My Posts on Blue Beetle's Box Office Performance (Collected)

During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of Blue Beetle I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.

7/23/23
How Will Blue Beetle Do? (A Note on the Boxoffice Pro's Tracking)
These days even the biggest movies from the bigger franchises are having a tough time getting audiences to the theaters--and smaller movies having a tougher time still. Thus Guardians of the Galaxy 3 disappoints (finishing up a fifth down from the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 when we adjust for inflation), while Shazam 2 craters (this $100 million+ DCEU superhero movie finishing with $134 million taken in globally).

Blue Beetle was an originally straight-to-streaming release "upgraded" with a bigger budget in the wake of its studio's declining interest in costly streaming projects that saw them decide to bury a nearly complete Batgirl film rather than give it the same treatment.

Still, from the standpoint of resources invested and name recognition the movie was more Shazam than Guardians of the Galaxy (never mind Spider-Man).

All the same, catching Blue Beetle's trailer a while back I thought it at least promised a fast, flashy, fun summer movie. (Indeed, it made a better impression that way than the contemporaneous Captain Marvel 2 trailer.)

Was it possible that Blue Beetle would defy the odds? Not necessarily becoming a billion-dollar hit, but still being a meaningful success on a smaller scale?

Alas, to go by Boxoffice Pro's projection Blue Beetle will be lucky to do as well as Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Their analyst Shawn Robbins anticipates a $12-$17 million opening on the way to a $27-$55 million gross at the end of its domestic run.

Shazam 2, by contrast, opened with $30 million--far above the high end of the range projected for Blue Beetle--on its way to a $58 million gross even after its collapse in the second weekend.

Of course, Blue Beetle will not actually hit theaters for four weeks, and a lot can change in that period. We have seen many a movie's tracking-based prospects wither in that time frame (in fact this has happened again and again this year, perhaps most pointedly The Flash), but sometimes their prospects improve--with this weekend's Barbie an excellent example. (A month ago Boxoffice Pro was thinking the movie's first three days might take in as little as $55 million. Now the range they have in mind is two-and-a-half to three times that, $140-$175 million.) Still, whether or not the film lives up to this promise the more likely outcome is its confirming the impressions so many of superhero fatigue and the commercial pointlessness of putting out smaller films of that kind.

Expect an update on that during the coming weeks.

8/28/23
How is Blue Beetle Doing Ten Days into its Release?
The box office prospects of Blue Beetle from the start were fairly modest--the movie a straight-to-streaming project that, unlike its fellow straight-to-streaming DCEU project Batgirl, was upgraded for theatrical release rather than buried, and even after that no Guardians of the Galaxy 3 or The Flash were competitiveness at the summer box office was concerned. Moreover, to a degree that was almost certainly unanticipated when the decision to give Blue Beetle a theatrical release was made, superhero fatigue, franchise fatigue, and general "blockbuster" fatigue all bit hard in 2023--with Ant-Man 3 and Shazam 2 both proving early losers, and the flops just continuing to come through the summer with the latest installments of the Fast and Furious, Transformers, the DCEU, Indiana Jones and even Mission: Impossible.

The result was that the early tracking numbers for Blue Beetle looked paltry indeed--four weeks in advance of the movie's debut Boxoffice Pro projecting a $12-$17 million opening weekend on the way to a $27-$55 million gross over the fuller domestic run, numbers that would have been disappointing in regard to the mere opening day of a much-awaited superhero blockbuster pre-pandemic. Of course, things did look up after, with Boxoffice Pro's projection for Blue Beetle rising to $20-$27 million for the opening weekend and $45-$87 million for the fuller run by the August 10 reassessment. Proportionately a significant upward revision, it was still from a very low starting point—and even the high end of the range well short of the $100 million mark.

As it happened the film, with a gross in the upper limit of the range Boxoffice Pro envisaged for its opening weekend ($25 million), and displayed decent legs in its second weekend (with a mere 49 percent drop in its second weekend), has justified the improved projection--but not done much more than that. At the same time it has been no great sensation overseas (57 percent of the worldwide box office gross to date accounted for domestically).

The result is that it will have a tough time just making its money back--even after taking into account post-theatrical income. With $25 million collected on opening weekend and $46 million in the first ten days one can, given reasonable optimism about the pattern seen to date continuing, picture the movie tripling its opening weekend gross, or making two-thirds more money than it already has--which works out to a final domestic tally of $75 million or so by either calculation. Continuing to account for 57 percent of the global gross this suggests a worldwide take in the $130 million range. Should the film do a little better than this--actually make the $87 million Boxoffice Pro anticipated, and eventually match its domestic gross overseas--it would still have only $175 million collected.

Now consider the formula I have presented here on the basis of Deadline's recent data. The share of the gross that goes to the production comes to, perhaps, half--which works out to $65-$90 million in rentals. For a lower-grossing film like this it is not inconceivable that the home entertainment, TV, streaming income will match or even slightly exceed the theatrical rentals, so let us say generously that counting this in the movie better than doubles its theatrical rentals with a $140-$200 million take from all those sources.

Now consider what we know of what was spent--the reported production budget of $120 million. Counting in the costs of publicity, distribution and the rest of what is not strictly "production" we tend to get 2-3 times the outlay for the production, which works out to, let us say, $240-$360 million (unless the backers really skimped). The result is that even should the film do well within the parameters discussed here the project could be tens of millions in the hole--while the less bullish scenarios have the movie losing its backers a good deal more than tens of millions. Still, even in the worst-case scenario this movie is unlikely to be accounted a major flop in the year that has also seen The Flash and Indiana Jones 5.

9/25/23
How Has Blue Beetle Done?
Alongside the DCEU film The Flash Warner Bros. Discovery had another superhero film coming out this summer, Blue Beetle. It hit theaters in North America in August 18--and six weeks on has collected some $70 million. It has taken in an additional $53 million internationally at last check.

This works out to a grand total of $123 million.

This is, admittedly, a bit better than may have been anticipated for it--the North American component of the gross, indeed, exceeding the high end of Boxoffice Pro's mid-July expectations ($55 million). However, it is a long way from making the $100 million+ film profitable, even if one assumes commensurately strong earnings in streaming and other post-theatrical distribution--and thus also a long way from justifying the decision to "upgrade" what had originally been a straight-to-streaming project to a bigger budget and a theatrical release.

Notably this is in spite of the film seeming to be actually well-liked--rather better-liked, in fact, than the far more expensive and heavily promoted The Flash, to go by the Rotten Tomatoes scores (a critics' score of 79 vs. 63 for The Flash, an audience score of 92 vs. 83 for the other movie).

It seems at the very least more evidence of the difficulty of getting audiences to buy tickets generally--and the difficulty of getting them to do so in particular for superhero movies, especially as those features of a superhero film that may make it stand out are, alas, not the kind of thing that tidily fits into high concept marketing schemes.

10/25/23
The Decision to Go With a Theatrical Release for Blue Beetle, in Hindsight
Amid the collapse of the delusions about the profitability of streaming Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) found itself shifting course dramatically with two DC Comics-based superhero films it had originally intended to release to its MAX service, Batgirl and Blue Beetle. On the grounds that it was too costly to make economic sense anymore as a streaming project, and too "small" for theatrical release, the company's bosses decided to simply bury Batgirl, while "upgrading" Blue Beetle to a theatrical release with a bigger production budget and the associated backing. As it happened the movie seems to have got a decent reception from critics--and the few who saw it (such that it has a 92 percent Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). However, the latter were not very numerous, with the movie's worldwide gross now standing below the $130 million mark.

Given what has been heard of the film's budget ($100 million+), what might be expected of the fuller expenditure (at least as much to distribute and promote it, and other claims on the revenue stream), between theatrical rentals and what the movie might make after its theatrical run from home entertainment, etc. (perhaps not doing more than matching that share of the ticket sales of $60 million or so), the backers could be out tens of millions.

As losses go this can seem trivial next to the hundreds of millions in losses the WBD may have suffered with The Flash. Still, it does raise the question of whether the company has done better putting the film out in theaters than simply finishing the movie on a lower budget and putting it out on streaming per the original plan.

Any thoughts on that, readers?

My Posts on the DCEU's The Flash's Box Office Performance (Collected)

During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of the DCEU's feature film The Flash I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.

May 5, 2023
How Will The Flash Do at the Box Office?
Until recently I have not discussed box office predictions much here, and when I have done so (especially when addressing predictions made in advance of the film's hitting theaters), have usually offered comment on other people's predictions rather than trying to come up with my own predictions from scratch.

The main reason that I have been offering more predictions lately is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and its component series', have run for so long by this point as to give us lots and lots of data in which even those of us who are not Hollywood insiders privy to test screenings and other such information can look for patterns.

