Will Christopher Nolan Be Directing Bond 26?: Reflections on the Chatter

In the two years since the release of No Time to Die the entertainment press has not had much to work with while keeping up the chatter about the next Bond film but rehashing old Bond trivia and speculations and suggestions about what they think the producers might do, or should do, in the next installment they are all absolutely sure is coming.

The result is that when reports of Christopher Nolan being up to helm a rebooted Bond franchise--with the reboot perhaps seeing the original Bond novels refilmed in their own periods--started to circulate they were quick to talk all this up.

Since then things have quieted down--for now, at least. (Even if there is nothing much to it in the absence of any real news people will probably resuscitate the idea.)

Still, the idea is not wholly implausible, given the direction of the films in recent years. Back in Albert Broccoli's time a Nolan would never have been given such a chance--but the franchise has gone from being "creative producer"-run as it was with Broccoli, to looking to critics' darling-type would-be auteurs (Marc Foster, Sam Mendes, Danny Boyle, Cary Fukunaga) to freshen things up. And Nolan in particular seems to have been on their minds for a long time, given how much the rebooted Bond films followed in the footsteps of Nolan's Batman trilogy.

Thus did they begin with an origin story about Bond becoming Bond, recounted in a tone some call "dark and gritty" (and others call "market pessimism"). Thus did they use for the big twist in Skyfall the big twist in The Dark Knight (that the first Avengers film and Star Trek and doubtless others have also ripped off). Thus did they give the reboot they had likewise made "more personal" an ending as well as a beginning, with the series ending with the hero.

It does not seem unreasonable that spending so much time "borrowing" Nolan's ideas they would have thought "Why not just actually get Nolan?" Especially given that it would automatically get a press that loves him, and his sizable online following, very excited about the project.

This would seem all the more the case given how the last few years have gone for Nolan--with Nolan directing a spy thriller of his own in Tenet that was well-received by critics and fans (even if the pandemic crushed its chances of being a blockbuster); while in a summer in which the film studios were failing miserably in getting the public to the theater Nolan somehow made his weirdo postmodern art film about a scientist from the 1940s into a near-billion dollar blockbuster. It would seem the more natural still if the Bond franchise's runners are at all enticed by the idea of following after the continuation novels by sending the screen Bond back to his own era (given that Nolan has helmed commercially successful period pieces not just in Oppenheimer, but Dunkirk).

Still, that a Nolan-helmed Bond film may seem plausible for all these reasons does not actually mean that this is the direction being taken--or even that the result actually stands much chance of working. After all, Nolan succeeded here in giving the public something other than a franchise film and now they want him to . . . make a franchise film just as those franchise films are failing. Perhaps a period franchise film of exactly the kind whose riskiness the colossal failure of Indiana Jones 5 just underlined, to which little really new can be brought at this stage of things, let alone anything really new that a vast audience would care to see. I certainly do not think the general moviegoing audience really wants something faithful to the Fleming originals--while I suspect that any such approach would make much more sense on the small screen than on the large, a very different kind of project from the one we are talking about here.

What Will the Marvel Cinematic Universe Bring in 2024? (And Will Audiences Go For It?)

A prior post here considering Marvel's potential to stage a comeback--concerned in the main with Marvel's prospects given the real problem evident after this year's string of underwhelming box office performances, that the high-concept franchise action film that has been king of the box office for decades is in decline. Still, even admitting this of the general market one might imagine Marvel managing to carry on, and even reverse the downward trend its films have been displaying at the box office.

In thinking about that it seems worth considering the movies scheduled for release in 2024.

There are three for the time being--Deadpool 3 on that critical first weekend of summer, the first of the rebooted Captain America films (Captain America: Brave New World) in late July, and The Thunderbolts in December.

How do their chances look at this very early stage of things?

