area of endeavor the kind of opportunity that is very disproportionately enjoyed and often monopolized by those for whom nepotism is a super power (usually, their only one), all of the hard work in the world--and all the talent and everything else that makes up "merit" too--very often amounts to little or nothing but exhaustion and bitterness at the end of a misspent life in which those who failed to do well can only feel that the aspirationalism with which they have been indoctrinated was a cheat and a snare, with those competing most closely with nepotism's beneficiaries without that advantage feeling the fact especially keenly. Indeed, given the choice between a capacity for "hard work" (and other such meritorious qualities), and having the right background, the right connections, from the standpoint of simply getting ahead it is far, far better to have the latter than the former.

Of course, simple and frankly obvious as all this is you won't see this spelled out very often--for the media is staffed by the courtiers of privilege, who, "more royalist than the king" (and the king is pretty damn royalist), cheer for every punch these throw down at the plebs, for these Josiah Bounderbys who so readily whine about their hard work not being appreciated ("No one appreciates me, no one," say they as they clutch the Oscar they have just been awarded) make very clear that much as they demand the world's sympathy for their supposed plight they have no sympathy for anyone else, least of all those to whom the world has been far less kind.

E.L. Doctorow Defines the Star

If I found E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime a less than wholly satisfying work it still had its points of interest, not least in its portrayal of actress and model Evelyn Nesbit, whom Doctorow describes to us as, as a result of the publicity accorded her in the wake of the murder of a lover by her husband, having become "the inspiration for the concept of the movie star system and every sex goddess from Theda Bara to Marilyn Monroe." What was key here was "a process of magnification [that] established" the individual in question "in the public consciousness as larger than life," with this significantly tied to their "represent[ing] one desirable human characteristic to the exclusion of all others."

As the choice of words indicates--"goddess," "larger than life"--mythmaking is involved, inseparable from the one-dimensionality of a figure seeming to "represent one . . . characteristic to the exclusion of all others" (for such simplification is what myth by definition offers).

Considering the decline of the star and the celebrity in our time it seems to me significant that such mythmaking was easier in a more controlled media world--like that of the old studio system with its contract players--and a culture which was more accommodating of certain forms of one-dimensionality. Many a current in today's cultural politics runs against that. (Certainly the prevailing politics of identity cannot abide any such concept as "the sex goddess," while the idea of an actor embodying such a characteristic as "machismo" or "sophistication" is scarcely less problematic for respecters of that conventional wisdom.) Meanwhile the exaltation of "relatability," at times taken to ridiculous extremes, does so as well, as we see when born-rich actors say nothing about the silver spoons they grew up, just that minimum wage job they worked for a week before they landed the gig that meant they never needed a "real job" again.

Why Are So Many Domestic Box Office Hits Doing So "Poorly" Overseas?

Variety recently published an article noting that a good many recent cinematic hits in North America have underperformed in the international market. It seems to me that the observation is valid (especially when we remember that in cases the underperformance is only relative, the international earnings of the Beetlejuice sequel or Wicked only appearing low relative to their North American success) the analysis, if quite rightly acknowledging the declining access Hollywood enjoys to the hugely important Chinese market (and the Russian market too), and in a cursory way too the reality that there are other film industries out there competing with them for the international audience in a way that they aren't for the North American filmgoer, suffers from the deficiencies one would expect of what is so much an "Establishment" publication in movieland, having about it a great whiff of entitlement that reminds one of just how much Hollywood takes the international audience for granted. For that reason I think it worth raising the following three factors plausibly at work in this situation, the first at best partially acknowledged in the article, the latter two not acknowledged at all.

1. Some genres "travel better" than others. The most obvious case is the big sci-fi action films and animated family spectacles. Entirely consistent with the pattern the examples of the type that did well in North America did well overseas. The year's biggest live-action hit, Deadpool & Wolverine, picked up $700 million internationally atop its $600 million domestic gross--while Dune Part 2, Godzilla, Gladiator 2, Venom 3 and Alien: Romulus considerably bettered their domestic performance in the international market. So did it go with films like Inside Out 2, which broke the billion-dollar barrier internationally (on top of making over $600 million in North America), all as Despicable Me 4 and Moana 2 (and on a lesser scale, Kung Fu Panda 4) have similarly done well by this measure. However, the absolute top ranks of the North American charts this year have been a little thinner on really big action movies this year than usual. The result has been that the kinds of movies that don't travel as well have been more than usually well-represented here--as with those top ten hits Wicked, which in contrast with some musicals that do well globally didn't have a built-in global audience (compare it with the ABBA-based Mama Mia, which did over three-quarters of its business internationally), and the more than usually quirky comedy Beetlejuice 2, a sequel to a movie that, if a good solid hit in North America, made barely any money internationally.

