Napoleon in the Context of Ridley Scott's Body of Work

A few months ago I asked here whether Ridley Scott's Napoleon might not, like Oppenheimer, surprise us by making a major hit of the unlikely material of a historical biography. I concluded that the chances of that were slight--and a month and a half after the film's release the issue appears settled, with Napoleon a weak box office performer, and no critical darling. (The movie's worldwide gross is just over $200 million--guaranteeing that the movie will have to do fairly well in home entertainment just to break even on its big budget--while with a critical score of 58 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the precedent of the Golden Globes behind us, I would not expect to see the backers compensated for their financial disappointment with little statuettes.)

As it happens, this is not the first time this has happened to Scott, who having his career in an era in which period pieces are tough sells to audiences, has nevertheless made quite the habit of such pieces, and indeed of full-blown historical epics--and much more often than not failed with them commercially and critically, after which they tended to pass into obscurity. (Remember the quincentennial-of-Columbus'-first-voyage-marking 1492: The Conquest of Paradise? Kingdom of Heaven? Robin Hood? His do-over of the Biblical book of Exodus? Or even 2021's The Last Duel?)

Gladiator was Scott's only real "win" with the historical epic--an exception in the career of a director whose artistic standing rests mainly on his work on other genres--notably the renown he got for two of the classics of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom (Alien and Blade Runner while his credibility as a director able to at least deliver commercial success rests on later films in that genre (like the rather lousy Alien prequel Prometheus, and the adaptation of The Martian), and the crime genre (with high on the list of his more successful films here Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Hannibal and the only marginally period '70s-set American Gangster and All the Money in the World), as along with a couple of war films with contemporary or at least very recent settings (G.I. Jane and Black Hawk Down).

Yet Scott kept going back to the historical genre (one reason why we have not only got Napoleon but will be getting a sequel to Gladiator that absolutely no one asked for), in spite of what Gladiator unintentionally demonstrated--and what even the fawning puff pieces for his new film affirm again and again in spite of themselves--that Scott simply has no real interest in history, let alone anything interesting to say about it. Gladiator pretty much offered a standard B-movie action plot--super-soldier who served his country faithfully and brilliantly is betrayed by an evil Establishment type, forcing him to get revenge, which he does (because "This time, it's personal!")--with this only looking different because of the novelty of the period trappings, and the extreme lavishness of the production, and the whiff of WWE about the proceedings, while good an action film as it was, from the standpoint of historical drama it was risible. And Napoleon, certainly to go by the remarks of Michael Roberts, George Marlowe and David Walsh, seems little better (while its extreme conventionality of perspective is rather more obvious).

So why does Scott keep coming back to the genre? Alas, Scott's answers to his interlocutors notoriously present the reader with more arrogance, flippancy, verbal abuse and "unprintable" vulgarity than they do insight (as, in a reminder that the entertainment press consists so largely of idiot suck-ups to the rich and famous who would be ashamed of themselves if they had a normal human capacity for shame, many of its members absolutely celebrate him for it). Left to guess as a result, my guess, for whatever it may be worth, is that Scott, who has always been more impressive on the level of spectacle than storytelling or ideas (indeed, it is visual style that people seem to remember most from even his most acclaimed work), simply likes presenting historical spectacle on the screen; likes managing these big productions with their vast casts and costuming and the rest that gives them their visual impact; likes, maybe, the thought of doing something we associate with the old-time Great Directors in Hollywood's Golden Age than the filmmakers of today.* And his standing in the film world is such that he gets a chance to do so every few years, in spite of the poor track record of the results at the box office.

* Where the limits of Scott at even his best are concerned I find it worth citing Kevin Martinez's review of the sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, in which he had occasion to remark what he saw as the earlier film's rarely remarked weaknesss. While calling the original "visually distinguished" he also found it "narratively cold, meandering and dull," specifically noting among its "most irritating aspects . . . its murky, chiaroscuro lighting . . . plodding pace . . . overall dreary, depressed atmosphere" (as these were, in his view unfortunately, carried over into the sequel) in a film that was "more of an accomplishment in production design than in cinema."