There is no question that Deadpool has his fans. However, the question is whether, six years after the last Deadpool movie, audiences will be up to a third helping of the same shtick, and whether it will matter much for the overall MCU. While I admit to not having been impressed with it even the first time around, others were, and I think it plausible that at least enough of the fans will come out to make the film a success by deflated, post-pandemic standards--but even such a success has to be qualified. Deadpool actually began as part of Fox's X-Men franchise, rather than the MCU, and is very different in style and tone from the rest of the generally PG-13-rated franchise, so that it may not suffer as much as others from the Marvel brand losing some of its luster--while the same relationship to the franchise means that its success cannot help the MCU much, if it indeed becomes a success.

This matters all the more as the next two Phase Five films are far from the sure bets they might have seemed to be a few years ago. Captain America became a major success for Marvel, with 2016's Captain America: Civil War one of the MCU's earlier $1 billion+ hits, but this arrives after an eight year gap with the last Captain America movie, a five year gap with the last Captain America appearance in Avengers: Endgame, and entails a significant overhaul when the pattern is already the films' performing well below the bar set by their immediate and especially Phase Three predecessors. (I also wonder what to make of the decision to bring back Tim Blake Nelson's Samuel Sterns--recycling an element from the little-seen 2008 The Incredible Hulk. Is this, like the tie-ins with the streaming shows, a sign of a franchise wrapped up in itself expecting the general audience to show the attentiveness of the hardcore, and in the process alienating them?) The late July release date (a change of plans that came in the wake of the big Hollywood strikes of this year) may also be unhelpful. Meanwhile The Thunderbolts, in presenting another superhero team that is far from the Avengers or the X-Men in regard to name recognition, puts me in mind of the less than wholly successful The Eternals.

The result is that if the MCU manages a "comeback," I do not see it happening on the basis of its 2024 releases on the basis of the available evidence. Instead it is easier to picture the present discontents with the MCU continuing--or even these films ending up further additions to Marvel's "loss" column.

Will Captain Marvel 2 Lose Money? (Revisiting the Numbers)

Previously, in light of the revelations about the cost of making Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) I speculated that the movie might need to make $650 million+ at the box office in order for its backers to break even on their investment.

At the time I was still working with my initial projection of a worldwide gross of $600-$700 million.

Recently extrapolating from Boxoffice Pro's tracking data-based estimate of the domestic gross ($121-$189 million) I suggested that, in a new low for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (removing the exceptional conditions of 2020-2021 from the picture) the movie might make $250-$500 million worldwide.

The result is that the mark at which profitability becomes plausible is that much further removed from even the high end of its likely gross. If that proves the case the movie might, instead of turning a modest profit, or even just covering its cost, be another loss-maker for Disney--in the worst-case scenario (a Flash-like performance) another $100 million+ loss for Disney, and even an Indiana Jones 5-caliber loser.

Of course, it is best to reiterate that this is an estimate made with still a month to go. I see no grounds to expect the situation to get better than it is--but all the same, a good deal can change in a few weeks, and for my part I will be keeping an eye on this one.

Can the Marvel Cinematic Universe Make a Comeback?

Back in the 2010s the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) went from strength to strength at the box office, especially in its 2012-2019 second and third phases, with Avengers: Endgame capping a historic commercial success.

However, as with so much else in the world the period since the pandemic has been unkind to it--the movie industry generally taking a brutal beating, one whose effects have persisted even as audiences for the most part resumed their theatergoing, with the MCU suffering along with the rest. Much of the MCU's trouble has been a matter of a more closed Chinese market (this was the biggest factor in the trouble Ant-Man 3 had), but it has had its share of woes even in its home North American market, where Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 all performed below what might have been hoped for given their predecessors' earnings--while the current expectations regarding Captain Marvel 2 look a lot like what happened with The Flash, implying that worse, much worse, may be in store not just for that movie but the several others behind it in the pipeline, and the Marvel brand as a whole.