2. Hollywood's unhingedly relentless exploitation of any and every franchise it can get its hands on is far along a path of diminishing returns, working with ever-older, more obscure, less promising material. Consider how this year saw sequels to Beetlejuice, Twister and Gladiator, all of them original films made 36, 28 and 24 years ago, respectively, with none of these films having been structured in such a way that anyone but a studio executive could say "This story must continue!"--with obvious implications for the interest of the public in a follow-up. In spite of that Beetlejuice was a robust performer in North America--but not internationally, where the original didn't make so much of a splash. Meanwhile Twisters was even less promising material internationally (and even as domestic hits go, far from being as successful as the original, such that there has been a fair amount of politicized spin on the part of the media), and Gladiator 2, when compared with the real terms gross of the original or the expectations for a reasonable return on a $250 million+ production, the movie has not been all that might have been hoped for anywhere. Thus has it also gone with, for example, Ghostbusters and Mad Max's further milking of their old franchises.

3. If the more publicly available data about international filmgoing is more limited and fragmentary than that for North America, there are still signs of the contraction and fickleness seen in North America being evident there as well. In North America, pre-Great Recession, Americans "went to the movies" 4-5 times a year, and still 3-4 times a year in the decade after. By contrast in 2022, 2023 and 2024 they went about twice a year--while elsewhere moviegoing had less way to fall. (The average in Germany and Japan was closer to one trip a year than two even before the pandemic.) At the same time it is plausible that just like Americans international audiences are getting tired of seeing the same genres and franchises and material generally over and over again, so that not only is the overall market shrinking, but something a little more idiosyncratic and more deeply appealing is required to bring them to theaters. As we saw last year, just as the Super Mario Bros., Barbie, Oppenheimer, Five Nights at Freddy's brought out filmgoers in North America while the superhero movies (Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2, The Flash) and the spy-fi (Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible) and much else supposedly reliable material disappointed, so did it go across the world (with, indeed, the international success of the weighty and unconventional Oppenheimer especially striking). Alas, the idea that Hollywood may have to get a little more creative, dialing back on the "tentpoles" as it makes smaller bets on smaller projects with a narrower but deeper appeal, is not one that it wants to hear--and thus one its courtiers are disinclined to acknowledge, especially as we head into a 2025 with a release slate in line with "business as usual," and thus very likely to put their preferred way of doing business to a severe test.

Does Anyone Still Watch Saturday Night Live?

I have noticed--and been surprised to notice--Saturday Night Live consistently listed under "trending" searches on a certain search engine.

After all, Saturday Night Live's place in popular culture is not what it used to be. Yes, actors promoting some new movie will still customarily stop here in the course of their publicity tour, but all the same, "network," "linear" TV has seen its profile and audience decline markedly amid the ascent of cable, home video and more lately streaming, and according to the ratings and other evidence I have seen the show is no exception. Indeed, it seems telling that it has been a long time since Hollywood tried making a feature film out of any of the show's sketches. The last seems to have been MacGruber way back in 2010, which, perhaps tellingly, flopped and left very little cultural trace, even as compared with not just a classic like The Blues Brothers, but A Night at the Roxbury or The Ladies Man. (Whatever else one says about them, many hearing the song "What is Love?" will think of the Butabi brothers, and maybe Jim Carrey, rather than Haddaway--while going by what I see online The Ladies Man may be one of the more highly quoted films of its time.)

Perhaps also telling, the MacGruber character, in playing off of a show that went off the air almost two decades earlier (as Murdoc yelled so many times, "MacGyver!"), seems to have already been playing to an audience other than the 18-30s who were supposed to be the original target demographic. (According to the numbers published a few years ago, almost 80 percent of the audience was above the age of 29, and 34 percent of the audience over 55.) Still, it is also an older audience that rather than plugging into some social media site on their phone "surfs the web" very much these days, and therefore accounts disproportionately for search traffic, such that in spite of the show's playing to a dwindling and aging crowd as the young appear increasingly oblivious to its existence there it is in "What's trending," even if, we are told, the producers' effort to reach the younger crowd notwithstanding.

Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament: A Few Thoughts on the Likely Winners

Looking ahead to the Deadline Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament--the magazine's ranking of what movies were not the highest grossing but rather most profitable--it seems to me that in this year when so many movies made so little money it is easy to guess the taker of the #1 spot. That would be Inside Out 2, which grossed almost ten times its big $175 million budget (finishing up its run with just a little under $1.7 billion), with, of course, much more money coming from post-theatrical revenues, where Disney home entertainment tends to do particularly well, such that the net on this one being much under $700 million would be surprising given the way these things tend to go.

Guessing the taker of the #2 spot is a little trickier. Yes, Deadpool & Wolverine, if well behind the Inside Out sequel, was well ahead of everyone else in its box office take--but there are complicating factors. If the movie's combination of a $200 million budget with a $1.3 billion gross likewise guarantees a take far larger than the outlay for production and distribution the fact remains that Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's agents almost certainly demanded, and received, something out of it for their stars. The result is that the studio net might be a lot lower than it would otherwise have been. (Think, for instance, of what getting Tom Cruise back into the air cost Paramount when it made Top Gun 2.) Disney-Marvel has almost certainly done very well out of the movie regardless, but the point is that the margin of profit may be lowered just enough to give the third highest-grosser of the year so far, Despicable Me 4, a shot at edging it out of the #2 position on the list (or Moana 2 doing so, should it overtake Despicable Me before finishing its run, and pushing that movie down one place).

Past these uppermost spots the guessing game gets harder because in light of the outlays of money and the grosses the margins between success and failure, and between one film and another, get smaller. Still, some of the year's releases seem safe enough bets. The second half of Dune? The first part of Wicked? I'd be surprised if they didn't at least make the top ten, while I would hesitate to rule them out of the top five. Kung Fu Panda 4? Very plausibly. Beetlejuice 2 or Venom 3? Maybe. At the same time there are movies that the media has tended to portray as successes that I really don't expect to see there--like Twisters, given its combination of big budget and weak international earnings, and Gladiator 2, about which it seems that, skeptical as I was of that one from the first, I may still have been overly optimistic (imagining $600 million globally as having been within the range of possibility for the film)--and of course the notorious flop Furiosa. Instead of these I would expect to find some of those movies that between merely robust grosses and lower budgets made the list, with It Ends with Us still seeming to me to have a good chance of at least making the top ten, and Alien: Romulus maybe doing so as well.

The Oscar Nominee List Changes

It has been common for observers of the Academy Awards to remark how more than before the serious candidates for the more prestigious--the Directing, Acting, Writing and of course Best Picture--awards, are often little-seen, relatively obscure films (Oppenheimer an extreme exception, and thus far no sign of a new trend). Less remarked is how we see more foreign-language films make the list--and one might add, more made-for-streaming films that get a theatrical release in the hopes of topping off revenue from and increasing interest in them in their primary medium. (Consider the Best Picture nominees. The South Korean feature Parasite won at the 2020 ceremony, while the winner in 2022 was a remake of a Franco-Belgian film for Apple+--as four additional foreign-language films scored nominations in 2022-2024, two in the last year alone--Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives.)

One can see this as a simple reflection of even a Hollywood accustomed to thinking of itself as the center of the cinematic universe becoming more cosmopolitan in a globalized era, and the ascent of streaming, but it arguably reflects the same trend as the obscurity of so many of the domestic feature films nominated for the Oscars--the way in which Hollywood's commercial strategy has made its bottom line-supporting films diverge ever more from conventional expectations of cinematic art leaving more room for foreign nominees, and streaming-oriented production, by default.

