Photo: Jason Boland/Warner Bros.
I had no more hair to pull out following the supposed failure of Furiosa: A Mad Max saga at the box office last weekend because I had already released everything due to the alleged failure of The guy who falls just in time several weeks ago. Summer hasn’t even started yet, and already Hollywood is calling it the summer of doom with big releases underperforming.
Honestly, most of us shouldn’t care. The important thing about Angry it exists, crazy and without compromise. What if it failed? So done Fight clubAnd Speed RunnerAnd The adventures of Baron MunchhausenAnd It’s a wonderful life – films that didn’t make anyone money First of all but it enriched the world of cinema.
But noise is unavoidable these days. With each new disappointment, voices come out of the woodwork claiming to understand why movies fail: some are convinced the movies aren’t good enough, others that the marketers blew it, or that the original properties weren’t good enough. so popular. first of all, either the tickets are too expensive or everyone is still afraid of getting sick. Everyone has an idea, but no one has a clue.
The truth is, whenever you’re talking about individual decisions made (or not made) by millions of people, the reasons vary greatly. Last year at this time, everyone was announcing the death of superhero films and the sad end to the long reign of Disney and Pixar. Now the only films this summer that seem like guaranteed hits are Deadpool vs. Wolverine And Interior/Exterior 2.
But Hollywood is in the midst of a transition, whether it realizes it or not. Ironically, it’s a transition many of us have wanted for some time: fewer gigantic productions that need massive opening weekends to justify their enormous costs; stronger films that can turn a profit over a few weeks and months thanks to good word of mouth. The smash-and-grab opening weekend strategy was never going to be sustainable, and the industry had become alarmingly dependent on a smaller and smaller handful of titles to save its bottom line. It was only a matter of time before enough of these measures failed, plunging the industry into an existential tailspin. COVID, production delays, strikes, and factors like franchise fatigue have all contributed to this current slump.
The system currently in place still relies on massive opening weekends. The schedule remains built around tentpoles, whether or not these films should be considered tentpoles in the first place. (As many have noted, Mad Max: Road to Fury was not in itself a gargantuan success. It was that pesky creature that Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with: a beloved work of art that did good business.) The big releases are spaced out from each other so everyone can have their big weekend end. Promotion and advertising is entirely focused on the first weekend and largely drops out soon after. If a movie opens below expectations, people like us talk about it, continuing to propagate the idea that opening weekend is all that matters.
Amidst the hubbub, there is a little truth that few people have paid attention to. In the weeks following its soft opening, The guy who falls just in time performed admirably at the box office. It dropped 50% in its second weekend, which is pretty good in our current opening weekend-focused era, especially since the film lost almost all of its most premium screens. expensive (IMAX, RPX, 4DX, etc.) for the benefit of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Angry, a very good film much appreciated by those who bothered to see it, could do something similar. Will these figures be enough to recoup its high price, marketing included? No, probably not. Will any of these films take several months to qualify as true hits? No, probably not. Because they were released into a universe where opening weekend was all that mattered. Angry has nowhere to go but down as it loses its screens and press and its marketing footprint disappears. Because we always expect sprawling results from non-tentpole films.
Amidst the vortex of disappointment are some bright spots. Sony Anyone but you, for example, opened last December below expectations, but then held up for weeks over the holidays to achieve a very healthy $219 million worldwide box office. Yes, it’s absurd to compare this film to Angry. Anyone but you cost 25 million dollars, Angry nearly $170 million. $219 million is an astonishing result for the former; it would be a disaster for them. But the success of a romantic comedy – a long-moribund genre – starring two not-so-big stars is an indication that movie-goer behavior may be changing and that the film industry should consider changing by same time. The romantic comedy was one of the biggest casualties of Hollywood’s drive to create four-quadrant mega-tents, as executives convinced themselves that audiences no longer wanted to see such films — at least not in rooms. The fact that there is life in this old genre again suggests that there may be life in other genres as well and that some films can actually grow their audience over time. But to get there, we need to abandon the destructive binary system in which only the biggest films are released theatrically while smaller, more marginal releases – the ones that actually demand attention and care – are considered disposable streaming trash.
Because Universal has already put The guy who falls just in time digital – premium video on demand (PVOD), not streaming, so you still have to pay for that, sorry – the idea that you have to go to the cinema to experience it is out the window. (Although it released its best result last weekend, when it was already available digitally.) The studio didn’t do it because it had petty grievances against The guy who falls just in time; Universal understood internally that if a film is released with less than $40 million, it goes to PVOD after two and a half weeks. A similar fate probably awaits Angry at Warner Bros. Unfortunately, this all adds up to an unconscious expectation in the minds of moviegoers that seeing movies in theaters really isn’t that important, since movies will soon be released digitally. Studios are responsible for fostering this belief among viewers over the past few years, as they have inadvertently terraformed a cinematic landscape completely hostile to their actual business. But they must abandon this kind of thinking if they want to succeed. Because in addition to understanding that not every studio release has to live or die on opening weekend, you have to be willing to let those pictures live in theaters for a while to see how they perform when the public sees them and talks about them. The more you convince people that almost everything will appear on Netflix in a few weeks, the better you poison yourself.
Remember, last summer’s box office was also supposed to be dismal, before Barbenheimer came and saved him. There are many reasons for the double success of barbie And Oppenheimer, obviously, and both films certainly opened wide. But they also had legs: Their opening weekends only accounted for about a quarter of their overall box office because they stayed in theaters for months, cashing in on the fact that people loved them and told others to see them, the speech snowballing until everyone wanted to do it. I know what it is. This is how these images conquered the spirit of the time. Something similar happened the year before with two other big COVID-era hits, Top Gun: Maverick And Avatar: The Way of Water (which, lest we forget, opened low enough that a critical friend of mine speculated that James Cameron had been deluded in devoting himself to doing more Avatar movies).
But for the American film industry to become healthier and more sustainable, it must abandon the idea that the only thing that matters is opening weekends and that the only things that can make money are the greatest films. Doing this will require recommitting to making better movies, not just arguing over the latest hot IP or drowning ourselves in a whirlwind of overpriced sequels and prequels, reboots and spinoffs. Oddly enough, a more varied approach will also be more beneficial for big films. Because in a world like this, an expensive oddity like Angry will not find itself in the suddenly untenable position of having to save an entire industry.
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