Of course, franchises do make comebacks. In its long history the James Bond franchise did so more than once--the franchise most notably recovering from its '80s-era decline with Goldeneye and the subsequent films of the Pierce Brosnan era. Still, the Brosnan period was only a period of relative success, falling well short of the franchise's '60s-era heyday, and could not have given the very different market. (Back in the '60s Bond had no competitors in the high-concept action-adventure franchise market. By contrast the field was pretty crowded by the '90s.) The result is that any recovery for the MCU is likely to be only relative, the kind of success the franchise saw in 2018-2019 (with Black Panther and Captain Marvel, and the two-part Avengers event, and Spider-Man and Ant-Man too, selling $9 billion in tickets in a mere year and a half) is simply not a reasonable expectation for any franchise's "business as usual" for very long.*

Moreover, even relative recovery can seem a longshot given, regardless of what Marvel does with its movies, the kind of movie Marvel makes and can be expected to go on making in any conceivable scenario--the high-concept action-adventure blockbuster franchise movie, which, as the troubles of the James Bond series that invented the form, and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series' that went such a long way to making them a Hollywood staple, and the DCEU that has been Marvel's closest thing to a rival, and this summer's Fast and Furious and Transformers and Mission: Impossible movies all show, is looking very shopworn these days in the 2020s. Indeed, investing in superhero movies these days is starting to look like investing in big, splashy historical epics and musicals in the late 1960s--sticking to an ever-more costly and increasingly losing old game when the studios would be doing better to look to new ideas to be the basis of new successes.

* Of course, these have been inflationary years, and $9 billion in 2018-2019 works out to more like $11 billion today.

The "Who Will Be the Next James Bond?" Chatter: A Note

As the claqueurs of the entertainment press endeavor to keep people talking about James Bond, and especially the unannounced next Bond film, on the basis of nearly nothing in the way of actual information, they have devoted much attention to speculation about and suggestions regarding the recasting of the lead, in the main going over the same list over and over and over again. (Yes, they are still talking about Henry Cavill. And Idris Elba. And all the other names you have heard three billion times already, as well as lots of names you have probably never even heard of at all. Like this Aaron Taylor-Johnson person they aren't shutting up about now.)

This seems to me to put the cart before the horse--given that the vision for the character, which is in turn a matter of the broader vision of the series, is what would make a particular actor more or less suitable to the role, especially with this not merely a matter of recasting but rebooting something that has already been repeatedly rebooted, and some serious change apparently in order after the uneven performance of the last film. (The point cannot be emphasized enough--No Time to Die was the series' weakest performer in North America since Licence to Kill, and probably not just here but elsewhere James Bond, like Indiana Jones, has failed to renew his fan base, with all that this promises for interest in a series that has only had one new film out since 2015.)

Do the series-runners have a new vision? One that actually stands a chance of appealing to a broad public? The silence on everything important to that possibility (the more obvious amid the noise about nothing at all, or what may yet turn out to be nothing at all) makes it difficult indeed to tell--but I am personally struck by the tallness of the order. The Bond movies, after all, succeeded by inventing the high-concept action-adventure franchise film--and kept the series going by adapting to that genre's evolution, putting up the ever-bigger budgets required for the first-stringers and shamelessly imitating every other success out there (from Jaws and Star Wars in the '70s to Jason Bourne and Christopher Nolan's Batman saga in the '00s). But now the whole game looks like it is drawing to an end--implying that a viable reboot will have to deliver a more fundamental overhaul of the series. And given the extreme reluctance of Hollywood to break with its longtime standard operating procedure, it seems to me that no one is offering any model for what the series might do on this score--forcing that much heavier a burden of imitation on those who would hope to bring Bond back to the screen successfully. If they do so it will be a striking feat--in marketing terms, if not artistically. But I cannot picture any possibility that would work (emphasis on the latter, as the claqueurs have not been short on ideas--the problem instead that all the ones I have heard from them have been completely unconvincing).

