The Claqueurs of the Entertainment Press and the Post-Pandemic Standard for Box Office Success

As my prior posts have made clear, 2023 box office closed on a very low note indeed, and thus far 2024 has confirmed those who thought the year showed every sign of being an even weaker one for the film industry. Of course, box office watchers had high hopes for the release of the second part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune saga, and the film seems to have lived up to their expectations that way, taking in $81.5 million domestically and another $97 million internationally.

It is a very respectable gross indeed--by the standards of 2024, which more than two years after the normalization of the box office seemed to be getting underway (with such successes as Venom 2, the Bond film No Time to Die, and of course, the near $2 billion phenomenon that was Spider-Man: No Way Home) the standard remains depressed, not least for what big sci-fi franchise spectacles like that one are expected to bring in. Just a few years ago an $80 million opening would not have been thought reason for the makers of a near $200 million-budgeted sequel of this type to crow like this, let alone declare an end to a box office drought (even before the massive inflationary shock of recent years that has produced a full-blown cost-of-living crisis forcing many to reckon with thelong-threadbare quality of their pretensions to being "middle class").

This was underlined for me by a recent Deadline piece on Anyone But You. The article's title promises that it will explain how the film became a "global box office phenom" that once again demonstrates the continued viability of a genre so many have written off, but again it is only a "phenom" according to a much reduced standard. The movie has barely crossed the $200 million mark globally, in part because it is far short of $100 million domestically, thus far taking in a $88 million. (For comparison purposes, just consider what these films made domestically, and at yesteryear's far lower ticket prices.)

The reader and watcher of the entertainment press now has to keep such things in mind as the claqueurs go on claquing, even when there is not much to claque about.

"When Can I Stop Rewriting?"

"Everyone knows" that rewriting is an essential part of writing--but as is often the case with what "everyone knows" we very rarely discuss it in an honest, helpful, way.

Consider, for instance, the matter of when it is that we ought to stop rewriting. Per the low expectations weary and cynical instructors tend to have of students the stress is on exhorting the rewriter to greater effort--rather than helping them make useful judgments about the very important matter of whether they have reached or even surpassed the point at which "more effort" is useless, or even counterproductive.

For my part I find that a point comes in my own writing when, as I reread and revise my work, I am no longer making "global" revisions, and the changes are all occurring at lower and lower levels--restructuring a paragraph here, later just restructuring sentences, later just tinkering with word choices.

All of this tends to reflect the fact that I am no longer revising what I say, but rather how I say it, and, with due regard for the importance of subtleties, smaller and smaller aspects of that. Indeed, rather than meaning I may by that point be thinking about niceties of form--the adjustments about switching something written in passive voice to active voice, or providing parallelism where it had been absent.

And while I am at it many of the changes may feel optional rather than strictly necessary--such that I find myself changing something, then rereading it, and deciding that it was better before.

Alternatively if I am still thinking about substantive changes late in the process it is likely that they suggest not a revision of the piece but a whole other piece than the one that I have written--one I might as well go ahead and write from scratch rather than going through the less efficient, more wasteful process of tearing up something that may be perfectly fine as is to produce something else out of the parts.

I think it safe to say that when you get to either of these points--the point at which the changes are increasingly minute, stylistic, optional; or at which the changes are not so much revision of what exists as writing something else (and again, this better done from scratch)--that you can take it as a good sign that you are getting near the end of the process.

The 2024 Box Office: Notes on the First Two Months

After an ultimately disappointing 2023, and its especially disappointing last third when no Barbie or Oppenheimer or Super Mario Bros. made up for the way the sorts of franchise films usually counted on to have blockbuster grosses kept flopping, hopes for 2024 were low--the more in as the studios bumped so many of what were supposed to be the year's big releases past December 31, 2024 in the wake of the Hollywood double-strike. (Exemplary of this is how this whole year will see just one Marvel release, Deadpool 3.)