We have less of that to go on in the case of the later, less prolific DC Extended Universe (DCEU), which has also been less consistent--and is already slated for a much-publicized overhaul, meaning we will not get very much more to work with before having to rethink our assumptions. Still, prior to that we will get a few more films, notably a Blue Beetle movie "upgraded" from the original plan for a streaming release; a sequel to the DCEU's sole billion dollar-hit, Aquaman; and of course, The Flash.

The buzz for Aquaman 2 has been surprisingly bad recently; the buzz for The Flash, surprisingly good, spectacular even, such that one may wonder just how it will do at the box office when it comes out six weeks from now in mid-June.

Considering this my first thought is that the Barry Allen/Flash character simply does not have the cachet of the other members of the Justice League, while there is no special angle that would make this "more" than just "another superhero" movie (the way Wonder Woman was, for example) in a market where there has been a super-abundance of the super-hero stuff for as long as most of us can remember (perhaps not irrelevantly including another incarnation of the Flash himself on the small screen in the Arrowverse for nine seasons), and "fatigue" possibly setting in. Meanwhile star Ezra Miller's current public image is . . . unhelpful, enough so as to probably put off some of the audience.

Moreover, The Flash will be going out into the most crowded summer box office season since before the pandemic. People will have lots of other options--so many that if it happens that the movie gets good press late in the game and has the advantage of positive word-of-mouth the crowding will limit its "legs," as they will any other movie we get this year. (I will say it again: Top Gun 2 had a lot of advantages, but in the cheer-leading mood surrounding it just about no one wanted to admit that one of the most important was that it had very little competition compared with releases in most summers.)

The result is that there is some room for the movie to "overperform," but from relatively low expectations. Screen Rant's Cooper Hood, for example, predicted $700 million as the movie's gross back in January, before the press became more bullish. Just going by my gut (on which I am more reliant here, again, because there is less to compare this movie to) I can picture the movie making that, or even more than that--but the billion-dollar mark seems to me beyond its reach. Will I have occasion to change my mind? I suppose I will find out in the coming weeks.

May 5, 2023
What Will The Flash Make on its Opening Weekend? And Over its Longer Run? (A Box Office Prediction)
Seeing the way the buzz for The Flash turned so positive--the way the media has got behind the movie--I wondered whether the audience was actually responsive, and looked forward to Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast accordingly.

Out today, it predicts an opening weekend in the $115-$140 million range for The Flash, on the way to the film eventually taking in $280-$375 million domestically. In short, there are expectations that--domestically at least--the film will do at least as well as Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and perhaps considerably better, especially over its fuller run. (Yesterday I predicted here that even fairly strong week-to-week holds from here on out would get Guardians 3 to just $330 million or so, about the middle of the range predicted for The Flash.)

What would that imply for the global gross? The bigger pre-pandemic DCEU movies (namely Man of Steel, Superman vs. Batman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League and Aquaman--all better analogies with The Flash today than smaller productions like Shazam and the pandemic release The Suicide Squad, especially as the box office continues to normalize and the biggest movies are as strong a draw as ever they were), made from 50 to 70 percent of their money internationally.

Between Boxoffice Pro's domestic range, and that figure, we get a very wide range for the possible global gross of from $550 million to almost $1.3 billion.

Of course, until recently the predictions I saw hewed closer to the bottom end of that range than the top--circa $700 million, which would not be far off the mark were the movie to do reasonably well in North America and simply match that abroad (e.g. take in a near-top-of-the-Boxoffice Pro-range $350 million, and make the same overseas; or do a bottom-of-the-range $280 million but make one-and-a-half times that internationally). Still, in the past DCEU movies have, if often seen as disappointments relative to the "Marvel envy" expectations laid on them, still done better than that in real, inflation-adjusted terms. In fact, even in current dollars only two of the six first-rank DCEU movies failed to break the $700 million mark, while all of them blew past it by a considerable way in real terms. Even the lowest earner here, Justice League, grossed almost $800 million when we adjust the dollar values of their year's release to April 2023 dollars, while in the same terms not one but three of the movies broke the billion-dollar barrier (alongside Aquaman, Superman vs. Batman and Wonder Woman doing so), as another came pretty close (Suicide Squad, with its $940 million+ gross back in 2016).

Selected DCEU Films, 2013-2018 (Current and Consumer Price Index-Adjusted April 2023 U.S. Dollars, Adjusted Figures in Parentheses)*

Man of Steel (2013)--Worldwide--$668 Million ($869 Million); Domestic--$291 Million ($378 Million)

Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice (2016)--Worldwide--$871 Million ($1.1 Billion); Domestic--$330 Million ($416 Million)

Suicide Squad (2016)--Worldwide--$747 Million ($943 Million); Domestic--$325 Million ($410 Million)

Wonder Woman (2017)--Worldwide--$822 Million ($1.02 Billion); Domestic--$413 Million ($510 Million)

Justice League (2017)--Worldwide--$658 Million ($794 Million); Domestic--$229 Million ($276 Million)

Aquaman (2018)--Worldwide--$1.15 Billion ($1.39 Billion); Domestic--$335 Million ($404 Million)

Might The Flash then not do better--perhaps much better?--than $700 million. Alas, the DCEU universe is not just in decline, but on its way out, so that there is no build-up toward anything bigger and better such as likely helped some of the earlier films. It may also suffer the effects of bad press about the star, while facing a lot of summer competition.

I might add that good as its press is lately it falls short of the kind of cheer-leading I remember for Wonder Woman back in 2017.

All of this gives it more obstacles to overcome than the preceding films had, less with which to overcome them, and less to gain if it does accomplish the feat (such that even if a pleasantly surprised audience supplies good word-of-mouth it may only count for so much).

So let us let us play it safe and focus on the middle of the relevant ranges with regard to The Flash's domestic gross, and that gross' share of the global total--about $330 million domestic, with somewhere around 60 percent of the revenue foreign, working out to a global gross the vicinity of $800-$850 million. Recognizing $550 million as the absolute rock bottom, and allowing some room for error at the high end (rounding up from 8.5 to 9), $900 million would seem a reasonable high end to the range--so that $600-$900 million is the broader range I have in mind for the time being, with $700-$850 million the more plausible range within that, the movie breaking the billion-dollar barrier still a long shot.

All the same, I do not doubt I will have more to say about this in the coming weeks as more information comes in--with, in fact, one angle on a possible long shot already germinating into its own post as I write this.

* I took the film's gross and adjusted from the prices of the film's year of release (e.g. 2013) to the prices of April 2023 (the latest now available).

May 19, 2023
Is The Flash Going to Be the DCEU's Skyfall?
There is a tedious predictability to the marketing of reboots--aspects of which tend to be fairly distasteful. One is the denigration of the old version of the franchise for the sake of talking up the new one.

"Didn't you just hate that?" the publicists say in that wheedling way.

Maybe some people didn't care for it. But not all of us. The whole point of the reboot, after all, is to capitalize on that earlier thing's success--which means the affection people had for it, which is also why they are taking this line. Their affection is why the brand name they are cashing in on means something, but their affection for the old version may be a barrier to their accepting a new one. The result is that to effectively exploit that affection they have to divert it--from the old thing to the new one.

Of course, this is not a permanent stance on their part. Because after all this nonsense has been used to establish the new version the franchise-runners go back to mining the old for more coin, the value of nostalgia for the old is too great a thing for them to ignore permanently.

Indeed, just a short time after trying to bury the old version to make way for the new they are apt to use the fondness people still have for the old version to prop up the new, especially when it is not doing so well.

The James Bond franchise, which as the pioneer of the high-concept mode of filmmaking generally, and the action-adventure franchise as we know it in particular, has been on the cutting edge of movie-making and marketing in the past, remains so--pioneering this particular practice.

"Didn't you just hate that?" they said about the original EON Bond films as they tried selling people on the reboot. No, we didn't all hate it. But that was the line they used in promoting the new Daniel Craig versions, and the claqueurs of the entertainment press helped sustain that narrative.

As it happened Casino Royale ended up a hit. But the response to Quantum of Solace, at least to go by the prevailing narrative, was less ebullient. Meanwhile, with MGM in financial trouble (for the umpteenth time, but not the last), the next film was put on hold as people wondered about the survival of the franchise itself. ("Is James Bond dead?" Entertainment Weekly actually asked.)

The franchise-runners were shaken--while the 50th anniversary of the Bond series was coming up fast. And so they made the most of it, making of Skyfall a 50th anniversary movie in an even bigger way than they made of the Easter egg hunt that was the 40th anniversary movie, Die Another Day. They made a big deal about evocations of Bond's past--shifting away from Bond as practically a dude who came "from the street" to go by what Vesper Lynd said in the 2006 film to making him a Scottish blueblood with baggage about his past, and more baggage from the "family dynamics" of the present. ("This time, it's personal.") They brought back the machine gun-packing Aston Martin from the '60s-era films that one would have previously thought simply did not exist in this timeline. And they had the film run with a latterday version of Q and Moneypenny and even an M who is not Sir Miles Messervy, but is at least Miles Messervy-ish, so that as the film closes the office, at least, looks a little more like the one we remember.