What do you think, readers? Anyone seeing the Bond series pull off the needed feat of reinvention to keep the franchise chugging along through another decade or more?

Captain Marvel 2 vs. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Captain Marvel 2's Likely Box Office

In the wake of Boxoffice Pro's announcement of its tracking data-based projections for the domestic opening weekend and overall run of Captain Marvel 2 the figures have been making the rounds of the "armchair movie executive"-oriented entertainment news outlets. Given that the figures suggest the movie's performing much less like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Phase Three-released original Captain Marvel than they do The Flash (with an opening weekend in the $50-$75 million range and an overall run in the $120-$190 million range, vs. the half-billion dollar hit that first film was in today's terms), there has not been much room for even the most grade-on-a-curve-minded of the claqueurs of the entertainment press to pretend this is anything like good news for the movie. (Indeed, "abysmal" reads the headline at one such site.)

Since I had weeks ago suggested that the movie might be the MCU's equivalent of the DCEU's The Flash this was not exactly a shock to me--but I admit that there was some room for people to think otherwise, and not simply because they were cleaving to old predictions like Screen Rant's guess back in January.* One reason is Guardians of the Galaxy 3's performance this past summer, which it seems worthwhile to revisit.

In raising the matter of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 one should start by acknowledging that the movie did not buck the trend of MCU films making less (in inflation-adjusted, real terms) than their immediate series predecessors--the movie making a good deal less than Guardians of the Galaxy 2, as against the quarter-to-half drop seen with the other movies. However, in comparison with the latest Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man films, it held up rather better--the drop about 20 percent relative to Guardians of the Galaxy 2. This could have been taken as meaning Captain Marvel 2 might not do too badly relative to its own high-performing predecessor. However, there were at least four significant differences undermining any such analogy (which was why, even months ago, I did not see Captain Marvel 2 breaking $700 million, let alone a billion):

1. Considering the case of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it is worth remembering that the film was initially seen as a disappointment--its opening weekend gross softer than anticipated (a rough one-third drop from what its predecessor managed domestically). However, the film turned out to have surprisingly good "legs"--better than its predecessor (so that where the second Guardians movie made 2.65 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians 3 more than tripled the take from its first three days), implying a particularly strong audience response. That suggested that a film audiences liked might do a bit better than some of those that had gone before it, but it could not be taken for granted that this would happen with other Marvel movies (while, again, the film still ended up with 20 percent less grossed than its predecessor).

2. Just as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 proved an exception in its good legs, making it a questionable point of comparison for Captain Marvel 2, the first Captain Marvel was also an outlier--as it was released in the most fortuitous possible circumstances for such a movie. Not only did it come out during the MCU's Phase Three, but it came out mere weeks before the absolute peak of the franchise with the release of Avengers: Endgame, maximizing interest; while the claims made for the film as a "social justice first," if redounding less to the film's benefit than did the similar claims for Black Panther a year earlier, probably helping as well. The result was an exceptional boost to the film which must be credited with helping it become a $1 billion+ hit. Their absence (because Phase Five is a long way from Phase Three, because a sequel is by definition not a "first"), which makes the film less of an event, means that the drop can be expected to be that much sharper here--hence my use of Black Panther rather than the other Marvel films as a basis for my own projection (though going by the current numbers even that may have been overoptimistic).

3. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had the benefit of considerable good will toward Guardians of the Galaxy 2, whereas Captain Marvel left audiences divided. A Rotten Tomatoes score may have its limitations as an indicator of audience feeling, especially as the claims of a campaign against the film led to the changes in its tabulation of general audience input, but all the same, where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 had an audience score of 87 percent, Captain Marvel had, and has, a mere 45 percent.