This past January was entirely consistent with the grim prediction, the box office gross of January 2024 down 18 percent from that of January 2023, reflecting both the tepid performance of the holiday period releases normally carrying the box office in that month (like Aquaman 2), and the releases in January itself (like the disappointing Mean Girls remake).* February was worse still, the gross in February 2024 down more like 30 percent--a testament to how, much as there was disappointment over Ant-Man 3's gross, it towered over anything out so far this year, the backers of the year's Valentine's Day superhero release Madame Web only able to dream of their film making that kind of money.**

All of that leaves the box office take for 2024 thus far down about a fifth from what it was at the same point the preceding year (somewhere around $860 million as against the $1.08 billion taken in last year, before adjustment for inflation). Of course, at this point there are hopes for March seeing stronger ticket sales, with great hopes (apparently with some substantiation in advance ticket sales and the like) held out for Part Two of Denis Villenueve's well-received Dune remake. Where the first film made just $400 million in those months when the box office was scarcely starting its recovery from the initial shock of the pandemic, those bullish on the movie hope that Part Two will get to be the full-blown blockbuster that the first lost its chance to become, with the movie expected to take in $80 million in its opening weekend.

Still, such excitement over the prospect of a mere $80 million weekend tells us just how much the standard has changed these past few years (even before we start calculating for inflation, $80 million falls short of the 100 biggest weekends on record), while even if the film achieves that, and displays reasonable legs, it will probably end up not much above $200 million domestically. The result is that, assuming they too do as well as reasonably hoped, even with help from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the next Godzilla, March 2024 may end up not really improving on March 2023 much or even at all--and therefore not do much to close the gap, still leaving the first quarter of 2024 significantly down from its counterpart in none-too-prepossessing 2023.

* The January 2024 gross was $495 million, versus $584 million the year earlier ($602 million when adjusted for inflation).
** As of February 28 the box office gross for February was in the vicinity of $356 million, implying a finish in the vicinity of $360 million, versus $500 million in February 2023 ($513 million in January 2024 dollars).

David Walsh on Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War

Recently writing again about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer David Walsh reiterated his praises for the film, and especially what he thought most worthwhile in it--while paying special attention to both Nolan's address of the theme of nuclear war (drawing heavily on Nolan's surprising frankness, and boldness, about his views), and the media's comment about the force of the audience's response, especially the "astonishment" of "empty-headed commentators."

So far as Walsh is concerned the film "demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work" that "appeal[s] to the viewer's mental powers," as against the "noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence," with the movie's themes precisely what drew the audience to it.

Alas, I have to admit that, in some degree, I remain among the astonished. I have long taken the view that when it comes to "the market," in contrast with the conventional wisdom about the consumer being king business generally decides what it is most profitable for it to have the consumer buy, presents them that take-it-or-leave-it , and they usually have little choice but to take it, be in the area housing, cars, consumer electronics, or anything else, because the alternative is to go without a practical necessity, even though they would prefer something else, and have that option if markets really worked the way the conventional wisdom insists they do (for instance, having the choice of cheaper, more durable goods rather than more expensive ones with features they find irrelevant or even destructive of value, as with so much of Silicon Valley's recent vile stupidities).

Yet I have tended to incline to the view that there is a good deal more congruence between what the consumer is offered in the world of pop culture and what they want. The consumer may take trash because they have been poorly educated, exhausted, stultified--enjoy a "pastime for helots" because they have been reduced to the condition of helots--but the point is that the unambitious, lowest common denominator character of the work meaningfully reflects what they can handle intellectually or emotionally. (As Steven Soderbergh put it a while back "There's a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad," and fewer people have been having it "really good.") Indeed, I have been prone to accept that, if at times in the past challenging movies have more frequently been successes, there were special reasons for that, which did not last long--that, for example, a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up became a hit mainly because it promised a then-groundbreaking bit of nudity and sex (of the kind that an appreciable audience actually wanted to see), that if the New Hollywood's decline was a matter of many different factors audience's appetite for such material was also finite relative to its openness to the splashy high concept then in the ascendant and dominant ever since.