Soap Opera as a Distinct Form of Storytelling

People often use the term "soap opera" to refer to a kind of storytelling, but it seems to me they rarely spell out what they mean in a clear, useful, way.

In trying to do better it may help to consider the fundamentals of "good," dramatic, conventional storytelling in the Western tradition going back to Aristotle and since developed by people like Gustav Freytag.*

From such storytelling we expect a story to be a "completed action." We expect a unity of "time, space and action." The result is that we expect that of the cast of characters one will clearly be protagonist; we expect that there will be a clear, main line of plot development; we expect the details to all matter (in line with the principle of "Chekhov's gun") as we proceed from exposition to rising action, climax, falling action, denouement--and beginning, middle and end.

This does not wholly exhaust the standard, but it is what is most important in it for explaining how the soap opera differs from it, because it lacks all these qualities. Rather than that completeness and unity of structure with its requirement of some measure of tightness of construction it is apt to be rather loose--a "loose baggy monster" if it goes on for long. Rather than having a clear protagonist it is about a bunch of people of whom one is unlikely to be, or remain for long, clearly more central than the rest. There may be a starting point--but there will not necessarily be an end, and hence no middle, because what the narrative does is follow those many people not through one big action, but an assortment of different, perhaps unrelated and nonsynchronous actions likely to involve some and not others one after the other (with, it might be added, many actions making little to no difference in their lives because the show must go on, so to speak); while if there is an end it is more likely to be a matter of the writer ceasing to follow those characters' doings (even if he comes up with an end point for them that makes their ceasing to do so look logical) than because some trajectory starting at the beginning has satisfyingly run its course by this point.

In short, soap opera is fundamentally different from conventional, unified, plot pyramided beginning-middle-end-type storytelling--with, I want to stress, the accent properly on different (as I have no interest in getting into the issue of "worse," "as good," "better" here).

As the reader may have guessed from this, while we call this storytelling mode "soap opera" this is only because soap opera (a term originated with radio shows) tends to work like this, not because soap opera invented this kind of narrative, which we are apt to find plenty of in nineteenth century novels, for example. (The term "loose, baggy monster" comes from Henry James' characterization of War and Peace, which I think can fairly be called a soap opera in the sense in which I use the term here--the more in as Tolstoy intended it to be just part of a far larger saga.) Moreover, if the kind of programming we associate the soap opera with, the daytime television soap opera, is one in deep decline these days amid the general revolutionizing of media in the digital age, this kind of storytelling is still fairly widespread--the more in as the looseness of the format is such a convenience for executives handling messy productions, eager to keep writers on a tight leash, and ever happy to spread out and drag out their tales with extra seasons and sprawling shared universes for as long as they remain profitable. Episodic television generally works that way--and so do the many movie franchises that, as they become more prolific, function more like TV shows than movies or movie series'. Indeed, the Marvel Cinematic Universe can be taken as a soap opera--while in Disney's hands there seem to have been notions of turning the storytelling of the Star Wars saga into a soap opera.

As all this makes clear, people do enjoy soap opera--but sometimes taking this approach proves very ill-advised indeed.

* Even if you've never heard of Freytag you probably know Freytag's explanation of plot structure (popularly known as "Freytag's pyramid").

Is the Hunger Games Prequel Actually the Hit of the Season?