4. Captain Marvel 2's promotion has suffered from significant weaknesses. There has already been a delay of the release date (the movie bumped from July to November), connected with claims about reshoots and questionable VFX work (which was a problem for Ant-Man 3), none of which is ever encouraging. The film's budget has recently been treated as something of a scandal (unfairly, I think, but it happened all the same). An early trailer, perhaps reflecting the belated VFX work, made the movie look cheap by MCU standards, and if a later trailer made a more favorable impression that way some damage was probably done. There is also the promise that this will be a relatively goofy MCU movie--an approach that smacks of "tired franchise," and probably did not help Thor 4. The fact of a tie-in with Ms. Marvel may not be helpful (given that the general audience that makes big grosses possible does not want things to get so intricate and sprawling as to require complex investment), while the attempt to broaden the audience by airing the show on the Disney-owned ABC broadcast network so much more widely accessible than Disney Plus has not been a great success. And amid the continuation of the actors' strike the actors have been less visible "on the media circuit," and may remain so, to the film's disadvantage. I cannot see any comparison between this collection of troubles, and the promotional effort for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which still produced that film's weak opening weekend).

In the face of all that one might still have hoped that Guardians of the Galaxy 3's relatively good reception was indicative of, and conducive to, warmer feeling toward the Marvel brand, and that Captain Marvel 2 would derive some benefit from that--but if it has done that it has not happened in anywhere near the degree that it would need to do to make the movie anything but a flop-in-the-making, at least going by what we see at the moment.

* Screen Rant projected that Captain Marvel 2 would make $950 million in January--while also guessing Ant-Man 3 would be a $1 billion hit, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 take in $1.2 billion. Alas, all that seems very far away now.

The Expendables 4: The Second and Third Weekend Box Office Gross, and Beyond

I was never bullish about Expendables 4, and after the early tracking data became public I suggested the movie could plausibly fail to make $100 million worldwide--by the standard of a franchise that had to begin with been modest by blockbuster standards, a collapse on par with Solo, The Flash or Indiana Jones 5. The underwhelming opening weekend ($8 million in North America) did not change that expectation, nor did the next two weekends. Dim as the prospect had become by that point, Boxoffice Pro still managed to overestimate its second weekend prospects, anticipating a mere 55 percent weekend-on-weekend drop giving the movie $3.6 million that weekend. Instead the drop was 69 percent, leaving it with just $2.4 million--while there seemed to be no projection for the following weekend, in line with the movie falling out of the "top ten" altogether by its third weekend. (As it happened, it took in another $1 million.)

The result is that after 21 days in release the movie had yet to hit the $16 million mark--while after the next three days seems unlikely to get much above it. The result is that where the low end of Boxoffice Pro's already lowered projection just before the movie came out had it making $24 million in North America, this seemingly puny target for the series looks hopelessly beyond its reach, as the same goes even for $20 million.

Meanwhile there is little sign of succor from overseas. Box Office Mojo currently reports the international gross as $14 million. Curiously China, where the movie had an $11 million opening weekend, is not included in that, but the less-than-stellar opening being tripled would still leave the movie far from $100 million worldwide.

As I often do when making such claims I thought I was being overly pessimistic when I said the movie might not break $100 million. And as has often happened this year after testing my "pessimistic" prediction against the reality, my pessimism seemed like optimism--as, given the massive loss the backers seem certain to take on this movie, another franchise "bites the dust."

What Will Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) Gross at the Box Office? (Opening Weekend and Domestic and Worldwide Theatrical Gross Predictions)

Back at the start of May I predicted that Captain Marvel 2--aka The Marvels--would pull in some $600-$700 million globally on the basis of its, in line with the softening grosses of recent Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, and an analogy in particular with the Black Panther films, its making not much more than half what the preceding film in its series did. Nothing I saw in the following five months made me change that--excepting my allowing for a greater possibility of the gross collapsing outright in the manner of The Flash given how we have seen this happen again and again this year.

Now Boxoffice Pro has made public its tracking numbers--domestic numbers only, of course, but these are still important and telling, and I will discuss these first before I go onto the worldwide gross figure that was my original concern.

Right now Boxoffice Pro projects an opening weekend in the $50-$75 million range, and a gross in the $121-$189 million range.