Basically they had gone from "Didn't you just hate that?" to "Didn't you just love that?" And if your answer was "No," their answer was "Shut up, of course you did!"

All this is inconsistent, incoherent, insulting to the intelligence--and therefore, I would think, risky. And even where the audience was accepting of the manipulation I would think such comparative minutiae would, at most, matter more to the hardcore fans of the series, not the broad moviegoing public that watches the movies casually, especially the younger members with less memory of the older films, who probably would not know Geoffrey Keen from Robert Brown from Bernard Lee (especially given how, I think, people actually watch action movies). Still, it got people talking, brought the new film a lot of positive press--and when it hit theaters, for whatever reason (correlation is not causation, but all the same, the correlation is pretty striking), the movie overperformed, and massively. The prior two Bond films had made about $600 million each globally--Skyfall over $1.1 billion, which is to say almost as much as the prior two films combined. Indeed, averaging the grosses of the other three pre-pandemic films, or even those three films with No Time to Die, and getting an average gross for a Bond film of about $900 million (adjusted for April 2023 prices), one sees Skyfall's gross approaching an astonishing $1.5 billion instead--suggestive of an overperformance of 50-70 percent.

Selected James Bond Films, 2006-2021 (Current and Consumer Price Index-Adjusted April 2023 U.S. Dollars, Adjusted Figures in Parentheses)

Casino Royale (2006)--Worldwide--$606 Million ($911 Million); North America-$167 Million ($252 Million)

Quantum of Solace (2008)--Worldwide--$590 Million ($830 Million); North America--$168 Million ($237 Million)

Skyfall (2012)--Worldwide--$1.11 Billion ($1.46 Billion); North America--$304 Million ($402 Million)

Spectre (2015)--Worldwide--$881 Million ($1.13 Billion); North America--$200 Million ($256 Million)

No Time to Die (2021)--Worldwide--$774 Million ($865 Million); North America--$161 Million ($180 Million)

Unsurprisingly the franchise-runners stuck with the nostalgic approach, having 007 (once more) battle Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his SPECTRE organization in the sequel. As the numbers cited above indicate, Spectre was not as successful as Skyfall--but got a boost coming right after that film, and perhaps, from its evocation of 007 Past.

Right now the DCEU seems to be following a similar trajectory. When Warner Bros. put out Man of Steel, and still more, revealed the developing outlines of the DCEU in Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice, there seemed no interest on its part in the earlier incarnations of the characters whatsoever. The whole idea was establishing the new universe, without audiences being distracted, or encouraged to draw comparisons that might be unfavorable, perhaps the more in as they went in a controversy-stoking direction (Ben Affleck is probably no one's favorite Batman--and whatever the claqueurs say a lot of people were probably not thrilled with the fascist wacko incarnation of the character he was given to play that time around); and frankly, because the stakes seemed very high, Warner hoping that this would be its very own equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Of course, it did not all go as planned, by a long shot, the DCEU never approaching Marvel's fecundity with films, with those films it did get to put out there failing to achieve its billion dollar hit-regularizing success.

Indeed, Warner decided to give these reboots . . . yet another reboot (because studios no longer give up on franchises, or even let them lie fallow, they rush to reboot them because in this day and age nothing is more repugnant to a Hollywood Suit than a New Idea).

Prior to this all becoming official the struggling DCEU Universe's runners, like the runners of the Bond franchise, started seeing nostalgia less as a threat to their new wares and more as a prop to them. Thus did the decision to have Michael Keaton play Bruce Wayne/Batman as part of the last DCEU films, a Skyfall-like evocation of franchise past to aid it in the present. Indeed, such nostalgic evocation seems to be the best thing The Flash has going for it, just as it was the best thing Skyfall had going for it, as the press buzzes over it.

Again, this seems to me something more relevant to fans than the broader audience. It also seems more relevant to American fans than their foreign counterparts--for whom there may be no nostalgia to exploit, with the result that the gesture will fall flat. (Consider how the deeply nostalgia-dependent effort to sell Star Wars in China, which missed out on the original release of the trilogy, fell flat in another reminder of Disney's inability to understand and market its own product--"smartest guys in the room" indeed.) This is all the more the case given that, in contrast with the longstanding, vast, global audience for the Bond films there is probably less nostalgia for anything so specific as, say, the Tim Burton Batman films. Still, this is a possible source of surprises here--and if it (or anything else) ends up working in favor of The Flash becoming a blockbuster, expect the entertainment press to get more bullish still in its predictions about what the movie will make in its opening weekend.

May 27, 2023
Is The Flash Already Looking Like a Flop? (An Update on the Projected Opening Weekend Gross for DCEU's The Flash)
A little over a week ago Boxoffice Pro reported that, based on its tracking, the upcoming DC Extended Universe (DCEU) film The Flash (due out June 16) was headed for a $115-$140 million domestic gross on its opening weekend.

Yesterday, when the publication released its next long-range tracking forecast it appeared the range had been revised downward. The top end of the range has not shifted by much--down only to $135 million--but the forecasters shifted the bottom end of the range downward by a rough quarter ($30 million), to a "mere" $85 million.

The revision predictably extends to the film's overall run, with the bottom end of the range falling from $280 million to $208 million (even as the high end of the range slipped only slightly, from $375 to $362 million).

In short, the floor fell dramatically.

Meanwhile The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the movie could now be expected to take in just $70 million on opening weekend.

This is far from consistent with the media's recent bullishness about the movie--and it would seem to indicate that the press is a lot more excited about the movie than he public is, its breathless hyping of the movie failing to catch on.

Of course, one may imagine that the weak debut will be followed by a positive reaction, and more robust ticket sales, in the following weeks. After all, good holds have partially saved Guardians of the Galaxy 3 from the fate some feared just a little while ago. Still, it is not a good sign, and I find myself looking again at the prediction I made in response to the first Boxoffice Pro projection, suggesting $700-$850 million as the plausible range for the film's global gross. If the movie opens to $70 million, if it does better than that but fails to interest the broader audience that stayed home opening weekend, we might see the movie fall far short of the $200 million Boxoffice Pro over its domestic run. Should the movie, like Aquaman, make 70 percent of its money overseas, that would leave it well short of the $700 million mark, while if it merely matched its domestic take internationally it might even end up under $400 million.

This would mean that the highly touted "best superhero movie ever" (a very, very big claim to make in superhero-saturated 2023) would make Ant-Man 3 look like a winner by comparison.

The result is that the film's trajectory in the weeks ahead will be interesting--though hopefully not more interesting than the movie itself (in which case this movie really will be in trouble).

May 28, 2023
The Flash, The Claqueurs of the Media, and the Audience's Response
The latest reports indicate that, even as the media has turned very bullish on the chances of The Flash at the box office, the evidences of the public's interest in the film remain weak--by summer blockbuster standards, at least. This movie starring a member of the Justice League's old core that is being touted as one of the greatest superhero movies ever--if not the absolute greatest superhero movie ever--may be looking at an opening weekend in the mere $70 million range, just half of what might have been hoped for just a short time earlier.

Why such a disconnect?

One possibility worth considering is that if the last three years have been hard on Marvel, they have been much harder still on Marvel's consistently much less successful rival, the DC Extended Universe, which was in nowhere near so strong a position to endure the disappointment, with their respective positions in the spring of 2023 showing it, when each had a movie out--Ant-Man 3, and Shazam 2. There was much hand-wringing over Ant-Man 3 failing to break the half-billion dollar barrier. By contrast Shazam 2's global take stands at $133 million at last report--the DCEU's flop making less than a third (indeed, not much more than a quarter) what Marvel's apparent disaster did.

I might add that, while Guardians of the Galaxy 3's relatively decent legs have had attitudes toward the film's performance considerably more positive recently, the reality remains a movie that had a weak opening weekend, and will end up with a good deal less money than its predecessors when we think in real terms rather than just inflated dollars--continuing, if in lesser degree than some of its predecessors, the downward trend in the take of Marvel sequels relative to the preceding installments in their series'.

While the DCEU's less prolific character leaves us with less basis for making such judgments, it does not seem unreasonable to think its movies are also suffering in the same way--and that this would not implausibly be more severe in the case of the weaker franchise. Consider the worst installment-to-installment performance the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has seen in the post-pandemic period--Black Panther 2, which saw its real-terms global box office gross drop by about half as compared with the original (from over $1.6 billion to $859 million in November 2022 dollars). One may add that this at least partly reflected the extremely high domestic gross of 2018's Black Panther ($700 million, it beat out even Avengers 3 because of the unrepeatable event the first movie had been made out to be), and the loss of the star of the first film.