Still, Oppenheimer's American gross was not simply a matter of suckering in audiences on the opening weekend, but sustained success as it displayed remarkable legs, grossing four times its opening weekend take in a feat few movies accomplish, while the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a truly fresh 91 percent. And of course the movie tripled its massive domestic gross globally, performing well in market after market. (Indeed Walsh, who rarely pays much attention to box office grosses, spends quite a bit of time parsing the numbers in demonstrating that, yes, people really did get interested, really did go for it.) As a result there is far, far too much evidence here of audiences responding to what they saw for one to blithely dismiss it as a matter of Midcult-devouring middlebrows claiming to like what they think they are supposed to say they like. And in fact it has me rethinking my position. I am far from convinced that we will see the multiplexes packed with serious adult dramas, even of more conventional character, anytime soon--but it may well be that there is a good deal more openness to such drama than those of us who pore over box office data have been given reason to suspect in a long time; and that, as Walsh also suggests, it may be a matter of the dark times the global public is living through forcing some hard rethinking about life, the universe, and everything.

Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War

It is a testament to the insane overhyping of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years, the pervasiveness of the tedious Luddite-Frankenstein complex view of AI, and the extreme failings of the media generally (not least its treating tech billionaires as all-knowing oracles), that when Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer came out--a movie about the making of the atom bomb, at a time when with every headline the danger of nuclear war should have been more and more on the minds of the commentariat, what the members of that commentariat all wanted to talk about was . . . the supposed danger of AI research (with this the more foolish because their concern is less the misuse and abuse of AI by human decisionmakers than AI itself somehow becoming malevolent).

Still, if they preferred to ignore the nuclear theme and fixate on their morbid Terminator fantasies (overlooking how it was nuclear weapons that actually enabled AI destroy humanity in that 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie so many treat as a philosophical treatise on the subject), Christopher Nolan, who often in the past had been evasive about his politics in interviews (lamely telling Rolling Stone that The Dark Knight wasn't political), discussed his views on the subject with an interviewer from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in quite frank fashion before Oppenheimer's release. In the course of said interview Nolan discussed growing up in England in the 1980s, amid what is today remembered as the "Euromissile crisis" and the Second Cold War, and the prominence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as how it pervaded pop culture at the time (Nolan recalling first learning of Robert Oppenheimer from the lyrics of the Sting song "Russians"). Nolan was also forthright--indeed, brave--in pointing to his film's relevance to the present, and not least the war in Ukraine, and how what he hears "not just from Putin" but "from both sides of the political spectrum" frightens him, leaving him "feel[ing] we're in a world now where people are starting to once again talk about those things as some acceptable possibility for our world," with "normalizing . . . atomic weapons" likely to lead to "to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet" (in a way that few others have pointed out).

Given how much coverage the film has received it is surprising how (relative to it) little coverage these comments of Nolan's have got, the commentariat (at the very least) simply not interested. Still, for his part film critic David Walsh has taken the view that the broader public that made of the movie a near-billion dollar hit--a Batman-like success, especially if one grades it on the post-pandemic curve so many others so readily apply to more conventional blockbusters like Marvel films--has not missed the movie's relevance. Arguing that it has indeed come out for this demanding, dense, idiosyncratically structured and shot, three-hour R-rated biopic in large part because that relevance struck a chord with them, as seen in his latest piece on the subject of the movie's reception a scarce week and a half before Hollywood's Biggest Night, and this movie's likely capturing the Biggest of that night's prizes.

Does Sora Represent the Beginning of the End for Film and TV Production as We Know It?

Back during the Hollywood strikes of last year the rights of writers and actors with regard to the usage of their work to train the artificial intelligence (AI) that many anticipate replacing some or all of what they do were a key point of contention.

This was an entirely legitimate concern for the writers and actors to have, given that even a slight chance of artificial intelligence doing just that justified their attempting to protect themselves (certainly in the wake of their experience of the streaming boom). Still, as one less bullish than most on the relevant technologies I have been skeptical that the day when AI really could do all that the actors and writers fear (and the executives doubtless hope). After all, consider how in the 1990s we were made to expect that the stars of today would soon be seen interacting with the stars of yesteryear on screen as a matter of course; and just a little while after, that the day had come in which fully computer-generated backgrounds would replace traditional sets. In both cases the technology was oversold--and the fact proved again and again over the years (as when Rogue One presented Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarquin).