Initially considering the prospects of the Hunger Games prequel I was pessimistic--expecting this to be another case of a formerly hugely successful franchise flopping with its latest film in the way we have already seen a great many times in 2023. The low estimates for the film's gross did not change that--and nor did the lackluster opening weekend gross (the $44 million it made domestically in its first three days not only a far cry from what the films of the original saga made, but at the low end of the range anticipated for this one). Still, the film had better-than-expected holds two weekends in a row, leaving it with $121 million grossed after its first seventeen days. This is, of course, much less than what the original The Hunger Games made in just its opening weekend (about just three-fifths of what it made in its opening three days if we adjust the figures for inflation), but it beats anything released since Five Nights at Freddy's (and seems likely to overtake Freddy's too before all is said and done). Moreover, with Wish underperforming very badly, Napoleon falling fast and the outlook for Aquaman 2 grim, all as the chances of anything proving a Super Mario Bros Movie, an Oppenheimer, a Barbie this holiday season seem very slim indeed, such that amid this very weak competition the prequel might well be the Victor of this season's Games.*

* The Hunger Games made $152 million in its opening weekend in March 2012--which amounts to $204 million in October 2023 prices, going by the Consumer Price Index.

Is Box Office Failure Getting Boring?

When back in early March box office-watchers were realizing that, after its sensational opening weekend, Ant-Man 3's ticket sales were going flat--and certainly not kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phrase Five with the hoped-for triumph--there seemed to be real surprise. There was less surprise when Fast and Furious 10 and Transformers 6 performed poorly by the standard of their franchises, because expectations were lower, but it added to the normalization of the failure of the kinds of films that until very recently tended to be considered nearly sure-fire successes, as did the opening weekend of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (even if this was partially compensated for by good legs), the letdown that was the release of the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, and, especially after its earlier insane hyping, the catastrophe that was the release of The Flash into theaters, as that very same weekend Elemental underperformed (its measure of redemption, too, coming a lot later and being limited in nature), and two weeks after that Indiana Jones 5, suffered (even considering the lowering of expectations after a poorly conceived worldwide premiere at Cannes) as bad a box office catastrophe as anything up to that point in the year. By their own more modest lights the superhero film Blue Beetle and The Expendables 4 franchise did just as badly.

By the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around it seemed that no one was very hopeful for it--and the initial tracking-based estimates left less scope for disappointment, as you see rechecking the old figures. A month before release Boxoffice Pro told us that The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 would both finish well north of $200 million at worst, with the $350-$400 million range within reach, in just the domestic market. Alas, The Flash barely broke the $100 million barrier (pulling in less than it was supposed to make on just its opening weekend), while Indiana finished with under $175 million. By contrast Captain Marvel 2, expected to fall short of $200 million in even the best case scenario, and not outdo The Flash by much in the worst, had less way to fall--even as it did indeed fall lower than that ($100 million looking out of reach for the movie now). Meanwhile, as Disney's Wish proves a significant disappointment commercially (with the film's opening weekend again falling short of the low expectations for it, followed by a bad first-to-second weekend drop), and the prediction going that Aquaman 2 may not do much better than The Flash or The Marvels, it seems that the commentariat can scarcely work up a response. All that can be said has been said--even as the phenomenon continues, with every sign indicating that flops of this kind will continue in the same steady succession through 2024.

Of Robert Iger and "Unsupervised" Film Directors

Robert Iger, who seems scarcely able to open his mouth without disgracing himself, recently did so again with a silly statement about the lack of "supervision" on the set of The Marvels as the supposed cause of the film's failure.

It is another shabby instance of the old propaganda of the media business that the "creatives" are floopy-brained idiots who can produce nothing of value without the Practical People playing the strictest of strict parent to them--being, to use that awful cliché beloved by a certain kind of ideologue, the "adults in the room." (Consider, for instance, the lame script used to destroy the leading lights of the New Hollywood over and over again in succession. "Oh, they're a perfectionist!" "Oh, they can't stay within a budget!" "Oh, these artists and their visions!")