By contrast Shazam 2 fell 70 percent from a much lower height (the original's take about $430 million in early 2023 dollars).

Moreover The Flash has no shortage of headwinds against it even without any such trend as that. Popularity-wise the character is no Batman--and even his movie fell short of $800 million last year (notably, in spite of the media also being bullish on that one). Meanwhile the current Flash movie is, in relation to its associated universe, not part of a build-up to something bigger and better (of the kind that worked so well for Marvel up through Phase Three), but the equivalent of a previously unaired episode of a canceled TV show being "burned off." In contrast with the usual expectations the star is not out promoting the film (we are actually hearing from Michael Shannon instead, to go by what I have seen in the press), diminishing that boost, precisely because Ezra Miller's profile is these days rather low in light of personal scandal (itself, perhaps, off-putting to audiences).

It may also the case that the DCEU's playing the "nostalgia card" is unlikely to work so well as the franchise-runners think. (What worked for James Bond will not necessarily work here--any more than the DCEU was able to replicate the MCU's success.)

Does that entirely rule out the movie's making $850 million as I recently thought not entirely outside the realm of the possible? No. But I find myself thinking a good deal more about the floor on the film's gross, which seems to me to be falling, and hard. Yesterday I speculated about a scenario in which (assuming the $70 million opening, ordinary legs, and not much more interest abroad than domestically) the movie ends up with under $400 million--or as little as $350 million. Right now the movie's doing no better than that would not be a very great shock--while even a good deal better than that would seem to me to still be a reminder that, indispensable as the claqueurs of the media may (sadly) be in what one might call the "theater of theater" for making a movie a hit, their powers have limits. And those limits may be far short of what is needed to get moviegoers excited enough about the movie DCEU will have coming to a theater near you in June to make it the first-rank hit the studio so clearly needs.

June 2, 2023
The Prospects of The Flash Get Grimmer . . . Again
Last week we heard a great deal about how Boxoffice Pro's forecasts for The Flash (and Elemental) underwent some downgrading.

After that--and with the disappointing prediction for Indiana Jones (a Solo-like performance is well within the range of their expectations) one could easily miss that they revised the film's prospects again, and not upwards. Where last week the "floor" for the film's projected performance of The Flash dropped significantly, now the same has happened with the ceiling too, this falling from $362 million last week to $308 million now--continued erosion amounting to a near one-fifth drop in the two weeks since the first ($375 million) forecast.

The movie's prospects could recover in the next two weeks--though I do not see how. By contrast I can very easily picture interest in the movie continuing to erode, in the process turning the highly touted "best superhero film ever made" into another failure, and reminding us all that Disney's executives have no monopoly on whatever fashionable corporate buzzword refers to the "skill set" of making for financially ruinous flops.

June 9, 2023
The Flash: One Week to Go Before it Hits Theaters--as its Box Office Gross Forecast Keeps on Falling
Not too long ago the hype for The Flash was extreme in what was truly a grand display of the operation of the entertainment press in full claqueur mode.

One may have wondered, however, whether the public was actually responding to all of the claquing on the movie's behalf.

The early box office tracking suggested that they did not. Still, the $280-$375 million Boxoffice Pro predicted as the film's final gross back in the middle of May, while not earth-shattering, at least looked respectable by the standards of a DC Extended Universe (DCEU) "burning off its final episodes."

And things could get better. After all, the critics might get behind the film, and help push it back on the road to box office glory.

Alas, things didn't get better, the projection slipping pretty quickly in the following weeks, and, in contrast with what might have been expected from the breathless hype of earlier, the critics not coming to the movie's rescue. Getting their say in recent days the Rotten Tomatoes score for the film stands at 72 percent--not exactly an overwhelming vote of confidence from those folks paid to "rate movies from good to excellent," with "good" what the critics rate movies when they don't like them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the Boxoffice Pro forecast made one week before the film's release, with the range of the film's overall run now down to $176-$282 million, works out to the floor and ceiling for the film's run in North America alone having fallen by $100 million in a mere three weeks, over a quarter of the take discussed just three weeks ago that some already regarded as a disappointment.

Putting this into terms of other movies, the film's doing well would, far from making it the crowning glory of the DCEU and the Epoch of Superhero Films in which we live that the hype promised, have it doing just a little bit better than Ant-Man 2 (about $260 million in April 2023 dollars), while at the low end its backers would be left wishing it only did as well as Ant-Man 3 (its $214 million standing about a fifth higher than the floor now predicted for the movie).

Going by what is said about the film itself, rather than the tracking data, I expect that the movie will find a fan base--relatively hardcore superhero movie fans responsive to the "trippy" premise, the brisk and action-packed narrative, the nostalgic button-pushing. But the general audience will be less impressed, finding it to be rather than the greatest of superhero films, at best an interesting one, or just passable, or maybe annoying and wearying, as the case might be--the kind of situation that leaves a movie a commercial disappointment, even as it, perhaps, wins a cult following over time.

June 14, 2023
The Flash: Reassessing the Box Office Predictions
Back in May Boxoffice Pro predicted an opening weekend for The Flash in the $115-$140 million range.

After all the hype about the movie's being the greatest superhero film ever people said "That's it? A measly $140 million is the best it can do?" (The figure, after all, would land it only the 35th place on the "All Time Biggest" list--and this even before we consider inflation.)

As if that were not bad enough afterwards the figure kept falling. And hard. Just last week Boxoffice Pro predicted an opening for The Flash in the $72-$105 million range--which meant that the "floor" anticipated for the film's debut back in May was higher than the new "ceiling" as its release approached.

Now the floor has fallen again as even the already much-lowered ceiling has receded out of sight. Boxoffice Pro's prediction for the film's opening weekend is not $105 million, or the circa $90 million that would have been the middle of last week's predicted range, or even the $72 million that looked like a "worst-case" scenario, but $69 million--not much better than half of what was thought possible less than four weeks ago.

It seems worth spelling out the (for the producers) disquieting implications. Specifically, even with fairly good legs the film, following such a debut, could easily fall short of the $200 million mark domestically that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse each blew past in their first ten days--and strong legs are by no means guaranteed here, with something in the $170-$185 million or so range easier to foresee going by Boxoffice Pro's apparent "multipliers." (Indeed, should the response to the film look like Ant-Man 3's--or even that of the last DC superhero film, Shazam 2--$150 million might be beyond its reach.)

Consider, too, the global prospects for the film. DC's larger films have tended to make 50 to 70 percent of their money abroad, which would translate to $700 million looking as high as it will go, and a lower gross much more likely--especially when we remember that the high end of that range was mainly a product of Aquaman doing very, very well in China.* The Flash movie will have a China release, but there was never any guarantee that The Flash would go above and beyond the way Aquaman did (indeed, the nostalgia that is such a big selling point for the movie seems a much weaker draw there than Aquaman's lavish undersea world), while Hollywood movies are simply picking up less in that market these days. (Indeed, Ant-Man 3's box office numbers would not have been nearly so bad were it not for an especially severe shortfall at the Chinese box office.) Therefore 60 percent seems a more plausible high.

Should the movie make $200 million domestically and 60 percent of its money abroad it would end up with a half billion dollar take. Should it make more like $170 million domestically, and just match that abroad, it could end up south of $350 million global--about what the first Shazam movie made at pre-pandemic prices. The result is that, building in a decent (+/- $50 million) margin of error I am thinking of $300-$550 million as the plausible range for the film's performance. By contrast the $700-$850 million I was prepared to consider a month ago on the basis of prior DC films and the stronger numbers then provided would seem to require a good part of the public to decide the film really is "the greatest superhero film of all time" and make it a Top Gun 2-like phenomenon.

I don't think very many people are holding their breaths for that now.

* With $210 million in the till due to a tripling of the opening weekend's gross, and 70 percent made abroad, one gets $490 million internationally, for a global total of $700 million.

June 18, 2023
The Flash's Opening Weekend Box Office Gross: How Did it Do?
In its first three days in domestic release The Flash has taken in $55 million.

Considering this, remember that Boxoffice Pro's projection just this past week was that it would make $69 million--almost a quarter more than what it actually did make--and that the $69 million figure was way down from its initial projection of $115-$140 million a month ago, which was itself received as a significant disappointment in the wake of some very loud claquing on the film's behalf, given that more than that had been expected.

So basically the movie's gross was less than half of what was projected in a worst-case scenario a month ago that was considered a major letdown.

Consider also what this means. Simply to get up to the $300 million mark the movie would need the legs of a Top Gun 2--which are probably not to be had by any movie this summer given the season's sheer crowdedness. Even with decent legs it might not break $150 million.

