Like a great many others in discussing the upcoming return of Deadpool I have written of the film as "Deadpool 3," not just because this was a lot more convenient than having to write Deadpool & Wolverine over and over again, but because the film actually seemed to me to actually be a Deadpool 3. However, the film's director Shawn Levy took issue with this, insisting that this is not merely Deadpool 3 but properly speaking, a Deadpool and Wolverine movie that should be referred to accordingly (as Deadpool & Wolverine). I took this for just the usual pretension of film publicity, but since then the studio has released a new trailer for the film--which, I think, really does justify the view of the film as not merely a Deadpool movie with Wolverine in it, but a genuine team-up of the two characters in a movie really about the both of them and the big adventure they have together (Deadpool and Wolverine's Excellent Adventure!).
Having raised the subject it seems an opportune moment to look back at my prediction for the film's box office gross from January. Back then I suggested an extreme range for the global gross of $150 million-$700 million, and $400-$450 million the territory in which the film would most likely finish its theatrical run. Given that the box office remains depressed compared to what it was in 2023, never mind the 2015-2019 period, and that this has been significantly connected with franchise fatigue extending in particular to superhero fatigue, I still think caution is in order--the more in as Deadpool and especially X-Men were both traveling a path of diminishing returns commercially. (Recall the reception X-Men: Dark Phoenix got?) Going by the more easily quantifiable factors my conclusion still seems to me to be sound.
However, there are also the less easily quantifiable factors that undeniably matter. First and foremost it seems to me that there is a real measure of affection out there for both these characters, and for Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in these roles, and plausibly for the idea of a team-up between the two--and that this may all be the stronger for the years that have passed since audiences last saw either of them. I will add that the expletive-filled trailer for the film promises to "deliver the goods" here with respect to both action and the Deadpool brand of humor, while the makers of the film seem to be making a real effort to appeal both to more casual viewers (assuring them that this is one Marvel movie for which people will "not have to do homework", a requirement that was probably a liability for movies like Dr. Strange 2 and Captain Marvel 2), while nonetheless offering something to hardcore fans (like the fact that, as this trailer confirms, Wolverine will for the first time ever appear in his famed costume from the comics and cartoons). All significant points in the film's favor, that going by the Internet chatter seem to be mattering with the audience, the movie is also likely to benefit from the same thing that Top Gun 2 did back in 2022--weaker than usual competition. (It is symbolic that this summer actually opens with Ryan Gosling in an adaptation of The Fall Guy.) This seems all the more the case in that last year's Barbie and Oppenheimer showed how a late summer release can really clean up, especially if what came before did not get theatergoers too excited.
Taking this into account I feel more bullish about the film. Do I think that it will take the Marvel Cinematic Universe back to its Phase Three glory days? No, that is more than any one movie can do, especially at this stage of things, with the market sharply contracted from what it was in 2017-2019, and this particular movie some way off the main line of the franchise.* Do I think it will make a billion dollars the way the first Deadpool did (adjusted for inflation)? That seems to me a very tall order for the same reasons. But looking at the numbers I presented earlier I think that as things stand now I would be less surprised if the film went over the $450 million mark than if it undershot the $400 million mark; that, in fact, a gross approaching or even reaching $700 million is more plausible than I would have thought three months ago. Pretty respectable these days, even with the hefty reported budget it might just let the film turn a respectable nine figure profit, and in the process restore some of the luster to the Marvel brand, not taking us back to 2019 but giving them a chance to keep what is probably the best they can hope for, a franchise that may continue to be a reliable (if more modest) earner even after its peak has passed.
* In 2017-2019 North American ticket sales stood at 3.5 per capita. In 2023 they were more like 2.2 per capita, a 38 percent drop, and 2024 will be lucky to match it.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Just How Profitable Was Guardians of the Galaxy 3?
It's that time of year again--Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament!
At the time of this writing Deadline has provided only the films making the tenth and ninth spots on the list. The #10 position was taken by PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--a feature film tie-in with the TV cartoon.