However, the chatter surrounding Open AI's Sora is making me wonder if the moment when the technology does start to really matter in the ways they talked about might not actually be so far away. Granted, it is months away from being usable by the public, and thus far produces only short videos with significant imperfections--but it is easy to picture a more developed, more robust, version, backed by human clean-up efforts, enabling a film studio (as against some casual online user) to deliver the equivalent of today's megabudgeted blockbuster fare at considerably lower cost, enough so that they will find it cost-effective to make parts of movies this way, and eventually whole films. The result is that the writers and actors who fought to secure rights within this particular contract battle may have been not only prudent, but prescient, in their stance--and their defeat in that battle potentially catastrophic for their professions.

David Walsh, His Colleagues, and the Nominees Honored by the 96th Academy Awards

As I have remarked many a time in the past I have consistently found David Walsh and his colleagues the most worthwhile team of film critics publishing in English today. Still, it has seemed to me that for a long time the amount of film reviewing they do has been falling off--especially where major U.S. theatrical releases are concerned. Where maybe a decade ago you would find one new review of such a film every week or so, now one can go for months without seeing a really widely released American film presented here. (Almost three months passed between the reviews of Wes Anderson Asteroid City and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.) Reviews of the kinds of movies that can be expected to sell very many tickets, the typical blockbusters (admittedly, not often the occasion of their best work, even if they do now and then present something interesting, as with Walsh's review of Suicide Squad) are especially rare here these days (Avatar: The Way of Water the last such film I noticed getting that attention--over a year ago in January 2023).

All but crowded off the site, with this likely encouraged this year by the attention they have given to both increasing censorship in a time of ascendant "extremism" and increasing conflict, and the historic double-strike by actors and writers in Hollywood this past year, Walsh and his colleagues remain attentive to the "critics' darling" sorts of productions, and continue to do plenty of what they do best in regard to it--exposing the artistic, intellectual and political limitations that leave so much of it just so much Midcult junk, always pretentious and very often truly noxious, churned out by, of and for a very privileged "social layer." This past year they have reviewed all ten of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, which not incidentally account for 29 of the 35 nominations in those more prestigious categories recognizing direction, writing and acting--Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Celine Song's Past Lives, Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (getting several of them in very recently, I suppose, to have the whole list covered before the Big Night). While all up to par qualitatively, with the reviews of Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Glazer's The Zone of Interest especially telling of the state of what passes for intellectual and cultural life these days, the reviews of Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things strike me as especially meriting note because in each case a director of whose work they had been very critical in the past managed to win a positive review from them--the only really positive reviews to be found in this lot. (That's right--just two of the ten movies up for Best Picture really deserving of any honors in their books, and a good many of the other eight better discussed as cultural artifacts testifying to the profound derangement of politics, social thought, culture and art in our time than as cinema.)

Will the Academy judge as these critics judged? The Academy's sensibility is very different from this group's--as Walsh never fails to remind his readers in his incisive coverage of the ceremony every year. Still, at last check Oppenheimer had the momentum behind it--and if most of the media seems to find virtues in that film other than those which impressed Walsh (interestingly they seem to think that this movie literally about nuclear war, which the director himself says is about nuclear war, has nothing to do with nuclear war in our time, but rather artificial intelligence) it could at least look like a case of the broken clock striking the right time twice a day--and Walsh's remarks about that should be interesting.

NOTE: This post has been revised and significantly updated twice since its initial February 27, 2024 posting.

The One True X-Men

The live-action X-Men movies Bryan Singer launched with the first film back in 2000 have been an important part of the twenty-first century pop cultural landscape. They have not been the genre's biggest hits in an era in which billion-dollar hits seemed routine for many years. Excluding the affiliated Deadpool movies, the biggest hit the franchise produced was probably 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, the $746 million of which falls just short of a billion even in today's inflation-adjusted terms.

Still, the 2000 film helped kickstart the boom in such movies with its then-respectable gross ($157 million domestic and $296 million global, working out to $282 and $528 million, respectively, in January 2024 dollars) two years before the colossal event that was Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.