The film pulled in a little more abroad, it seems, with the domestic/international gross at the end of the Friday-to-Sunday period expected to be along the lines of 46/54 percent going by Box Office Mojo's data. Still, where even restrained, pre-claquing expectations had projected some $700 million for the film at the global box office (a figure I thought plausible enough) the movie's making so much as $400 million looks a long way off.

The result is that what was touted as the "greatest superhero film ever made" makes Ant-Man 3 look like a hit by comparison. (That one made almost $215 million domestic, and $476 million global.)

All this being the case I would say that I expect The Flash to be prominent in Deadline's list of the year's biggest "box office bombs"--but, alas, know it will have a lot of competition. There is Indiana Jones 5, which seems to be on track to be another Solo--or worse. And, later this year, there is the bad buzz-plagued conclusion to this phase in the DCEU's existence, Aquaman 2 which seems unlikely to benefit from the preceding DCEU film failing so badly. Indeed, this is shaping up to be one exceptional year for megaflops--so much so that by year's end we may, with this coming on top of Hollywood's other troubles, see its commitment to its current way of doing things more sorely tested than at any time since the New Hollywood era.

June 28, 2023
The Flash's Second Weekend Box Office Gross: Worse Than Ant-Man 3, Again
The opening weekend gross of the much-hyped DCEU film The Flash is a now notorious disappointment. Where a month earlier the projection that it would make no more than a "mere" $140 million in its opening weekend was received with dismay it actually picked up just $55 million in its first three days in release--just two-fifths of that "disappointing" figure.

Meanwhile it seems there were few expectations that the film would prove to have the kind of legs that would ameliorate the disappointment. Before the weekend Boxoffice Pro projected the film's seeing a severe 69 percent weekend-to-weekend drop. The reality was actually worse--73 percent, which left the film with a mere $15 million added and $87.5 million grossed overall (as against the $90 million+ Boxoffice Pro expected).

By contrast Ant-Man 3, which had a $106 million take in its first three days, saw a drop of just 70 percent (leaving it with $32 million added in the second weekend for a total of $167 million). The result is that The Flash not only opened with about half of what Ant-Man 3 did, but is also fading faster. Given that Ant-Man 3 did not do much more than double its opening weekend take over the course of its run (finishing up with $214.5 million), The Flash may be thought likely to do no better. The result would be the film's finishing with not just under $150 million over the entire run, but perhaps even under $110 million--less than what Ant-Man 3 made over the long holiday weekend of its release, and what, in view of the hype about The Flash, would have been regarded as, again, a disappointing opening weekend (never mind overall run). Meanwhile there is little sign of extraordinary success for the film in the international market. Thus far the film, which came out or had come out in all the major overseas markets (the big Asian and European markets--China, Japan, South Korea, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by the week that it did in the U.S., has made 58.5 percent of its income abroad (taking in $123 million internationally). Should that remain the case with the movie having pulled in $110 million domestically, not just the $400 million mark, but even the $300 million mark, will be beyond it. The result is that the movie, which has for weeks seemed likely to lose money for its studio, is likely to leave that much bigger a hole in their books--quite plausibly in the vicinity of $150 million or more even after taking in revenue from video, TV, streaming to go by the pattern seen in recent years.**

* Ant-Man 3's $167 million after ten days worked out to 78 percent of its total gross. Should The Flash (which, again, is fading faster) do no better, it will have $112 million at the end of its run.
** Assume, given the reported $200 million budget, final outlays of $400-$600 million on production, distribution and promotion. With $270 million grossed globally and rentals equal to half of that the movie would end up with $130 million or so banked, while perhaps matching this from the other, later revenue streams--working out to $250 million taken in a pessimistic scenario, against the bigger outlays.

July 2, 2023
How Much Money Will The Flash Lose?
In a little over a month the media has gone from claquing for The Flash as the "greatest superhero movie ever" to accepting that it is a flop of historic proportions (reflected in its, in its third weekend, having just $99 million collected in North America, less than might have been hoped for in its first two days of release).

Now the question seems to be just how much money will be lost on this proposition.

Well, the formula is familiar enough.

Consider the reported budget--something on the order of $200 million. Double and triple that to get the range of the final bill for production, distribution, promotion.

You get $400 million to $600 million this way.

Now consider what the film seems likely to make at the box office. The prospect of $400 million seems to be receding in the distance, even $300 million. I personally can see it (given its possibly finishing around $110 million domestically and the current 40/60 domestic/international split) topping out somewhere around $275 million. Assume a fairly typical 48 percent goes in the till and you have $130 million or so in worldwide theatrical rentals.

Now what about home entertainment, etc.?

Big movies usually make somewhat less here than they do from theatrical revenues. Even 90 percent (which would work out to just under $120 million) is high. But given how poorly this one did at the box office it may make relatively more than usual there. Assume that it matches its theatrical take from those other sources. Or even does better--that it betters that by 50 percent (the way some small movies do).

You end up with maybe $250 million, at best something in the neighborhood of $300 million.

Against that you have the outlay of $400 million+ (and maybe much more).

The result is that even if the movie is a spectacular home entertainment performer (relative to its theatrical income) it will work out to a nine figure loss for the studio--$100 million, maybe $200 million. I would not even be shocked by a $300 million loss on this one movie.

This would guarantee it the top spot in Deadline's "biggest box office bombs" competition in just about any year but this one.

September 25, 2023
The Flash's Rotten Tomatoes Scores
In a year in which big-budget franchise action films kept crashing and burning the flopping of The Flash still stands out as an extreme case. The movie made a mere $108 million in its entire North American run (when for such a highly anticipated movie $108 million would have been regarded as a disappointing opening weekend), and not much more overseas--a mere $160 million that left it with just under $269 million in total. Especially given the film's hefty price tag--which in yet another revelation of a major film's budget being considerably larger than was originally announced, seems to have been in the $300 million range--the loss to the studio may end up in the range of several hundred million.

Interestingly, this was in spite of the film apparently not being hated. The critics' score was 63 percent, the audience score 83 percent--not spectacular, but other films with much, much worse have done much, much better, and there is room to think that the scores would have been higher had it not been for the unhinged overhyping of the movie as the greatest superhero film ever made at a moment when the standard is extremely high, the audience showing signs of becoming jaded. (Indeed, I think there is still room for the movie, given its oddities, to become a cult success.)

All of that seems to underline just how much the film market may be changing--and, much as they are evidently resisting it, forcing change on the Hollywood system of a kind not seen in a half century.

September 25, 2023
"How Much Money Did The Flash Lose?" Again (The Budget Was Even Bigger Than We Heard)
These days we seem to be constantly hearing that some big-budget movie actually cost a lot more than was reported. Most of the stories I am aware of have had to do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe but this seems to have happened with The Flash as well--the circa $200 million movie actually a $300 million movie.

Given that production budgets tend to represent one-half to one-third of a studio's outlay on a big movie (there are also distribution, promotion, participations and residuals, interest) one may guess from this a total outlay on the movie of $600-$900 million.

As it happened the movie grossed about $269 million worldwide, which one might guess worked out to not much more than $130 million in theatrical rentals. It tends to be the case that big movies like these make the equivalent of two-thirds of their rentals from those post-theatrical distribution methods, like streaming and TV, but given how weak the theatrical gross was this time one could picture the movie making relatively more. So I could see the movie making $250 million when those proceeds are in--while if the theatrical flop becomes a surprise hit here, we might think $300 million.

$600 million in expenses minus $300 million in revenues is . . . still a loss of $300 million.

And $900 million minus $300 million is . . .

Well, you get the picture. Basically, this movie might, even with those later revenues counted in, easily put a $300 million hole in its backer's budgets, and possibly much more--a half billion or more not out of the question. Such is the insane gamble that a film like this has become these days . . . and time and again this year the studios are losing. Still, to go by the remarks of David Zaslav, who--in a display of the surreal disconnect between what studio executives "think" and what EVERYONE ELSE ON EARTH think, claimed that Warner Bros. franchises like the world of DC Comics, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings are "underused"--I do not see the studios changing course very readily.

May 11, 2024
Is The Flash Really the Biggest Box Office Flop of 2023?
Previously considering the numbers Deadline presented in the course of its "Most Valuable Blockbusters" tournament I mentioned that I was surprised that the figures for the film that was ranked the biggest money-loser of the year, Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels), did not include the reported subsidy that cut the net production cost from $270 million+ to $220 million.

I also noticed that the budget for The Flash last year was reported as over $200 million, and then $300 million later, in a tone of scandal.