For those who value traditional cinematic art Hollywood does itself no credit here, but one can see this as a logical continuation of the evolution of audiovisual technology evident ever since television dealt its colossal blow to film. Indeed, considering how long ago that was (the 1950s), and how the film studios managed to keep people coming to the theaters as often as they have for as long as they have one may be impressed with the industry's resilience (if more with its commercial "achievement" than its artistic success or integrity). Still, with their options long dwindling and seemingly proving less effective in recent years (especially if the tentpoles are proving less reliable draws than before), the game appears to be drawing to its close. The fact does not mean the end of film, just a change for where and how we watch them--even if, admittedly, what has remained of the romance of the old theatrical experience goes in the process.

The Race for the 2025 Oscars: Some Thoughts

In some years the entertainment press positively buzzes with talk about the chances of film releases in "the Oscars race" from early on.

This was not one of those years.

Just as the year's shrunken slate of films enjoying wide releases was thin on really first-rank blockbusters (as the far from first-rank grosses show) it has been short on critical darlings--even by the standards of recent years that have seen the contenders for the more prestigious (Picture-Director-Actor-Writer) Oscars.

Consider those films from which something might have been hoped. The sequels to Best Picture winner Gladiator and Best Actor winner Joker? No one seems to have any expectations for them in these categories, with the same going for Alex Garland's Civil War. Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? It also seems unlikely to enjoy any recognition here, given how it flopped with critics as well as audiences. Mad Max: Fury Road was a Best Picture nominee, and Furiosa was well-liked by the critics, but this is the kind of movie that gets nominated more as a gesture toward what people actually watch than as a real competitor, and its having been a big flop will rule it out of recognition on those grounds--all as Kevin Costner's much-hyped Horizon saga suffered from both critical disappointment and public disinterest. Dune, Part Two may have a shot at a Best Picture nomination, but more because of the inclination to recognize at least something that made money than because it is a natural (the second half of the epic even less likely than the first to be a real Best Picture contender because it is basically a big action movie). Perhaps something will be offered Inside Out--though it should be remembered that critics liked the sequel less than they did the Best Screenplay-nominated original.

So what's left among the bigger releases of the year? There is that other Timothée Chalamet film A Complete Unknown, which as a musical biopic is more Oscar's speed (and, if scarcely opened at the time of this writing, did debut on over 2,800 screens). And as an adaptation of a successful Broadway musical popular with both critics and moviegoers there is Wicked, which seems to have the best shot out of the whole bunch at Best Picture. But even so it will be another year where "smaller" and little-seen movies dominate, furthering the trend of the Academy Awards looking ever more like the Independent Spirit Awards.

The Contradictions of Today's Rhetoric About Natality

In the advanced industrialized world those who like to chalk up "success" to "idealistic," cultural, factors rather than material ones set great store by "middle class" values. These values, which are highly individualistic, include "personal responsibility," not least in the matter of starting a family--particularly the principle that one should not begin one without reasonable expectations of being able to afford that family, which is to say, while meeting a certain standard of what Thorstein Veblen called "pecuniary decency," and with a certain minimum of security, such as that with which we associate the material side of middle class existence .

However, really generalized middle classness was always more a promise than a reality even in the more affluent countries, and if the gap between promise and reality has long been widening it may be that in recent years that gap has simply become too big to paper over. Unsurprisingly, young people are less prone to start families--entirely in line with the middle class values with which they are raised.

This, of course, raises a problem for those who would like to see higher fertility rates--who, of course, tend also to be vehement supporters of those changes in economic life that have eroded the middle class. (Thus is the right delighted with Emmanuel Todd when he attributes American and Western decline with declining religiosity and not enough young people studying engineering, and apparently criticizes the West's promotion of its gender politics in the world at large, but completely ignore what he has to say about neoliberalism.) The result is that they neither repudiate middle class notions of responsibility, nor the neoliberal economic program--and instead, in line with their tendency, lay blame on the individuals who have not got along for failing to get along. (Oh, things aren't so tough out there, they say. It's just that a lot of them would rather play video games in mom's basement than get a job--while the ones who do have money blow it on avocado toast and such.)

From their standpoint this may be the least unacceptable approach intellectually, but the dissonances are massive, and they are likely to find that mere hectoring of the young is not going to produce the changes in society's direction that they so clearly desire--implicitly, that even while remaining committed to middle class values young people reconcile themselves to raising their children in conditions of less and less security, comfort and opportunity in line with traditional lifeways, and the requirements of those whose minds are on business and on realpolitik for an ample labor supply, and large cohorts of military manpower age youth.