Just as before that propaganda has been dutifully, respectfully, passed on to the public by the entertainment press--because its members, courtiers by profession and indeed instinct, know that when they must choose from among those to whom they usually suck up, it is safest to go with the executives rather than the artistes. And the public believes them because, apart from usually believing what it is told, the prevailing schema of values has society respecting businesspersons infinitely more than artists. (It is one reason why artists, even when attaining great wealth as artists, seek renown as businessmen and businesswomen as well, pursuing such recognition like some latterday patent of nobility. "I'm not just an actor! I'm a businessperson!" Because I slapped my name on some crappy products.) It is all so pervasive that even people who ought to know better seem less cognizant of the pattern than they ought to be. (Thus did the usually very incisive Peter Biskind not call it out in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, all too often presenting much more conventional morality tales about talents ruined by their own hubris when recounting the shattering of those careers.)

It seems to me--and if I may so, a great many others--that the folks in Hollywood really in need of supervision--in need of adult supervision--are the ones who think that because they have big offices and wear expensive suits they are adults who know what they are doing, even as all they really seem to know how to do it is put holes in their company's balance sheets.

Wish's Opening Weekend: How Did it Do?

I wrote this after the first weekend but I was delayed in putting it up. Here it is anyway--with an update.

BoxOffice Pro projected for Wish a $35-$44 million gross over its first Friday-to-Sunday period--and $49-$66 million over the five-day Wednesday-to-Sunday period of the long Thanksgiving weekend.

As it happens the film made less than the bottom end of the range for the 3-day period over the whole five-day period--a mere $32 million (of which a bit under $20 million was collected over Friday, Saturday and Sunday). This is significantly below expectations that were already weak to begin with for a major Disney animated release (indeed, were weak for such a film even before being revised considerably downward this past month)--to say nothing of a movie that seems to have initially been conceived as a grand 100th anniversary event celebrating the founding of the historic studio.*

Of course, as I keep saying cinematic hits may be becoming less front-loaded, and we forget that at our peril. Certainly box office watchers were quicker than they ought to have been to write off both those Disney releases Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental (both of which had better than expected holds, with Guardians in the end looking respectable, and Elemental going from flop to hit in the process), while this very weekend the Hunger Games prequel had a better than expected hold itself, indicating some hope for a movie that had also had a disappointing debut. The holiday season seems especially likely to work out this way for Disney releases. (Remember, even before the pandemic upended the film market, how things went for Mary Poppins Returns?) Of course, it will take quite the multiplier to make even the low end recently estimated for the whole-run gross possible--even quintupling the five-day gross does not get one much further than $150 million or so, beneath the bottom end of the range Boxoffice Pro anticipated for the movie a week before its release ($165 million). Still, it may be safest not to rush to the cry of "FLOP! FLOP! FLOP!" just yet.

* The expectation for the three-day period as of a month ago had been $45-$65 million, and $64-$94 million for the first five days in release.

UPDATE: Wish has had its second weekend which saw a 61 percent drop for the film from its unprepossessing opening, leaving it with a mere $42 million after ten days--less than the bottom end of the range for the first three days in the first Boxoffice Pro forecast. The result is that it will be tough for the movie to get to $100 million, never mind $165 million (or the near-$300 million previously treated as a serious possibility).

On the Routineness of Ex-Special Forces Protagonists in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I recall running across a gripe session on a discussion board among people annoyed with the trope of a zombie apocalypse scenario where the hero just so happens to be ex-special forces.

There was more in the way of amusing cracks than genuine insights into the matter, but it still got me thinking about just why we see so much of this. One way of looking at the matter is to say that the reason there are so many such characters in these stories is that they are such natural protagonists for them--people trained for combat, survival in harsh conditions, etc. having skills that would be very useful indeed in such situations, and besides being helpful to them potentially helpful to any group of people they link up with.

But people sure have seen it a lot, so much so that it seems predictable, and "convenient," and trite.

That suggests another, larger, problem--namely that there has been so much writing in this genre for so long, so that like any genre that gets so deeply exploited for so long it is tired. The issue, then, seems less the kind of protagonist than the fact that people had seen this story so many times before.