Moreover, while the films have not always met the expectations of fans, critics or audiences (there were complaints about Last Stand in 2006, and Wolverine in 2009, and 2019's Dark Phoenix was definitely disappointing, for a start), on the whole the X-Men movies have been well-received, with it saying something of that reception that Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for a quarter of a century now.

Still, I have to admit that all these years later for me the one "true" X-Men adaptation remains the '90s-era (1992-1997) animated series, and it seems natural that it should be so. After all, what can be more natural than that a comic book be rendered through drawn images rather than a live-action adaptation in which much that works in a comic book panel does not work at all?

It is certainly something to think about as the Hollywood studios, unwilling to let go of the revenue stream that superhero films have been until the catastrophes of 2023, and perhaps not wholly unmindful of the success of the recent animated Spider-Man movie (the one real bright spot in the commercial picture genre-wise, not that it seems to get the press one would expect from the fact), may turn in this direction to keep the hits coming in the years ahead.

25 Years of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine

Seeing Wolverine's shadow loom over Deadpool in the trailer for their new film I found myself thinking of how this movie marks a quarter of a century of Jackman playing the character on the big screen. Starting with 2000's X-Men, he reprised the role in the subsequent two films that produced that trilogy (2003, 2006), a trio of Wolverine movies (2009, 2013, 2017), and the rebooted X-Men trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), prior to this movie--ten films in all over twenty-five years.

It really is an extraordinary run--twice as long as Daniel Craig (or Roger Moore's) run as James Bond, for example. It testifies to how well-received Jackman's portrayal of the character has been--but also how, despite what some foolish contrarians insist, big commercial films and the careers they make have been about franchises, rather than stars, and sticking with a successful actor-character combination (like Jackman as Wolverine) what makes for a Big Name.

Cory Doctorow's Latest at Pluralistic

I have long found Cory Doctorow a breath of fresh air in a dialogue where discussion of his areas of concentration are dominated by copyright Nazis and Silicon Valley hype-mongerers. And I am pleased to say that in spite of standing by positions anathema to the prejudices of the mainstream media he has now and then managed to secure a platform there from time to time. (I was recently surprised to find his writing on the "enshittification of everything" in the Financial Times.) Still, one would see only very little of what he produces in such places--Doctorow writing prolifically at his own site, Pluralistic, where I consistently find his posts worth not a mere skim, but a proper, word-for-word read.

Of course, having said that some of the pieces are more impressive than others. Last month I was most impressed with his posting on the artificial intelligence bubble, which seems to me even more timely now than it was amid the skyrocketing price of NVIDIA stock).

This month is not quite over at the time of this writing, but I think it safe to say that for me the winner is Doctorow's piece on the demise of Vice, which Doctorow very ably connects with, contrary to the idiot lies peddled by market populism-singing snake oil salesmen for Big Tech back in the absolutely deranged and deranging 1990s, the sewer of predatory practice that the Internet became--inevitably, given that the hard realities of power simply do not cease to operate at the edge of cyberspace.

Madame Web's Second Weekend

Following its underwhelming Valentine's Day debut Boxoffice Pro predicted a 59 percent drop in box office gross for Madame Web from its first weekend to its second, leaving it with about $6.3 million collected and a total of $35.5 million in the till after twelve days.

This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.

Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)

Just How Much Do Streaming Shows Get Watched After Their Run?

Last year Kimiko Glenn's sharing her residual check for her work on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black during the actors' (and writer's) strike on TikTok got a lot of attention.

The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.

This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).

Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.

Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.

It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.

The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.

Wall Street is Acting Like the Singularity is Here (Again)

A couple of years ago, considering in hindsight the way that the capitalization of the stock market exploded in 1994-1999 (growing 20 percent a year), it seemed to me that in its "irrational exuberance" Wall Street was acting as if the Singularity had arrived.

So does it seem to me now as the price of NVIDIA's stock soars.