Had Deadline gone with the net production cost of $220 million for Captain Marvel 2 they would have shaved $50 million off the loss--and had they gone with the $300 million figure for The Flash's production budget they would have added an extra $100 million to its loss. The result of these two changes would have been to lower the loss on Captain Marvel 2 from $237 million to $187 million--and raise the loss on The Flash from $155 million to $255 million. The number would still be terrible for Captain Marvel 2, but even worse than it is now for The Flash, with the result the two movies still being at the top of the "biggest" flops list, but switching places to make The Flash #1 in this unenviable category (all as a fuller accounting could easily translate to an even worse picture for The Flash).

May 11, 2024
How Much Money Did The Flash Really Lose?
Back in June 2023 when the promised "greatest superhero movie ever!" instead crashed and burned at the box office, the reports were that the lousy gross for The Flash meant the movie possibly losing the studio $200 million.

However, that was back when people thought the production budget was in the vicinity of $200 million. A little while later we were told that it was $300 million--implying the possibility of much more than $200 million being lost.

Yet, even as the budget appeared larger than first reported, Deadline reported a mere $155 million studio loss on the film during its "Most Valuable Blockbusters" tournament.

Odd, isn't it?

Well, when you take a closer look at the numbers you see that Deadline went with the $200 million production budget figure, not what we heard later.

At the same time, where in June we heard the marketing campaign was running $150 million, Deadline claims just $120 million were spent on prints and ads.

All of this allows the number to make sense--all as one could find still more room for it to do so if these were gross rather than net figures (if subsidies and the like offered offsets to the numbers then being thrown about).

However, if we go with those higher numbers things move in the other direction. A $300 million production budget, a $150 million marketing campaign, work out to an addition of $130 million+ in extra expenses. Tacked onto the $155 million loss Deadline reported, in fact, the loss nearly doubles, approaching $300 million.

It may well be that the lower numbers Deadline used are the correct ones. Still, given what we previously heard, doubt seems far from implausible here--and I would not be shocked by later revelations calling the Deadline numbers into question.

January 25, 2025
Andy Muschietti Gets in his Two Cents on The Flash's Failure
Apparently the press is still talking about the colossal failure of Andy Muschietti's DC superhero film The Flash.

The director of the movie, explaining the matter in Hollywood insider terms in a story from Variety, talked about The Flash not being the "four quadrant movie" that supposedly any movie financed at that level has to be in order to turn a profit.

Getting a little more substantive than this tossing about of buzzwords he remarked "that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character."

Of course, anyone could have told Mr. Muschietti that--and indeed, before the breathless hyping of the movie as "the greatest superhero movie ever made" completely confused things back in the spring of 2023 the more astute box office analysts had less buoyant expectations for the film than they would have for, for example, a Batman or Superman film. (Thus did the comparatively optimistic folks at Screen Rant who thought Ant-Man 3 would be a billion-dollar hit, Guardians of the Galaxy do better and The Marvels fall just short of a billion expected just $700 million for The Flash.)

However, this mattered the more for a host of reasons Mr. Muschietti did not raise. Yes, there is the "Ezra Miller problem," and yes, there is the way the "greatest superhero movie ever made" hype probably backfired, but there are also the more structural matters--not least the audience's longtime lukewarmness toward the DC Extended Universe, all as The Flash had the misfortune of hitting theaters in a much tighter market than before (again, moviegoing down by a third relative to the pre-pandemic period) in which even more promising material was underperforming badly (as those three Marvel Cinematic Universe films did relative to the expectations for them), with the reality of superhero fatigue not helping.

Of course, just as Mr. Muschietti did not raise these aspects of the issue, neither did the writers at Variety, nor those other media outlets retailing the remarks--who as courtiers to the industry's kings cannot be expected to be very attentive to these inconvenient facts.

The Media's Insistence on the U.S. Presidential Election of 2024 as a Turning Point in the Culture War

The election of November 2024 saw Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump beat Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris with a 49.8 percent share of the vote to her 48.3 percent according to the official final count from the Federal Election Commission, a mere 1.5 percent margin of victory. If a shock to many it was not a landslide by any means--with all that implies about reading into it some tectonic shift in American electoral politics, or even reason to rethink what is really salable to the broad public (for instance, as compared with New Deal standard-bearer Lyndon Johnson's 61 to 39 percent margin of victory over far-right candidate Barry Goldwater back in 1964). This is all the more the case in that the election was in many respects unusual, with the Democratic Party, on top of facing an anti-incumbent mood inflamed by outrage over the exacerbation of working people's long-worsening troubles by the post-pandemic surge of inflation, coping with a switch of candidates late in the race without the sanction of a proper primary process that put on the ticket a candidate little-known and of uncertain salability to voters in blatantly undemocratic fashion; the comparatively bungled handling of the belatedly and hastily organized campaign that followed; and the candidate and the party's refusal to break with the Democratic Party's decades-long display of utter contempt for the working-class voters without which it does not win elections; which all went together to make 2024 a "greatest hits" edition of the campaign failures of the Democratic Party (and even the Republican Party) from the preceding half century.

However, if Trump enjoyed a narrow win over an exceptionally vulnerable opponent, and the margin of victory almost certainly a matter of material discontents, in the wake of the election the media was and remains insistent that the election was decided on the basis of "the culture war," and indeed marks an historic turning point in them in favor of the right.

Why is that?

Alas, this question, if not asked nearly enough, is easily enough answered. After all, the media gravitates toward politics just as much as it gravitates away from policy, is utterly obsessed with personalities and campaign horse race stupidity, fixated on the very short term as against a long that is beyond its feeble faculties, and in line with its centrism makes a fetish of "consensus," holding that everything which happens in the political arena must somehow represent the generality of opinion, if only in a lowest common denominator fashion, with all that means for its reading of elections. At the same time the "political class," the media included, has devoted itself to playing up the culture wars, consistently exaggerating their importance decade in, decade out down to its recent inversion of the mantra of '92 that "It's the Economy, Stupid" to the point of making "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" a cliché of its reporting on the election of '24--not simply because of its prejudices that have it more comfortable considering politics from the standpoint of culture rather than class, but its cynical eagerness to divert attention from such matters as the economy or foreign policy and the combination of elite agreement and public discontent with them, the more in as such discontents may be harder to ignore. Indeed, the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" idiocies went hand in hand with their telling the public that their hardships are "all in your mind," simple-minded or irrational reactions to price increases, or manipulation by purveyors of "fake news." At the same time there is perhaps no issue where a supposedly "both sides"-minded media is more likely to "one side" the matter in practice than foreign policy, and especially war, such that any discontents here among the public at large were even less likely to be acknowledged as a factor in the outcome. Having eliminated the other explanations, the victory of Trump thus seemed like it could be the triumph of the culture war right, while it did not hurt this tendency at all that claiming such a shift in sentiment among the public goes along nicely with the mainstream media's own shift in such a direction. In line with the evolution of the centrism toward which it inclines into its present embrace of neoliberal-neoconservative politics, the culture wars were really the sole point of dissonance between itself and the avowed right, and even that difference, always less substantial than it was made out to be, is now disappearing as, like so many other pretenses of another era, it falls away.

What a War Economy Really Means for Those Living in It

While the online world is a cesspool of contrarianism at its most vile and stupid I suspect comparatively few who are not stupidly and loathsomely trolling the speaker would flatly deny the dangers, and wrongs, of romanticizing war.

This is not only the case with regard to the hard reality of physical destruction of bodies and minds and property, and the moral effects of organized violence for those who participate in it or otherwise suffer it personally, but what war means for people far removed from the scene of the overt, direct, violence, like those on the "home front"--even in a supposedly "good" war. Yes, a war economy has many a time meant the end of unemployment--but it also meant a combination of higher demand for production with eagerness to keep the demand for labor in check, inflation as governments show less concern for holding down prices than they do for holding down wages, wartime taxes that tend to weigh much more heavily on workers rather than bosses, "moral suasion" to buy war bonds, and much, much else, translating to longer hours at higher and more dangerous work intensity under more severe discipline and often outright state compulsion in return for lower real in-their-pockets wages, all as "production for the front" meant there was less for workers to buy with what money they did have. All of this went hand in hand with their experiencing the alienation of having the labor organizations supposed to represent them in at a minimum their struggle for better pay and conditions, etc. turned into another instrument of the bosses for disciplining them in line with the program delineated from above (not least, with the threat of yanking them out of the job and sending them to the front along with the goods they were making or paying for), the more thoroughly in as what civil liberties had ever been allowed them were in abeyance--the right to strike, even the right to speak, taken away as they were not just gulled but shamed and bullied by those who browbeat them with a thousand-times-outworn "Don't you know there's a war on?" clichés of "sacrifice." Never mind that "making a sacrifice" means being subject not object, and choosing to give up what one has, while here others who do not speak for them are in fact making the decisions to take--by and large, take what little the have-nots have (given that not only must one give what is one's own for one to speak of sacrificing it, but one must also regard it as of value, this, again, no sacrifice given their lack of regard for the poorer members of the community), as they pretend the process is ennobling and any reluctance about it ignoble on the part of people who have "had it too good for too long" and selfishly "forgotten what really matters in life"--in contrast with the haves who get coddled, their right to reap colossal war profits and enjoy all the comforts of prosperity in peace treated as sacrosanct, with all this extending to an indulgent attitude toward outright criminality on their part ("Prosecute them? But Don't you know there's a war on?").