And that in turn suggests a bigger problem still--that we are overdue for some new genres with which to amuse ourselves. Alas, pop culture is stuck in a rut—likely because everything else is too.

Social Withdrawal as Social Protest

Considering the issue of social withdrawal I have generally found myself looking at reports on the matter from or about Japan, and discussion of the issue as it may apply elsewhere in the English-speaking press (mainly though not exclusively the American press). Recently, though, I happened on an item in the French newspaper 20 Minutes discussing the topic, which caught my attention right away with the title: "Hikikomoris français: 'J’ai fui le monde car il était trop dur, trop brutal, trop insécurisant, trop injuste, trop dégoûtant.'" Translated the quotation, from one of the article's interview subjects, says "I fled the world because it was too hard, too brutal, too insecure, too unfair, too disgusting."

I have long tended to the view that there is something of this view of society in much of the social withdrawal we see (in regard to work, for example), be it the milder forms of withdrawal in which people may hold a job, etc. but do the absolute minimum to survive and keep aloof from other people at all other times, or the more severe forms we see, as with the hikikomori who refuses to even come out of their room and face their family--but the preference has long been to see it as a matter of individual pathology, etc.. However, here we have an explicit social criticism on the part of one of the sufferers, who flatly says that he found the world outside unbearable--a reaction hardly implausible given how society is structured, how people treat each other, and the rest, and especially how all this is felt at the "sharp end." The fact that the response to such criticisms so often tends to be sneering callousness ("Welcome to the real world!") only underlines the fact--and suggests that those seriously interested in where the world is going would do far better to put such phenomena in their proper context than, in line with the conventional, cowardly, mediocre norm people treat as mature and pragmatic, deny the existence of any context at all.

"I Never Rewrite!"

Read much about writers with any amount of attention and you will come across quite the number who claim that they never rewrite their own work.

Read their remarks with attention and you also note that, if true, this is because they can count on others to do it for them--because, frankly, they are prominent enough to be indulged that way.

The rest of us, alas, can only dream of ever enjoying anything like such privilege, leaving us enduring the process--and, unpleasant as it is, probably producing a better result for it a fair amount of the time.

Just What is an "'80s Jerk?"

I recall years ago happening on the Teen Titans, Go! episode "Nostalgia is Not a Substitute for an Actual Story." For the most part the episode was up to the standard of the show's very good best, but I was confused by the discussion of "'80s jerks" as a particular, distinctive, type.

That confusion did not prompt me to look into the matter--but more recently I found myself running across items that discussed '80s pop culture as featuring mean-spirited characters out to wreck the hero's effort to attain some goal, often without there being much practical gain in it for them, and wondered whether there was any substance to this at all.

Assuming that there is indeed such substance one possibility is that this truly standard storytelling element seems '80s because after the '80s the big movies that had a chance to make a significant pop cultural impression had less room for such jerks--because of the way big splashy action movies crowded out the littler comedies and light dramas where they tended to feature. Thus the bad guys were not mere jerks, but rather something grandiosely malevolent in very high-stakes situations (like a Thanos).

It may also be that as the "cult of the asshole" grew and grew the default level of "jerkiness" we came to take for granted meant that even where they could possibly have made an impression jerks of the old kind would scarcely be noticed--the more in as the hero themselves was now likely to qualify for "jerk" status themselves. (How else would you characterize Tony Stark, certainly in his Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnations? Or the more recent incarnations of Batman as Hollywood embraced the idea of "Batman as unhinged fascist?")

Considering all that, even granting that unlike some others I do not think film is exactly suffering from a lack of small-time villains motivated by petty or pointless meanness, it does seem to me that the way "jerk characters" have become less conspicuous reflects how film has become a good deal more limited than it used to be--all as the threshold for what constitutes insufferable behavior keeps rising.

Star Wars Was Not, and Could Never Have Been, Another MCU

The title of this post makes the point--Star Wars was not, and could never have been, the second Marvel Cinematic Universe-style hit machine that Disney was so clearly hoping for when it bought Lucasfilm. There are at least three reasons for that.