Where its share price was $50-$60 at the end of 2019, and amid the ups and downs of the subsequent pandemic (which had its share of financial insanity as the Federal Reserve turned on the monetary spigot--remember the Gamestop stock foolishness?) topped out at about $300 before dropping into the $100-$200 range in late 2022, has surged from that point to stand at $788 now, more than ten times its late 2019 value even after adjustment for inflation.

The story goes that this is all because NVIDIA's prominence as a maker of AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips.

It is probable that very, very few of those involved in these machinations have any idea what AI chips actually are, but they are excited because they know they have something to do with artificial intelligence, hype about which has gone through the roof and beyond since Open AI's release of Chat-GPT amid a frenzy of media claquing (with even the "awful warning" stuff of the credulous Ezra Klein variety playing its part), and that is good enough for them.

For now.

For my part, I remain, as I was last year, less impressed with the technology and its possibilities, Cory Doctorow summing up the situation all too succinctly when he observe[s] that "we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job", as you are likely reminded every time you call customer service, get a phone tree, and then beg to talk to a human.

Madame Web's Opening Weekend: A Few Thoughts

Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast for Madame Web anticipated a three-day (Friday-to-Sunday) gross in the $25-$35 million range.

Over the following four weeks the figure dropped repeatedly to more like $14-$20 million on the day of release--a forty percent fall. Meanwhile the film's six-day gross between its Valentine's Day release (February 14) and the conclusion of the four-day President's Day weekend (February 19) looked as if it would fall short of the bottom end of that initial projection for just the three-day period.

As it happened this was pretty close to the actual course of the debut. Over the Friday-to-Sunday period Madame Web pulled in about $15 million, and $26 million over the whole six day period.

For comparison purposes, Ant-Man 3 made $120 million in just the Friday-to-Monday period on this same weekend back in 2023--five times as much.

That film, considerably better-received than Madame Web, saw its legs buckle very quickly, the movie grossing 56 percent of its entire take by President's Day. Especially in light of its even longer opening (six days instead of four) and word-of-mouth being so unlikely to save this one (the Rotten Tomatoes score that was so appallingly low last week has actually fallen further), I do not expect this movie to do much better than that--with the result that (again) I would be very surprised if it got very far past $50 million--much more so than if it fell short of $50 million.*

The story hardly seems following much further than that--but there does seem to me something worth saying about the remarks of the critics, specifically their function of damage control reminiscent of what we saw with Captain Marvel 2. "Yes," they say, "this movie is a failure, and not simply because of Russian robots and trolls and so forth, but because it is just not a very good movie. And yes, we've had a lot of this with superhero movies lately. So those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies."

Pay special attention to that last part: those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies. Such remarks have as their function heading off any suggestion that the situation has anything to do with a genre that has been exploited very intensively for a very long time being run down by this point ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), let alone the model of filmmaking by which Hollywood has lived so long being in crisis--just the studios getting complacent, sloppy, flabby. They just need to get off the couch and diet and get back in shape!

As I have argued again and again, I see abundant reason to think the trouble goes way, way deeper than that. But just as the claqueurs will not tell the public that, the courtiers to the Hollywood elite will not tell their patrons that. The question, then, is whether that elite is intelligent enough not to trust its sycophants.

Alas, "intelligent" and "Hollywood" have not deservedly been spoken in the same sentence very much for a very long time--all as, sadly, the culture of the elite C. Wright Mills described so well favors always speaking "to the well-blunted point" and "soften[ing] the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," rather than facing the facts and thinking hard about how to really deal with them, with results we see all around us every day in this Age of Polycrisis. Hollywood shows no sign of being an exception to that unhappy pattern.

* Last week the critics' score was 18 percent; now it is 12 percent. Meanwhile the audience score is 56 percent. By comparison Ant-Man 3's less than brilliant scores were 46 and 82 percent, respectively.

Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its "Blockbuster" Filmmaking Model?

As I have remarked many a time (because the claqueurs and courtiers of the entertainment press are so much in denial about this) what Hollywood has been looking at since 2023 is a crisis not just of the superhero film ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), even if that is the most conspicuous aspect of the situation, but a crisis of its filmmaking generally--and in particular a crisis of the high concept model that has prevailed since the 1970s that has so come to center on franchise-driven sci-fi-inclined action movies, and lavish animation tending toward family audiences and musical comedy.