What is Charity to the Rich, Really?

People make much of the "charitable giving" of the rich, which has been seen as a legitimizer of their extreme wealth and privilege. They have much, and so the presumption goes, they give something back.

Alas, it is never that simple. A rich person may well have altruistic impulses. But it is also the case that charitable giving is, at a certain level of that activity open only to the rich, a matter of tax break and tax shelter, good public relations, occasion for "conspicuous" consumption and display of wealth, and opportunity for social networking--while the donations and institutions involved are often levers of power with which to advance more self-interested agendas. (Thus do the "charitable" foundations of a certain "tech billionaire," through their activity, serve to defend the intellectual property regime on which his wealth is based.) They even get from their "charitable" activities an excuse to hang out with the likes of a Jeffrey Epstein (after which the individuals in question say "I went there only for my foundation, I didn't have any idea tthat guy was into all that stuff").

It is all as far from the ideal of selfless giving as one can imagine--in each and every way the conduct of the hypocrites of whom the Apostle Matthew spoke, who here "have their reward" (in extreme abundance). Still, never missing a chance to remind everyone of what they truly are, the commentariat will so insistently call them "philanthropist" for it that the gullible believe it all an expression of their love of humanity.

Clive Ponting's 1940: Myth and Reality--and the Value of Reminding Us of What We Were Supposed to Know, But Don't

Some time ago I discussed here Clive Ponting's handy book 1940: Myth and Reality--and Angus Calder's rather dismissive attitude toward the book as a work not really bringing anything new to light.

Considering the snideness of Calder's objection I now recall the writing of one historian engaged in such a project himself in regard to quite a different historical subject. Owning that he offered little that could be considered new strictly speaking, he points out that some of those admittedly not so new bits he presented had been slighted in one way or another, whether ignored, or simply not fit into the fuller picture--and altogether, if known in part or even substantially by some specialists, never reached the wider public, and still less played their part in the making of a collective memory dominated by an Establishment-approved narrative that serves the agendas of the powerful rather than the public's right and need to know, or the historian's duty to fact and truth. The result was that gathering together the neglected or buried bits, examining them, putting together the Big Picture with those bits included and presenting them to that public never properly exposed to the bits, let alone their collective implications, was a meaningful and important task.

I agree entirely with that outlook--and certainly regard Ponting as having rendered a public service in his doing just that, presenting once more in very convenient form a more truthful version of the past in the face of the endless recitation of the Myth with which those of orthodox mind wittingly and unwittingly work to bury it.

Saved by the Bell: A Few Thoughts

Saved by the Bell is one of the many, many shows I got to know mainly because of how much it has been rerun in the decades since airing its finale. (Just a few years ago several different channels all likely to be part of your cable package had it as a staple of their morning lineups, so that between them you probably had your choice of Saved by the Bell rerun in the same time slot on many a weekday.)

I can't say that I was terribly impressed by what I saw. Consider how all these years later, we find that its prime time contemporaries Seinfeld and The Simpsons in its glorious golden age each gave us hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits that have endured in pop cultural memory--situations, lines, gags--to the point of their being memorialized in Reddit pages and memes as a great many persons still constantly reference them in any situation where they are at all relevant. By contrast I cannot remember a single bit of Saved by the Bell that I have seen referenced in the same way--or which would deserve to be so.

Of course, as the show's long life in reruns reminds one, Saved by the Bell had, and still has, its fans--but at least as adults even those fans seem to be fairly forthright about the weakness of the material that had such a hold on their affections when they were younger. Indeed, former Entertainment Weekly editor Randall Colburn, for example, penned an interesting piece about that a few years ago in which he acknowledged that the show he so loved as a young adult "is the laziest s--- ever made," not least in its peopling Bayside High School "almost exclusively [with] the stalest, most absurd stereotypes: preppy, jock, cheerleader, brainiac . . . geek." This would seem to have been at its absolute worst in the grotesque caricaturing involved in the conception of the nerds--the show presenting them as "effeminate dorks" who "speak in high-pitched squeaks, waddle like penguins, wear tape over their glasses . . . speak at length about pocket protectors," and make every girl (at least, the non-nerd girls) "recoil every time they're near," all as the writers, treating them with more "disdain . . . than any other subgroup" as they picked on "the nerds" every which way they could (not even allowing them to be the one positive thing that a nerd has conventionally been regarded as being, intelligent), gave every impression of "enjoy[ing] bullying these dorks as much as Zack and the gang did."