I admit that this one was not on my radar at all, and have nothing to say about it. By contrast I had expected Guardians of the Galaxy 3 would, if unlikely to make the top five, still rank in the top ten--because if an underperformer in comparison with its predecessors and some of the more bullish expectations held out for the film in the months prior to its release in a year in which so many big-budget films flopped it still looked like a respectable earner, with my reading of the figures back in May making me think a $100 million take in even the more pessimistic scenario I had in mind.
The final bill on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 came to $550 million--about 2.2 times the $250 million production budget, counting the $90 million absorbed by participations and residuals and the like. The movie's total revenue was $674 million, about 55 percent of that theatrical revenue (thanks to the film doing a bit better than the bottom end of the range I discussed, pulling in, instead of $700-$750 million, about $860 million globally). The result was a net profit of $124 million according to Deadline's calculation. Computed another way the profit equals 23 percent of the outlay.
How do these figures compare with the numbers on the prior two Guardians films?
For Guardians of the Galaxy 2 the figure Deadline computed was a net profit of $154 million (a bit under $200 million in today's terms) on total costs of $515 million--yielding a 30 percent return.
For the original Guardians of the Galaxy the figures were a profit of $204 million (some $270 million in today's terms) on an outlay of $520 million, working out to a 39 percent return.
The result is that the original film was, both in terms of the return on expenditure and absolute return, the most profitable, the second film less profitable than that, the third film least profitable of all--affirming a trend of diminishing returns on the franchise from the monetary standpoint that seems reflective of the diminishing returns on the bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of which it was a part. Of course, that said Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $100 million+ profit still make it a very worthwhile investment--but with the direction in which this series has moved (a 40 percent drop in relative return, a more than half drop in absolute return), to say nothing of the broader trend with regard to the MCU, the superhero film and the high concept franchise film as we have long known it, should give any astute investor pause in regard to the idea of a Guardians of the Galaxy 4.
Of course, we are likely to be getting one anyway.
At the time of this writing Deadline has provided only the films making the tenth and ninth spots on the list. The #10 position was taken by PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--a feature film tie-in with the TV cartoon.
I admit that this one was not on my radar at all, and have nothing to say about it. By contrast I had expected Guardians of the Galaxy 3 would, if unlikely to make the top five, still rank in the top ten--because if an underperformer in comparison with its predecessors and some of the more bullish expectations held out for the film in the months prior to its release in a year in which so many big-budget films flopped it still looked like a respectable earner, with my reading of the figures back in May making me think a $100 million take in even the more pessimistic scenario I had in mind.
The final bill on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 came to $550 million--about 2.2 times the $250 million production budget, counting the $90 million absorbed by participations and residuals and the like. The movie's total revenue was $674 million, about 55 percent of that theatrical revenue (thanks to the film doing a bit better than the bottom end of the range I discussed, pulling in, instead of $700-$750 million, about $860 million globally). The result was a net profit of $124 million according to Deadline's calculation. Computed another way the profit equals 23 percent of the outlay.
How do these figures compare with the numbers on the prior two Guardians films?
For Guardians of the Galaxy 2 the figure Deadline computed was a net profit of $154 million (a bit under $200 million in today's terms) on total costs of $515 million--yielding a 30 percent return.
For the original Guardians of the Galaxy the figures were a profit of $204 million (some $270 million in today's terms) on an outlay of $520 million, working out to a 39 percent return.
The result is that the original film was, both in terms of the return on expenditure and absolute return, the most profitable, the second film less profitable than that, the third film least profitable of all--affirming a trend of diminishing returns on the franchise from the monetary standpoint that seems reflective of the diminishing returns on the bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of which it was a part. Of course, that said Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $100 million+ profit still make it a very worthwhile investment--but with the direction in which this series has moved (a 40 percent drop in relative return, a more than half drop in absolute return), to say nothing of the broader trend with regard to the MCU, the superhero film and the high concept franchise film as we have long known it, should give any astute investor pause in regard to the idea of a Guardians of the Galaxy 4.
Of course, we are likely to be getting one anyway.