1. As one finds attending to George Lucas' creative process when he worked on the original Star Wars he was torn between making a more "adult" piece of science fiction, with complex world-building and political themes, and a fairy tale as he understood the form on the basis of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. In the end he opted for the latter--and produced Star Wars as we know it. The catch, however, is that fairy tales are simple and short, with a beginning, middle, end, and expanding them is apt to turn them into something they are not--as is evident when we look at the Expanded Universe, even at its best. (A figure like Grand Admiral Thrawn, for example, has no place in a world of fairy tale simplicities.) It is evident, too, when we look at George Lucas' own prequel trilogy (1999-2005)--in which we see something of those more complex, world-building-intensive, political ideas Lucas had but eschewed when working on the first film in the '70s. The Expanded Universe has been a success with a limited hard core of readers; the prequels alienated many. So was it likely to go with any other such effort--with, as Disney demonstrated, stretching out the Star Wars' saga's main line by three more movies leaving fans looking at it and saying "This is not my Star Wars" (and not just because of the culture war politics, even if that is what gets all the press).

2. As might be guessed from that fairy tale origin Star Wars was never a creation comparable to the Marvel or DC comic book universes--really a bunch of separate comic book characters, separate stories that over time got to be complexly interlinked into a sprawling narrative. Putting it another way the core of those universes that people attend to are those characters, each the stars of their own show, so to speak, the heroes of their own stories, who happen to live in the same world as those other stars and heroes so that they get involved in each others' lives. By contrast Star Wars was the "hero's journey" of Luke Skywalker--and if members of his supporting cast struck a chord with many fans (a Han Solo, a Lando Calrizian, a Boba Fett) they did not provide the same basis for setting up Iron Man and Thor and Captain America in their own movies, and then tying them together in the Avengers. Thus a Han Solo movie was the kind of thing more likely to appeal to Expanded Universe readers than the general audience--as was seen when that movie actually came out. It did not have to be a debacle--but the level of investment in it, reflecting the unreasonable expectations for the general-audience interest in such a movie, made it so.

3. Besides the fact that Star Wars did not provide a superhero comic universe-retinue of characters each plausibly the star of their own film, there was the significant liability of the world they inhabited. One of the principal attractions of the superhero genre as against other forms of sci-fi action spectacle--most evident in the most consistently high-performing franchises, like Batman and Spider-Man, as against the more exotic franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy--is that superheroes operate in something like the real world, presenting the audience with a minimum of what Darko Suvin would have called "alienation" effects (things that yank them out of the experience, not least by forcing them to think). We all know Gotham is basically New York--while Spider-Man actually does live in New York--and it is easier for the general audience to get into that than the story of someone on Coruscant. Alas, making a Cinematic Universe out of Star Wars required the audience to not just be willing to follow the adventures of someone on Coruscant, but to be specifically interested in that fictional world in itself. Again, the hardcore fans are happy to immerse themselves in that galaxy far, far away. But they are no basis for consistent billion-dollar hits (as, again, the results show).

The basis of all of this seems to me to have been fairly obvious stuff to anyone who bothered to understand Star Wars, and the cinematic market, and for that matter bothered to learn a little bit about how science fiction works. (Certainly something of this would have been obvious had they read a certain book I can name. Ahem.) But I have no idea if anyone at Disney-Lucasfilm understood it, while it seems obvious that if they did understand it they regarded it as far less important than the Star Wars brand name, which was what they paid those billions for and on which they bet so heavily, with this admittedly seeming to work out for a while Episode VII was a sensational success, financially at least (making a billion in profit by itself, according to the folks at Deadline).

But things fell apart fairly quickly, so much so that Kathleen Kennedy recently spoke of Star Wars being handled not like the MCU but the much-lower output Bond movies (read: rather than three billion-dollar movies a year, one movie that will probably fall short of a billion every three years). While the press does not seem to have made much of it this is a confession of the effort's defeat--catastrophic, war-losing defeat--which can seem the greater given how 007 himself has not been doing so well lately, with the same going for Disney's other revenue streams.