Accordingly, while others are asking "Can the Studios Retool their Superhero Movies so they can be Winners Again?" I think it more worthwhile to ask "Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its Filmmaking Model for the Last Half Century?"

That question leads to two others, namely "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-going?" and "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?"

Why does the question of the blockbuster model lead to the others? Where "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-Going" is concerned the simple answer is that since the advent of television plunged Hollywood into crisis in the 1950s, and sent theatergoing plummeting (between 1948 and 1969 Americans went from going to the theater thirty times a year to doing so just four times a year, which has remained the average), the kind of movie we identify with the blockbuster is what has kept Americans going to theaters at all--with its one last card left to play the offer of big-screen spectacle, mainly of the sci-fi action-adventure and splashy animated extravaganza types.

Consider what this means in actual dollars and cents terms. In the years before the pandemic (2015-2019) domestic ticket sales came to about $14 billion a year in today's terms, half of which money the studios got--with this increasingly coming from the blockbusters (the top ten movies alone accounting for about two-fifths of the ticket sales by the end of that period). Those theatrical successes, one should add, were also the basis for big earnings from post-theatrical revenue, as with streaming and home entertainment generally (which often added almost as much to a movie's bottom line as the studio's cut of ticket sales); and money from spin-offs and merchandising; while the domestic earnings were typically more than matched by what the movies made overseas in the case of these kinds of films.

As the studio executives learned the hard way after many, many losses, the economics of straight-to-streaming releases simply do not allow for that kind of money-making--such that they found that funding blockbuster-budgeted straight-to-streaming releases did little but run up their debts, and have since tended toward smaller projects in that medium (to the point of finding a Batgirl, too small for theaters, too pricey for streaming, and just burying the movie). Indeed, streaming success often seems a reflection of cinematic success. (For all its undeniable failures, where would Disney Plus' line-up be without the cinematic success of Star Wars and Marvel?) Certainly it says something that people will watch a streaming spin-off to a cinematic hit, but that tying a theatrically released movie too closely to a streaming show is self-defeating (as Marvel demonstrated time and again, with Dr. Strange 2, and Captain Marvel 2).

In short, without the blockbuster studios have little to keep people coming to theaters--while without the money to be made from the theatrical release and all to which it can lead the blockbuster makes little economic sense--leading to the second question "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?" For the blockbuster was Hollywood's area of "comparative advantage" relative to the rest of the world's film-making. Others could make, for example, a small domestic drama or romantic comedy that would play in their home market just as well as Hollywood fare of the type, or even better because it was made just for that country and its culture. They could not match Hollywood's big budgets and the spectacle they bought with any regularity until at least very recently (when the growing wealth of China's domestic market, and the determination of the Chinese government to develop this particular industry, had the country backing such movies), all as Hollywood retained a global advantage with regard to stars, franchises, business relationships and the rest. Without the blockbusters Hollywood has that much less to offer the rest of the world--and becomes just one more movie-making outfit on a planet full of such outfits clamoring for an audience that are in other ways no less dynamic, and perhaps more so. (Consider, for instance, the successes that Japanese animation, or Korean film and television, have enjoyed in the international market as of late.)

Can Hollywood survive the demise of its model for making big hits, generally and in relation to its position within a global cinematic marketplace? Yes . . . but most likely as a shadow of its former self, a much-reduced industry living on smaller productions with ever less cachet than before outside North America; a bigger version of, for instance, British film and television, rather than the Center of the Media Universe that it was in its twentieth century glory days. The result is that for Hollywood overcoming the crisis of its model in one way or another--either finding a way to keep that model viable, or finding a substitute that similarly plays to its strength--has the highest of stakes, all as they are led by, well, not heroes to "match the mighty hour." Indeed, I can picture a couple of decades from today Tinseltown's executive suites packed with old men and women mentally stuck in a past more congenial to their sense of self-importance, or grumbling bitterly about how things were "Back in my day," until they drive to distraction the younger persons around them holding what remains of the industry together.