Disney Dethroned?
As I remarked in a prior post Deadline is now in the midst of its annual "Most Valuable Blockbuster" tournament. Starting from the bottom of the top ten they have already identified the tenth and ninth-ranking films--the latter of which is Guardians of the Galaxy, which they make clear is Disney's only film to make the list in 2023.
Just one film--and that a mere #9 ranker.
Compare that to how Disney fared in the glory years of the mid- and late 2010s. Disney had the #1 film in 2015 (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and four in the top ten. In 2016 it missed the #1 position, with its highest-ranking film Rogue One getting just the number three spot, but had five films in the top ten. And then it claimed the #1 position three years running, all while maintaining a disproportionate presence generally, with three films in 2017 and 2018 each (the top three in 2018's case), and then in the annus mirabilis of 2019, having an astonishing seven of the top ten, including, again, the top three (Avengers: Endgame, Frozen 2, The Lion King, Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, Aladdin, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker).*
Of course, that things went this way is unlikely to be very surprising to anyone who has paid attention to the box office during the last year or so, given how even in a year of flops Disney's offerings were conspicuous disappointments--Indiana Jones 5 and Captain Marvel 2 most notoriously, but also The Little Mermaid remake, Ant-Man 3, Wish and Elemental (which may have managed to turn a profit, but still looked a weak performer by Pixar's long exceptional standard). Indeed, it was my guess that on the list of the biggest loss-makers that always accompanies Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers, Captain Marvel 2 and Indiana Jones 5 would occupy two of the top three spots--all as Disney would be represented elsewhere.
Still, it seems only fair to ask how this came about. Simply put, during the twenty-first century Disney pursued a particular strategy--"Buy up every top-line franchise and brand you can and exploit them ruthlessly." Doing this with Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar, as well as its own animated classics-heavy brand, it scored much more than its share of hits. (Again, seven of the top ten most profitable films of 2019 as reckoned at the time!) But the market has changed--so much so that the question now seems to be whether Disney, and for that matter everyone else in Hollywood, is capable of changing with it.
* One may, of course, quibble with the numbers in hindsight given that the procedures of the British film subsidy system keep indicating higher outlays than are usually reported in these lists (as was the case with Avengers 3 and 4), but Disney is unlikely to be the only studio playing games here, and it seems to me that even taking this into account this still broadly reflects how things stood at the time.
Just one film--and that a mere #9 ranker.
Compare that to how Disney fared in the glory years of the mid- and late 2010s. Disney had the #1 film in 2015 (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and four in the top ten. In 2016 it missed the #1 position, with its highest-ranking film Rogue One getting just the number three spot, but had five films in the top ten. And then it claimed the #1 position three years running, all while maintaining a disproportionate presence generally, with three films in 2017 and 2018 each (the top three in 2018's case), and then in the annus mirabilis of 2019, having an astonishing seven of the top ten, including, again, the top three (Avengers: Endgame, Frozen 2, The Lion King, Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, Aladdin, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker).*
Of course, that things went this way is unlikely to be very surprising to anyone who has paid attention to the box office during the last year or so, given how even in a year of flops Disney's offerings were conspicuous disappointments--Indiana Jones 5 and Captain Marvel 2 most notoriously, but also The Little Mermaid remake, Ant-Man 3, Wish and Elemental (which may have managed to turn a profit, but still looked a weak performer by Pixar's long exceptional standard). Indeed, it was my guess that on the list of the biggest loss-makers that always accompanies Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers, Captain Marvel 2 and Indiana Jones 5 would occupy two of the top three spots--all as Disney would be represented elsewhere.
Still, it seems only fair to ask how this came about. Simply put, during the twenty-first century Disney pursued a particular strategy--"Buy up every top-line franchise and brand you can and exploit them ruthlessly." Doing this with Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar, as well as its own animated classics-heavy brand, it scored much more than its share of hits. (Again, seven of the top ten most profitable films of 2019 as reckoned at the time!) But the market has changed--so much so that the question now seems to be whether Disney, and for that matter everyone else in Hollywood, is capable of changing with it.