The Superhero Flops Pile Up--as the Musical Flops Did a Half Century Ago

Looking at the superhero films of this year one may note that Ant-Man 3 underperformed, but the domestic drop was actually mild (about a sixth from the prior film's gross)--the bigger factors in perceptions of the film's performance the very front-loaded holiday weekend and the exaggerated expectations for what making it the start of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would do to boost the film relative to the prior Ant-Mans; and where the more serious shortfall in the international gross was at issue, the way the film fell flat in China (where Marvel generally, and Ant-Man 2 specifically, had done well). Shazam 2 really did do badly, but was also a relatively limited follow-up to an at best minor success, and so chancy from the start, with the same going for Blue Beetle--an originally straight-to-streaming project upgraded to theatrical release that failed to justify the gamble (commercially, anyway, even if there did seem to be some genuine liking for the film among those who bothered to show). Additionally Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if it opened disappointingly (by the standards of $100 million+ openers, at any rate), had the benefit of good holds that in the end will probably leave it, if a confirmation of the MCU's trend toward declining grosses, still one of the year's more profitable films.

The result is that looking at those movies one can see room for argument about how superhero films are doing. By contrast The Flash was an undeniable catastrophe, with this major, height of summer-released DCEU film about a core Justice League member performing in a way that would have been troubling even for a Shazam film--this movie that cost $300 million taking in under $300 million globally.

Now Captain Marvel 2, as of its third weekend in release, looks as if it will end up doing worse. And the first tracking data-based forecast from Boxoffice Pro for Aquaman 2 suggests the film will do no better than those two predecessors.

Considering the prospect of these three massive superhero films becoming flops on a historic scale (each perhaps registering a loss in the $100 million+ range, and perhaps much more) in just a little over six months' time puts me in mind of 1969--the year when the underperformance of three big-budget musicals (Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, Hello Dolly!) proved a turning point for Hollywood, ending its fantasy of having another Sound of Music-level success. Musicals still got made, but they were no longer the mainstay of the box office they once had been--and in spite of scoring hits once a while, never truly recovered.

Again, Hollywood does not turn on a dime, the release schedule typically lagging the decision to greenlight a movie by a couple of years (more than that these days, with all the pandemic and strike-related disruptions), such that more superhero movies will be coming our way because the project is already in production, pre-production or otherwise underway; while as yet I have seen no evidence that Disney or the WBD are at all capable of shifting tracks. Quite the contrary, troubled as the MCU is it may actually be Disney's strongest earner these days (with Star Wars all but moribund, with any schemes it had for Indiana Jones fallen flat, with its animated productions doing so badly that the commercially marginal Elemental is its closest thing to a success since before the pandemic); while the WBD would seem to have little to keep it going but the fantasy that an overhauled DCEU will let it beat Disney-Marvel at its own game. Still, supertanker-slow as shifting a studio might be, and stubborn and stupid as the studios' management may be, the studios, already very badly battered at this point (by overinvestment in streaming, by the pandemic, by rising interest rates, etc.), can only take so much more in the way of losses--and eventually they will have to change their current course, however hard it may be to picture that change, or the result's appearance.

Napoleon's Opening Weekend

Last month I speculated about whether Ridley Scott's Napoleon had the makings of another Oppenheimer--as another historical biopic that looks like unpromising material for a hit which surprises us all with a box office triumph. I was doubtful (Oppenheimer having had advantages in the form of Christopher Nolan's cheering section and the claims for its relevance based on the hyping of supposedly transformative breakthroughs in artificial intelligence). Going by the initial projection, and the tracking data-based estimates that Boxoffice Pro put out over the month I saw no reason to revise that opinion, while looking at the numbers this weekend it seems that the movie's actual gross has, domestically at least, almost exactly matched Boxoffice Pro's pre-weekend projection (a bit over $20 million for the 3-day period, $32 million for the 5-day period).