Naturally those in power find much to like about the war economy, whereas the population at large tends to have a rather different experience of the phenomenon. The disparity puts me in mind of George Orwell, an author who got a lot wrong (I have always found his anti-intellectualism lazy and cheap, long wondered if as toward the end he cowered before the irrational he was not losing his grip, and seen it as evidence of his failings that it is the enemies of what he professed to stand for who have been so successful in wielding his name and his writing as a club against what he did stand for) but also got some very important things right, not least that all through history War has been " waged by the ruling group against its own subjects" first and foremost "to keep the very structure of society intact," such that "continuous" War is an end in itself--and any intelligent person expect that even the most just and necessary War that ever was or ever could be will, in anything remotely resembling civilization as we have hitherto known it, become something far less noble in purpose sooner than later, the more in as the people wax in vigilance of those menaces to freedom of which Orwell, even nearing the end, remained thoroughly alert, so much so that many of those who would rush to claim him for their side in political argument ought to be very wary indeed of referring the public to what he actually wrote, rather than what they illiterately fancy he did.

An Alternate History of Post-Cold War British Defense Policy? (A Few Thoughts on Bronwen Maddox's Financial Times' Piece)

Amid renewed talk of breakdown of the "trans-Atlantic relationship" and a decline in optimism among the Western commentariat about the likely outcome of the war in Ukraine and its implications, those in Europe eternally banging the drum for bigger defense budgets and what they buy have been more than usually audible and strident. (Rather than the 2.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product so many British politicians have talked about these past few years the Ministry of Defence now claims that at least an extra percentage point beyond that is a necessary minimum in the current security environment.) Exemplary of the way these things tend to run is the piece in the Financial Times by Chatham House director and regular contributor to that paper, Bronwen Maddox.

Smarmily titled "Defence is the Greatest Public Benefit of All" (next to which the author brushes off "sickness benefits, pensions and healthcare" in the tone of a Roman patrician sneering about the bill for panem et circenses) Ms. Maddox pushes the old narrative that voter-fearing governments have been forsaking defense for the sake of goodies for a piggish public in a way no longer tenable. (Citing an unnamed "senior European minister" the way Thomas Friedman cites unnamed cab drivers, she passes on somebody's quip that "'For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare . . . Now, we will have to reverse that,'" with Ms. Maddox, speaking in her own voice, clarifying that this means that "politicians will have to persuade voters to surrender some of their benefits to pay for defense . . . the essential public benefit above all" (emphasis added).)

Reading the piece one would never know that European governments, Britain's included, started paring down their defense budgets (certainly in percentage-of-GDP terms) way before the past three decades--precisely because before those past three decades one did not see "normal," peacetime, spending levels, but the quasi-permanent war emergency levels of a near half-century Cold War. Those levels were in fact such as to be increasingly untenable as economies stagnated, debt piled up, and fiscal space began shrinking in the wake of the post-war boom's end, with, one should add, politicians often highly resistant to the process, and indeed consistently refusing to make the full cuts that fiscal, monetary and economic stability demanded, as Britain's case demonstrates. The end of that Cold War so exhausting for the West as well as the Soviets removed whatever justification there had been for Cold War defense levels that only went on getting less supportable given that the economic performance of Britain, Europe, and just about everybody else in the post-Cold War period was so lousy, all as politicians' resistance to such cuts again factored into the matter, along with the taking on of commitments far more costly than they realized. Thus, for example, did the era-defining 1998 review put forth by Tony Blair's government both reflect the (self-deluded?) economic overoptimism of the New Economy-dot-com-bubble-heyday-of-globalization period then just peaking--while the deployments of British troops in the twenty-first century, not least in the invasion of Iraq, showed no conception of the realities of such operations whatsoever on the part of that Prime Minister who promised that his government would be "wise spenders, not big spenders," with all that this meant for what the government got for its defense outlays.

Reading the piece one would also never know that the post-Cold War period, and even the decades before, were not periods of profligacy with domestic spending by vote-chasing politicians, but (however much this may have been occluded by the endurance of large fiscal states) extreme penuriousness with such spending as neoliberal governments privatized basic services and chipped away relentlessly at social safety nets, all as deindustrialization and financialization, and the destruction of labor's position by deregulation and union suppression, left most working harder for less. In Britain, after all, these were the years of Thatcher, and Blair, with the essential trend continuing through the years of austerity. And if perhaps confused by the extreme emergency of a (still ongoing) pandemic in which, whatever a lying buffoon would have us believe about who exactly said what words, the actions that spoke far louder rather than words said "let the bodies pile high in their thousands," what British voters got with the next round of Labour government, certainly by the time of the party Manifesto's release was Tony Blair, Part II, as his government's chancellor made clear that, from the standpoint of the party base, even worse was coming.

Admittedly the cuts might have been worse still were the governments in question more determined to maintain the defense spending levels of an earlier era. But that is a far cry from "taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare," while it has also been plenty to leave the British public as a whole in something other than the coddled and pampered condition Ms. Maddox implies. Moreover, as the policymakers in question took that very different course it is worth remembering that, far from cowering before angry voters as they went about it, they implemented their extremely unpopular programs while displaying the kind of open contempt for the voting public that brought on the poll tax riots in Britain.

Indeed, the fundamentals of Ms. Maddox's narrative are so remote from reality as to be describable not as giving us the history of the relation of defense spending to social spending in Europe, and certainly Britain, but an alternate history of events--plain and simple science fiction, if of a low quality to judge by its lack of the quality of verisimilitude. Yet it is passed off and respected as if it were the real thing, endlessly promoted in the "respectable" organs of the press solely because of the functionaries of that press' eternal readiness to platform those desirous of rallying a public round the flag in that way enabling them to gloss over societal problems and divisions with demands for "unity" ("We're all in this together!" they say cynically, in contrast with the misguided but well-intentioned celebrities who caught so much more flak for an ill-timed "Imagine" cover just a few years later) and give them a freer hand against dissenters, the better to let them gut social programs and replace human welfare with the corporate kind, and implement the right-wing social engineering of conscription to the gratification of youth-haters and misandrists eager to see the young brutalized in basic training if not on the battlefield as they supply cannon fodder for elites skilllessly playing their game of Risk with real human lives.

The 2025 Academy Awards: Some Words on the Best Picture Nominees

As those who care to know are likely to already be aware, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 97th annual awards ceremony Sunday night.

At least where the conventionally higher-profile nominees were concerned there were not many surprises--certainly going by the way I have seen these things play out, year in, year out.

I am unsurprised that Anora won, given its buzz (helped by the backlash against the record thirteen prize-nominated Emilia Perez)--and only slightly less unsurprised by its having had a "near-sweep" (emphasis on "near") of the most prestigious prizes. Best Picture and Best Director go together more often than not, while it is more likely than not that the Best Picture winner will also get at least one of the acting prizes, and one of the writing prizes too. (Of the last ten Best Picture winners, six landed Best Director, seven landed at least one acting award, and seven a screenplay Oscar--while every single one of the Best Picture winners chalked up at least one win in the directing, acting or writing categories, and eight of them at least two wins, making for an average of 2.2, leaving Anora just a bit above average with three wins here.)

I am also unsurprised that, as it was a year where no movie was quite the overwhelming presence we see in some years (while we certainly did not see the kind of furor we had last year as the partisans of Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan demanded recognition for each of their films), the rest of the prizes were very widely dispersed, with Anora getting just one more prize, and that in a technical category (Film Editing), as the other four acting and writing prizes (Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay) were spread out among three other Best Picture contenders, namely The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, and Conclave (and A Real Pain with them)--the "spread the wealth" dynamic fairly in evidence here, with the additional recognition accorded them in the technical categories consistent with that. (Brutalist and Emilia Perez each got a second award for their music--the former for original score, the latter for the song "El Mal"--while The Substance, if missing out on the Best Actress prize for which Demi Moore was supposedly a lock, got only a hair and makeup award.)

At the same time I am unsurprised that Part Two of Dune was limited to the technical categories, and that Dune and Part One of Wicked each picked up a mere two prizes (especially as Wicked's being a faithful, no-additional-songs adaptation of the Broadway original ruled it out of the more musically-oriented categories, and especially as Wicked is just a "Part One" and so unlike the other contenders will have a chance at greater recognition in the 2026 ceremony, should the second half of the film be well-received, an expectation for which there is some precedent).