* One may, of course, quibble with the numbers in hindsight given that the procedures of the British film subsidy system keep indicating higher outlays than are usually reported in these lists (as was the case with Avengers 3 and 4), but Disney is unlikely to be the only studio playing games here, and it seems to me that even taking this into account this still broadly reflects how things stood at the time.
Taylor Swift and Five Nights at Freddy's Made Deadline's Top Ten Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023?
Previously thinking about the likely makeup of Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers of 2023 I suggested the Taylor Swift concert film and Five Nights at Freddy's would get some recognition--but on the list of smaller films that made relatively large profits, rather than the list of "most valuable blockbusters." However, we see Taylor Swift: The Era Tour ranked at #7, and Five Nights at Freddy's at #8 on that very list--a development very surprising given that, where overall gross is concerned, they did not rank all that highly in that year. Where the listed global grosses at Box Office Mojo are concerned Taylor Swift's film not only did not make the top ten, but failed even to make the top twenty, ending up at only #23--behind that notorious flop The Flash (#21), for example.* However, Swift's film was also relatively low-cost, a $15 million production (one-twentieth of what The Flash cost). The result was that when all was said and done the movie, between its $261 million in ticket sales, and subsequent and associated revenues, made a $172 million profit. Thus did it also go for Five Nights at Freddy's--that movie, between costing a little more money and making a little more money than The Eras Tour ending up just a little less profitable than Swift's film (pulling in $161 million according to the Deadline calculation).
Those who anticipated the films would do well seem to be saying "I told you so" --but this seems mainly because they were confident in those movies' prospects, in large part because of personal enthusiasm about them, and focusing on that would make us miss two very large, important developments here.
One is that these comparatively low-grossing movies outdid so many bigger-grossing movies profit-wise, with all that suggests about the declining viability of those movies that were for so long Hollywood's principal moneymakers (like The Flash, which made more money than the Taylor Swift film, but seems certain to produce a nine figure loss for WBD).
The other is that the bar for making the top ten list is a lot lower than it used to be. Back in 2019 Taylor Swift's film would not only not have ranked at #7 with a profit of $172 million, but would not have made the top ten at all. In 2019 the tenth-ranked film on Deadline's list was the Jumanji sequel, with $236 million, while the seventh-ranked film, the live-action adaptation of Aladdin, reportedly made a profit of $356 million, twice what Taylor Swift's film did, even before we consider the considerable inflation of these years (a more than 20 percent rise in prices since 2019).
Together the two factors are indicative of a situation of a shrunken film market--doing well in which may mean playing by very different rules from those that prevailed just a few years ago when Disney was the champion.
Those who anticipated the films would do well seem to be saying "I told you so" --but this seems mainly because they were confident in those movies' prospects, in large part because of personal enthusiasm about them, and focusing on that would make us miss two very large, important developments here.
One is that these comparatively low-grossing movies outdid so many bigger-grossing movies profit-wise, with all that suggests about the declining viability of those movies that were for so long Hollywood's principal moneymakers (like The Flash, which made more money than the Taylor Swift film, but seems certain to produce a nine figure loss for WBD).
The other is that the bar for making the top ten list is a lot lower than it used to be. Back in 2019 Taylor Swift's film would not only not have ranked at #7 with a profit of $172 million, but would not have made the top ten at all. In 2019 the tenth-ranked film on Deadline's list was the Jumanji sequel, with $236 million, while the seventh-ranked film, the live-action adaptation of Aladdin, reportedly made a profit of $356 million, twice what Taylor Swift's film did, even before we consider the considerable inflation of these years (a more than 20 percent rise in prices since 2019).
Together the two factors are indicative of a situation of a shrunken film market--doing well in which may mean playing by very different rules from those that prevailed just a few years ago when Disney was the champion.