Still, how the film's legs hold up remains to be seen. They would seem most unlikely to carry it anywhere near the billion-dollar mark given this start, but it is possible that if the holds are decent, or the film simply enjoys a robust response in the international market that has long been more receptive toward movies like this one than the domestic one (indeed, the film has already picked up $46 million abroad, a figure apparently considered a pleasant surprise by some observers), it might at least cover its costs--which these days seems like a feat for any movie, and still more for a Scott-directed historical epic such as this.

Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes: Second Weekend Box Office Gross

A month before release the expectations for the Hunger Games prequel (Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) were low--dismal, even--next to the grosses of the four films of the original saga, and if Boxoffice Pro's projections edged upward from there they were still a far cry from the surges seen for Oppenheimer and Barbie (the high end of the range for which shot up from a bit above $200 million to almost twice that much). And then when the film did come out last weekend its gross was nearer the low end of the range than the high, a mere $44 million at the domestic box office.

Of course, as I have said in the past, it may be that even franchise films which succeed are less front-loaded than they used to be, with audiences more hesitant to go to theaters than before the pandemic--more skeptical of the idea that they have to go and see this sequel/prequel/reboot/remake "just because it's there," instead waiting to hear that the film is actually worth their time from others, preferably others they know instead of ever-ready-for-hire claqueurs of the entertainment media. (Thus would it seem to have gone with Guardians of the Galaxy 3, for example.) So I thought I would wait and see what the second, holiday, weekend had in store for the movie.

As it happens, the Hunger Games prequel would seem to have held up a bit better than expected this weekend--the movie pulling in $28 million over the three-day Friday-to-Sunday period and $41 million over the five-day Wednesday-to-Sunday period, lifting the total domestic gross to $97 million (against the $82 million Boxoffice Pro projected on the basis of its expectation of a steeper drop). This is far from enough to make it a blockbuster on the scale of its predecessors--but, should its legs hold up the movie may at least eke out a domestic gross north of $150 million on that basis, at least keeping it from being a major money-loser, and maybe better than that on the basis of a healthy international response (which is certainly better than a good many anticipated for it).

Captain Marvel 2's Third Weekend Box Office Gross

Last week Boxoffice Pro predicted a relatively gentle drop in Captain Marvel 2's weekend gross after the collapse seen in the movie's second weekend--anticipating its taking in a bit over $6 million to raise its North American total to $77 million after seventeen days in relase.

As it happened, the unprepossessing prediction proved accurate. The result is that, if the film's chances of defying all it has against it (a divisive reaction to the first film, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's trend of declining grosses, the declining interest in superhero films and franchise films generally, the weak promotional campaign, the uncertain response to the Ms. Marvel show with which it is so strongly tied in, the bad buzz-encouraging delay and leaks about its budget, and eventually the lackluster reviews) to be a great commercial success were probably slight from the start, the chances of Captain Marvel 2 now going from flop to hit Elemental-style now seem negligible.*

Indeed, given how badly it is lagging the earlier film (with not quite $77 million grossed after seventeen days, when Captain Marvel 2 was just short of the $100 million mark) I no longer see any reason to expect Captain Marvel 2 to beat The Flash domestically, or globally either. What interests me now is whether the movie will manage to beat Aquaman 2 to escape the dishonorable distinction of being the lowest-grossing of the really big superhero releases of the year--a race that, given Aquaman 2's weak current prospects, Captain Marvel 2 might not necessarily lose.**

* The only real rival to The Flash here would be Indiana Jones 5.
** I count as the major releases the top-tier Marvel and DCEU movies--besides the three named here, Ant-Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3. (By contrast Shazam 2 and Blue Beetle, both of which Captain Marvel 2 has admittedly beat, would be lower-tier films.)