I am also not surprised that, if no movie claimed a really big share of the prizes, the result was still that the makers of two Best Picture nominees, including A Complete Unknown (which, a natural for an Oscar as a biopic of a famed singer, had among its eight nominations one for Timothée "Are You Sick of Hearing About Him Yet?" Chalamet), walked away from the ceremony without a single statue--for simple mathematics makes clear how hard it is to give everyone something when ten Best Picture nominees are now the norm, and there are only seventeen prizes to go around for any U.S.-made live-action feature film (the rest recognizing animated, short, documentary and foreign work), as a result of which their backers will have to settle for promoting their movies as "Oscar nominees" rather than "Oscar winners" (while Best Picture nominee I'm Still Here had its sole win the International Feature Film category).

And it is equally unsurprising that in a year in which filmgoing was down even by post-pandemic standards and excitement about the cinematic releases weak, and what eventually proved to be the leading contenders for the bigger prizes got limited attention from the wider audience (even A Complete Unknown grossed a mere $73 million, as the five that claimed eleven of the prizes, including all the more prestigious prizes, picked up much less--Anora, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez grossing just $15 million each, A Real Pain half that, and the whole lot under $90 million) the evidences of the interest of the general public in the ceremony were not very high. If viewership was higher than in the (understandably) rock-bottom year of 2021, it fell for the first time in four years.

Indeed, considering these numbers the Julius Streichers over at the New York Times wondered aloud if the numbers did not bespeak the cultural "irrelevance" of the ceremony.

Admittedly I have myself been arguing for the declining "relevance" of the ceremony for years now, but what the NYT offered was not an assessment of the ways in which popular culture and the standing of film in it have evolved, but rather their starting point for an argument that "as the country veered right" the perceived progressive content of the more substantial nominees was out of touch with the sentiment of the folks who live outside "the Hollywood bubble." An exercise in what those schooled in "logical fallacies" call "begging the question," it is entirely clear from the Times' predictably taking that line that they mean for their readers to think so--continuing in their relentlessly pushing the view that the rest of the country has no truck with Hollywood liberalism (remember their part in spinning the story of Twisters' release?), and especially that the outcome of the presidential election of 2024 was not a matter of profound material and especially economic discontents, staggering incompetence (or indifference) on the part of a Democratic Party that, utterly terrified of anything that might press its platform in a progressive direction, put itself in an exceedingly difficult situation through the decisions that led to its changing candidates so late in the race, and the lack of alternatives for the protest-minded that those so committed to forcing a "Hold your nose and vote"-type of politics on the public approve so heartily, but instead an expression of deep shifts in the views of the public that made November 2024 a turning point in der kulturkampf, on the flames of which they stand ever ready to pour gasoline--and point to as justification for their own rightward march.

The Cost of Living: What We Really Pay for Housing

Jedidajah Otte's recent article about the supposed "dream" of home ownership having turned into a nightmare for a great many Americans is worthy of notice for a number of reasons. One is that, in contrast with much of the coverage of this subject, it acknowledges that rather than the "pride of ownership" or the security that is supposed to come with owning the four walls and roof within which they reside, the problems of renters in a time of scarcity and spiking prices (and zero acknowledgment from anyone in a position of authority that humans might have need of affordable rentals) have constituted a significant "push" factor in this direction. Another is that in considering the troubles of homeowners Otte discusses not only the high sale price of homes, but also the high cost of continuing to live in a home even after one owns it "free and clear"--the cost of taxes, insurance and maintenance.

The last in particular is testimony to the fact that not only has housing been made difficult to attain by an economy running on real estate speculation turbo-charged by casinonomics-minded ultra-loose monetary policy, and policymakers' matching their obsequiousness toward all those who benefit from that game with contempt for the public's housing needs (indeed, they invariably hasten to blame "irresponsible" homeowners for any problems they have, the better to deflect any criticism of the Finance-Insurance-Real Estate sector), but the decrepit or obscenely high-maintenance character of the housing built and sold to the public. Making it no accident that your spam box may be full of unsolicited offers regarding the roof you may or may not have, the product, in contrast to the traditional logic and justification of economic growth and the exactions it demands as being for the sake of making necessities cheaper and more abundant, is all too consistent with the now century-old consumer culture designed to force people to consume as much as possible by making meeting basic needs as expensive an affair as possible, turning home ownership into one unending "renovation" of a money pit while glorifying the situation as "choice," and attributing any failure of the product or absence of potential improvement to consumer tastes. (Home buyers, they tell us, go for cheapness rather than solidity in their homes, and then at the same time they tell us that it's the consumer and not the builder who resists price-cutting "manufactured" house-building. Sure, no contradiction there.)

The next time some techno-hyped nitwit gives you the spiel about surging technological change making our lives better every day, remind them of what they are paying for shelter.

And food.

And health care.

Captain America 4's (First) and Second Weekend--and the Revelations About "the Budget": Some Thoughts

As of the time of this writing we have seen the box office gross for Captain America in not just the first but the second weekend of its release. The movie's opening was within the range of common expectation, but unspectacular--some $89 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period, and then $100 million when we added in the subsequent Monday.

Compare that to what Ant-Man 3 took in on the first three days of its release, and the four day weekend as a whole exactly two years earlier--some $106 million over the first three days, and $120 million over the first four. Adjusting for inflation Captain America's grosses were, for both periods, down about a fifth from what that movie did, with all that means for the film up to that point, even though one would conventionally expect more people to come out for Captain America than for Scott Lang.

However, an opening weekend tells us only so much. Even a weak opening may be redeemed by good week-to-week holds--and this was where Ant-Man 3 really suffered. The movie's gross fell 70 percent from the first weekend to the second--a number generally recognized as terrible, and which did indeed prove a sign of things to come, with the movie ultimately barely doubling the gross of its first three days over its entire run (instead of multiplying it by two-and-a-half or even three times in the way so many Marvel movies have done).

And as it happened, in spite of a less than wholly enthusiastic audience response there was some expectation that Captain America 4 would do better, with the folks at Boxoffice Pro anticipating a drop of just 50-60 percent, and in the process a gross of $37-$44 million.

Alas, the sub-Ant Man 3 gross has been followed by a weekend-on-weekend fall in the take about as bad as Ant-Man's, the current report of a $28 million gross working out to a 68 percent fall. It also works out to a ten day take of $141 million--which, again, is about a fifth lower than Ant-Man's inflation-adjusted ten day gross (the $177 million its $167 million would be in today's dollars).

It therefore does not seem unreasonable to anticipate Captain America following an Ant-Man 3-like trajectory from an initial take lower than Ant-Man's, leaving the movie one-fifth down from Ant-Man's final gross. Some $225-$230 million in today's terms, think a finish for Captain America in the North American market of about $180 million. Even should the film do a little better--should it, by grace of better holds, prove to have Guardians of the Galaxy 2-like legs, for example--it would still only match Ant-Man 3, not best it. Meanwhile there seems little chance of rescue by the international market, which may not do more than match the North American gross.

The result is that the gross of $400-$500 million, which I suggested as the likely range for the film's global gross last month, seems eminently plausible.

Still, in considering the consequences of the movie's gross for Marvel's bottom line, one should note that even as these have fallen so has the report of the film's budget (?!). In 2024 the press for the film held that the budget for the production (the actual making of the movie) was $350 million, or even more, which was what I went with in my initial discussion of the film. In late January, however, it became commonplace to say that this was a gross overstatement, that the film really cost just a little over half that, some $180 million--a claim that profoundly changes the possibility of the movie turning a profit, or at least getting to the break-even point, if true. But is it? Most of the press has passed on the word uncritically. However, some are skeptical (World of Reel's Jordan Ruimy, citing the authoritative reports of Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez, calls the lower figure "too silly to believe"), while the imprecision of the discussion leaves at least some room for reconciling the different figures. (For example, consider the distinction drawn by Deadline where it presents "production" and "interest and overhead" on separate lines, even though the latter are undeniably part of the bill, all as it is far from impossible that an initially intended $180 million production's cost exploded during the much-talked about reshoots.) Moreover, Marvel has had a history of flat-out underreporting its outlays for movies, and then having the facts given away by, for example, the documentation entailed in its claiming government subsidy for the production (as seen on many occasions when it held out its hand for a rebate from the United Kingdom). Perhaps we will see such a revelation down the road in the case of this film, perhaps not, and should it really prove to be a $180 million movie, and the backers not spent too much on promotion and the rest, the movie would still have some chance of at least breaking even with the help of the post-theatrical revenue streams.

Whether the gross is very promising for the subsequent Marvel movies lining up for their chance at the box office, however, is another matter entirely.