Will Xander Cage Come Back for One Last Adventure? (Thoughts on XXX4)
The resulting, first, XXX film did well, but not that well (a $142 million domestic gross, it qualified only for 15th place on the list of the year's top grossers), and the film's star Vin Diesel walked away, the sequel proceeded without him (indeed, Diesel's character Xander Cage was supposedly killed off), and flopped, after which plans for a third movie were, as I remarked in 2012, stuck in development hell.
What brought back the franchise back was the way that Vin Diesel's career resurged largely on the strength of the second wind that the Fast and Furious franchise got with its fourth film (from which point it went from strength to strength through the next several films), which was in good part a matter of how well the movies were doing in the Chinese market. The peak of the series, Furious 7, saw the movie take in a sensational $1.5 billion worldwide, twice as much as the preceding movie that had previously been the series' best performance, with more of that money actually coming from China than from North America, well as it did there. (The grosses in the two countries were $390 million and $353 million, respectively.)
The result was that that next XXX film finally happened--hitting theaters in North America in the dump month of January 2017, an expression of little confidence in the movie, but also the expectation that amid relatively weak competition it might clean up. It did not quite do that in Hollywood's home market, taking in a mere $45 million--but making almost six times that much internationally, adding a bit over $300 million to the total with over half that ($164 million) coming from just China.
Accordingly we heard about plans for a fourth film--because back then it still made some sense to back a relatively costly film on the expectation of a big gross in China. However, seven years later any such film is still just being talked about, and it is not hard to imagine why. The disruptions of the pandemic apart, and the way that the Fast and Furious films' decline cannot but suggest that Diesel having this kind of adventure is not the draw it was just a short time ago, franchise films generally are doing less well. Indeed, if we hear less about the decline of spy-fi than we do the decline of the superhero film that the commercial decline of that form is nonetheless real (you can see it in the gross of No Time to Die, of Mission: Impossible 7, of again those Fast and Furious films), while the XXX franchise was pretty marginal to begin with by its standard (Xander Cage never coming close to rivaling 007, Ethan Hunt or even, after he and his gang turned superspies, Dom Toretto), and the Chinese market that was so important to the last film's profitability has become far less open to Hollywood.
The result is that all those factors that made a fourth film in the series a plausible business decision have vanished. On that basis one might think that as a result the franchise will not manage to escape development hell again. However, Hollywood's determination to exploit every franchise far past the point of diminishing and even negative returns for lack of inclination to do anything else seems to only be growing more pathological. The result is that I cannot see the greenlighting of a new Xander Cage being a sound business decision on the part of the Suits--but then again, neither does a Twister 2 or a Gladiator 2 seem to be that, and both those movies are scheduled to come to a theater near you later this year.
Daniel Bessner and the "Bad Writing" on the Marvel Cinematic Universe's latest
A year ago the press subjected us to quite a bit of drivel about various studio blockbusters suffering because they did not have "good writers"--as if those running the studios backing $300 million productions said "You know what? Let's get the not-good writers for this impossible task of making this umpteenth sequel to a long stale franchise that nobody ever asked for palatable to the public."
It was as stupid as it was shabby, the more in as with a writer's strike on it looked the more obviously like the cheap worker-bashing by bosses it obviously was, but the various figures who made such remarks in the press would not stop offering such comment, even extending it to other artists (as with Robert Iger's all too characteristically foolish crack about "unsupervised directors").
Reading Daniel Bessner's extraordinary article in Harper's about the lot of the writer in neoliberal, post-Great Recession, post-COVID, post-strike Hollywood makes it all the clearer just how illegitimate such nonsense is, given that, again, the studios have robbed the writers of their scope to do their jobs, with Marvel at the absolute forefront of the process. (Thus has Marvel brought the TV-type "writer's room" into film-making, and at the same time, expected writers to write whole seasons of shows without letting them know what the ending is supposed to be because the executives want to hold on to the maximum latitude to generate crappy spin-offs--and then blamed the writers for the failings of the material.)
For those seriously interested in the subject, and interested in the reality of the situation rather than the claqueurs' praises, the piece seems to me essential reading.