Yikes.

After all, at the low end of the range these really are Flash-like numbers (that movie having taken in $55 million on its opening weekend, and gone on to a $108 million gross in its entire run), while the high end of the range is not very much better (more like what was hoped for The Flash in the weeks before its release, even after the delusions about its being the greatest superhero film ever fell apart).

I think this makes the point--but in the interests of thoroughness let us compare these numbers with what the original Captain Marvel made back in the spring of 2019. That movie opened to $153 million, and had a domestic run in the $427 million range--or $185 million in its opening weekend and $517 million in its overall run in September 2023 dollars, respectively.

This works out to the current expectation being that the movie will, in inflation-adjusted, real, terms, open 59 to 73 percent lower than the original, and eventually pull in 63 to 77 percent less; that, in other words, it will be lucky to make two-fifths what the original Captain Marvel did, and may make just one-quarter what it did, domestically.

By comparison Black Panther 2 made a bit over half what the first Black Panther did globally in real terms--which means that the current projection for Captain Marvel 2 is that even at the high end of the range it will suffer a significantly worse drop relative to its immediate series predecessor than any of the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe films, while in absolute terms hauling in even less than Ant-Man 3 (which was being called a flop with some $214 million in the till, over an eighth more than the best projected for this movie).

In fairness, a movie might find some compensation overseas for its domestic underperformance--but given this shortfall the compensation would have to be positively enormous for this movie, and this is not how things have been working out lately for the MCU, or for Hollywood generally. Indeed, the international market has often been the problem--this a much more significant factor in Ant-Man 3's overall performance than its domestic underperformance.

Let us thus take the domestic/international split the original Captain Marvel managed as a relatively optimistic scenario, especially since no recent Marvel release has managed to make quite so much of its money in the international markets--roughly 38/62 according to Box Office Mojo. This works out to a multiplier of 2.65, which applied to the $189 million gross that is Boxoffice Pro's high estimate has the movie, in this positive scenario, barely cracking $500 million. Applied to the low end of the range it finishes up with about $320 million. And should the movie manage to do only relatively as well overseas as, say, Black Panther 2 did (with a 53/47 split), with this applied to the $121 million figure, this would amount to $230 million--less than The Flash (and a fifth of the $1.13 billion Captain Marvel made before adjustment for inflation).

The result is that the $600-$700 million gross I had wondered might be overly bleak can now seem optimistic, with the worldwide gross now looking more like $500 million at best and perhaps as low as $250 million, and the domestic gross, which I cannot picture breaking $200 million, perhaps ending up closer to $100 million (or: $100-$200 million domestic, and $250-$500 million global).

Of course, we still have a month to go--but as has been seen time and again with franchise films this year BoxOfficePro's projections have tended to trend downward rather than upward in the case of such films in the weeks preceding their release (this certainly the case with The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, lesser disappointments like Mission: Impossible 7, etc.)--while reading Boxoffice Pro's commentary I was struck by the use of the phrase "alarmingly low" in relation to its pre-sales, which the site informs us are not just "69 percent behind the pace of Guardians Vol. 3," but also 72 percent behind [Ant-Man 3], and 42 percent behind Eternals" at present. (Eternals!) The result is that by the week of the movie's release the prognosis might be still worse than it is now--while even if it got no worse than it is at present there is no way to see this as anything but a prediction of disaster for this film, and another big blow to an already badly tottering MCU, and along with it, the badly tottering superhero genre, Hollywood franchise action film and "blockbuster" generally, and Hollywood studio system altogether.

The Expendables 4 Had its Opening Weekend. How Did it Do?

The Expendables 4 made its debut at the North American box office this weekend.

Few seem to have expected it to make much.

It actually made less than that.

Following Thursday night previews that took in $750,000 (the first time I can remember seeing such numbers for a $100 million franchise sequel come in below seven figures), the movie made about $3 million opening day leading to expectations of an $8 million opening weekend, which were more or less fulfilled. (The movie's take was ultimately $8.3 million.)