All of that aligns exactly with my impressions of the show--while Colburn seems to me entirely correct when he remarks that "The Big Bang Theory . . . is basically what would happen if the Saved By the Bell writers tried to write a show about nerds." Still, Mr. Colburn's own observation would seem to refute what seemed to me the argument he most wanted to make in writing this piece, namely that the nerds are a relic of the era of Saved by the Bell which we have since happily moved past. That The Big Bang Theory not only launched almost two decades after Saved by the Bell, (in 2007) but had a twelve season run (2007-2019) and spawned two successor series' (Young Sheldon, which ran for seven seasons itself in 2017-2024, and hitting the air just this past month, George & Mandy's First Marriage--it just never ends!), is testament to how the cheap (and exceedingly lazy) nerd-bashing of Saved by the Bell remains very much with us--with all its profoundly unfortunate implications, which certainly have their complements in the equally simple-minded "positive" images of nerdishness, and by way of contrast with the nerd, the exaltation of the idiocies that people of conventional mind celebrate as "cool".

Not Deadpool & Wolverine but Captain America: Brave New World Will be the Real Test of the MCU's Appeal to Movie Audiences

This summer saw the release of the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie since the debacle that was The Marvels back in November 2022, Deadpool vs. Wolverine. It proved a spectacular hit with audiences when it hit theaters, grossing over $600 million in North America and improving on that worldwide--giving it a final take that, even after inflation, was a third higher than that of the original Deadpool way back in 2016.

The courtiers and claqueurs of the press, which had been waiting desperately for something, anything, like Deadpool's success, rushed to seize on it as proof that audiences are as ready to eat up superhero sequels as ever they were in service to the studios' doubling down on announcements of much, much more to come (bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans and who knows who else to the next edition of The Avengers).

It seemed to me that they were, as usual, getting ahead of themselves. While Deadpool vs. Wolverine has unquestionably lived up to (or exceeded) any reasonable expectation for that film it is still an exceedingly idiosyncratic product. Not only is the Deadpool franchise far from being a conventional superhero series--indeed, it is a beat-you-over-the-head-with-its-postmodernism parody of the superhero film whose popularity can suggest the form's creakiness--but gimmicks like pairing up Deadpool with Wolverine are not to be had every time, while the movie went above and beyond in "giving the people what they want," to the point of its bursting with cameos and in-jokes in ways that also are not easily repeated to the same effect.

That people came out in such great numbers for it does not guarantee that they will come out for more conventional (for many, more stereotyped and blander) fare with anything like the same enthusiasm. The result is that the release of Captain America: Brave New World, due out not quite six weeks from now on Valentine's Day weekend, seems to me a far more meaningful test of the salability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand.

That said, how well would Captain America 4 have to do at the box office to "do the job?" Think of the matter this way. Back in 2016 Captain America 3--the first really big release of that summer--pulled in $400 million in North America. Adjusted for inflation this is more like $540 million today.

Deadpool, of course, cleared that mark--by almost $100 million, and this in spite of the handicap of a well-earned R rating. However, no other Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has hit that mark since before the pandemic with the exception of the anomalous Spider-Man: No Way Home (another hard-to-repeat cross-over event), leaving little meaningful precedent, such that I can easily picture the film falling short, perhaps far short, of the half billion dollar mark.

Of course, so high a mark does mean plenty of room for the courtiers and claqueurs to "spin" a lower gross than that as a "win" for Marvel--to, ignoring inflation as they grade on a curve, say that a $300 million gross is great. Alas, the shakiness of Marvel's position after these rough past few years--and the way this movie's production budget exploded (we hear now of an outlay of over $350 million due to reshoots, implying that $300 million won't cut it, especially with ever less to hope for from the Chinese market)--and the fact that there will be two more MCU movies coming out in the next ten months after this (including the Phase Six opener Fantastic Four in July)--mean that Marvel really, really, really needs this one to be a winner which proves "We've still got it!"

The result is that for those interested in the business side of cinema this one is well worth watching--all as the tracking-based estimates should start to make the rounds of the relevant parts of the entertainment media soon.