I cannot count myself shocked--or even really surprised--by this underperformance given that the expectations were already so close to nothing to begin with (Boxoffice Pro having thought $10-$15 million, and inclining toward the lower end of that range). Still, the number is in, and makes for such a weak start that even Top Gun 2-like legs would give the movie just a $50 million domestic gross that would have to be considered a dismal failure for a movie like this--all as, with very poor reviews from the critics (16 percent from "All Critics," 14 percent from the "Top Critics" on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences unenthusiastic (the "All Audience" score is just 68 percent), any such prospect seems remote in the extreme, and the film doing relatively well to get to $20 million (less than what Barbie made in Thursday night previews alone) is far more likely. Meanwhile its overseas performance shows little sign of making up for it. (As it did so often in the '10s the Chinese box office came to the rescue of Expendables 3. But Expendables 4 opened with a mere $11 million there last week.) The result is that, again, $200 million looks like a longshot for this movie--which, even more than before, I think could fall short of $100 million worldwide, adding to the lengthening list of 2023's big-budget franchise flops, though, again, the hole this movie puts in the studio books will scarcely be noticed next to the likes of those put in them by The Flash or Indiana Jones 5.

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.

"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.

The Demise of the Gold Eagle Publishing Imprint, and the Collapse of the Mass-Market Paperback

Some years ago News Corps' shutdown of the Gold Eagle imprint that once loomed so large in action-adventure fiction seemed to go completely unacknowledged by the media.

That lack of coverage seemed to me to bespeak not just the decline of the imprint, or the associated genre of "paramilitary" action-adventure fiction, both of which were fairly "old news" by the mid-2010s, but the broader displacement of leisure reading by audiovisual media. The more recent collapse of sales of the mass-market paperback generally--not quite so unreported as the Gold Eagle collapse was, but all the same, getting relatively little attention--is part of the same process. No matter how much some would like for us to believe that we are just reading in a different format the decline of the paperback seems to me indicative of the decline of casual reading, light reading as other activities replace it.

Like mind-numbedly staring at videos where so-called "influencers" jabber about stupid crap--and, in line with the cultural importance accorded to said influencers and said stupid crap, get far more press coverage than the collapse of the mass-market paperback has got, or could be expected to have got, in an age in which even the "JOURNALISTS" OF THE ERA DO NOT READ!

Rethinking the Pandemic's Legacy for the Movie Business

Early in the pandemic my expectation was that the blow to an already fragile film business--the disruption of a much-weakened and eroding habit of film-going, the shutdown of many theaters, the increasing shift of even big-budget original content to streaming--would make recovery slow and full recovery unlikely (especially given that, as we have seen, the pandemic never went away). In late 2021 and early 2022 my view changed somewhat, such successes as Spider-Man: No Way Home (an $800 million hit in North America alone just as the latest mutation of the COVID-19 virus was running wild) made it seem as if not so much had changed, with the successes of Top Gun 2 and Avatar 2 in particular the following year giving the impression of a return to normal underway--and I suggested that the packed release slate of 2023 would see the box office normalize that year, since all 2022 had seemed to me to lack was the usual quantity of releases, and especially of near-sure-fire franchise sequels among them.

Of course, it did not work out that way. The movies came, of course, but the recovery of the box office that looked so dramatic between late 2021 and the spring of 2023 stalled out badly in the summer, suggesting that the continuation of the recovery much past three-quarters of the pre-pandemic level of business would be a long, slow process--the more in as to the extent that people were going to the theater they were not doing it for the same movies as before. Where in 2021 and 2022 we saw the usual sort of blockbusters lead the way--big franchise action films like the Marvel, Top Gun and Avatar sequels--2023 saw such films consistently underperform from Ant-Man 3 forward, and time and again flop catastrophically over the summer, with the process exemplified by the receptions to The Flash and Indiana Jones 5, and less dramatically, the newest Fast and Furious, Transformers and Mission: Impossible films. Rather it was more idiosyncratic hits that led the way--The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the spring, Barbie and Oppenheimer in the late summer period--with these accounting for a disproportionate share of the box office as the distribution of ticket sales became ever more "top-heavy." (Where in the early 2000s the top ten films of a given year accounted for 23 percent of that year's North American box office gross, and it was more like 34 percent in 2015-2019, in 2023 so far it seems to be just under 50 percent to go by the Box Office Mojo's numbers.*)

The result is that I think my earlier, more pessimistic appraisal was the more accurate--and that Hollywood will have that much tougher a time ahead of it as, with streaming proved no substitute for theatrical revenues, those revenues come to depend on an ever smaller share of hits and, in comparison with the past years when Disney flourished by ruthlessly exploiting the viability of Star Wars, superheroes and animation (both new animated movies and live-action adaptations of its old animated classics), the movies once counted on to be winners fail to deliver, while those likely to truly be winners are ever harder to identify.**

* The calculation is based on the site's "calendar gross" rather than "in-year release" figures (some $3.4 billion grossed by the top ten films against the year's overall gross of $6.9 billion).
** Exemplary of that situation seven of the ten highest-grossing movies of 2019 were Disney productions of exactly these kinds (Star Wars 9, Avengers 4, Captain Marvel, Toy Story, Frozen 2, Lion King and Aladdin), while Disney's Marvel coproduced an eighth movie on the list (Spider-Man: Far From Home), with the top six all Disney productions (of the seven previously mentioned, all but Aladdin), a truly astonishing preponderance, while every one of these broke the billion-dollar barrier globally (at a time when a billion dollars was more like $1.2 billion today, and therefore that much more substantial an achievement).

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.

Balzac and the Rise of Modern Publishing

In discussing Balzac's depiction of publishing in Lost Illusions I remarked how, in contrast with so many who light-mindedly tell people that "publishing is a business" (mostly, just in the course of excusing it for the brutal way it treats writers), Balzac actually shows what that means--the essential crassness of those in control, the extreme conflict this sets up with any artistic imperative, the problems of publicity and the way they make it more important to have a "distinguished name" on the cover of a book than that the book be good, the expenses of promotion and the corruption of book reviewing, the nearly insuperable obstacles that any new arrival of whatever talent must overcome just to get their work looked at, and the rest.

Still, if all this is as true of the business today as it ever was (and set by Balzac with infinitely greater forthrightness than any contemporary person discussing the industry dares to do), it can seem the case that the entrepreneurs of the "Wooden Galleries" Balzac describes are remote from the realities of a corporatized, bureaucratized world we have long taken for granted--just as is generally the case when we consider business as it stood two centuries ago. Still, as is also the case with much we see when we look at the world of two centuries ago, and the books of Balzac, we can see that later world emergent, in a quip of the vile Dauriat's. As he remarks when, with gleeful cruelty, crushing Lucien du Rubempre's hopes, "I have eleven hundred manuscripts on hand . . . eleven hundred manuscripts submitted to me at this moment," a testament to the scale of the submissions with which a major publisher must deal. Moreover, Dauriat, quite clear on what managing such quantities of manuscripts requires, observes that he "shall soon be obliged to start a department to keep account of the stock of manuscripts, and a special office for reading them, and a committee to vote on their merits."

So did it go, the processing of manuscripts becoming increasingly bureaucratized, with the result that Jack London described so well in Martin Eden--until the Dauriats of the world decided they would not bother with such things at all, dumping the burden of running such departments and offices on literary agents and telling anyone who came to them with such a manuscript in spite of their declaration anywhere and everywhere that they "do not accept unsolicited manuscripts" to "get an agent," three little words that are the "Let them eat cake" of the Dauriats of Park Avenue.