It was as stupid as it was shabby, the more in as with a writer's strike on it looked the more obviously like the cheap worker-bashing by bosses it obviously was, but the various figures who made such remarks in the press would not stop offering such comment, even extending it to other artists (as with Robert Iger's all too characteristically foolish crack about "unsupervised directors").
Reading Daniel Bessner's extraordinary article in Harper's about the lot of the writer in neoliberal, post-Great Recession, post-COVID, post-strike Hollywood makes it all the clearer just how illegitimate such nonsense is, given that, again, the studios have robbed the writers of their scope to do their jobs, with Marvel at the absolute forefront of the process. (Thus has Marvel brought the TV-type "writer's room" into film-making, and at the same time, expected writers to write whole seasons of shows without letting them know what the ending is supposed to be because the executives want to hold on to the maximum latitude to generate crappy spin-offs--and then blamed the writers for the failings of the material.)
For those seriously interested in the subject, and interested in the reality of the situation rather than the claqueurs' praises, the piece seems to me essential reading.
Merchandising and the Bottom Line for Today's Movies: Estimating Profitability
It has long been the case that merchandising has been crucial to the revenue stream for Hollywood films for a long time--for so long that many seeing Spaceballs over the years must have been unclear on just why Mel Brooks so pointedly raised the issue in that film. (The reason is that Star Wars was the watershed here.)
In its calculations Deadline has income from merchandising accounting for over a fifth of the revenue for PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (which made the #10 spot in its Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023 tournament). Indeed, the publication's analyst Anthony D'Alessandro notes that merchandising was decisive where profitability was concerned, and indeed the film "greenlit" here because of this.
This is a more common story than one might think--but it seems to me that taking merchandising into account here and not in the case of other films (it is not mentioned in the report on Guardians of the Galaxy 3, of the huge importance of merchandising to Marvel's profits) is distortive of the rankings this time around.
In its calculations Deadline has income from merchandising accounting for over a fifth of the revenue for PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (which made the #10 spot in its Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023 tournament). Indeed, the publication's analyst Anthony D'Alessandro notes that merchandising was decisive where profitability was concerned, and indeed the film "greenlit" here because of this.
This is a more common story than one might think--but it seems to me that taking merchandising into account here and not in the case of other films (it is not mentioned in the report on Guardians of the Galaxy 3, of the huge importance of merchandising to Marvel's profits) is distortive of the rankings this time around.
Might Profits for Movies Mean Losses for Streamers? (Or Vice-Versa?)
Reviewing the numbers Deadline offers on the most (and least) profitable movies of the year one sees a differentiation of the revenue streams for those films by type, with streaming indicated separately.
As it happens, streaming platforms are largely studio-owned--with Disney owning Disney Plus, for example. And so an important part of the revenue for Disney movies consists of Disney Plus buying the rights to stream a Disney-made movie. (As Anthony D'Alessandro explains in the item devoted to Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the $180 million Deadline reports for the revenue from streaming "includes the amount for which Disney sells the film to itself, Disney+ being the pay-one window for the studio's movies.")
In and of itself this should shock no one who has been paying attention. In the current world economy, where things like antitrust law are so often dead letters, "related-party" trade in its various forms makes up a very high proportion of the world's total trade. Indeed, of the U.S.' import-export trade in goods in ">2021 and 2022 over 40 percent was represented by related-party trade of this kind. Still, as Investopedia explains, while "there are rules and standards for related-party transactions," there are conflicts of interest, and particular difficulties for auditing the transactions, with "improperly inflated earnings, even fraud" something that can--does--happen.
Thus some see such numbers, and wonder. After all, no more are Hollywood studios than the rest of the corporate world known for their impeccable accounting, or for their forthrightness about financial reality--and it is all too easy for a studio to fatten the bottom line for a movie by selling it to its streaming service at an inflated price, or should the alternative prove more desirable at the time, sell the movie at a below-market price to help out the streaming service. And if it seems to me that the entertainment press does not much interest itself in such questions (like the rest of the press they are more likely to do PR for big companies than properly cover them), I have seen in comment threads and various other fora that the "armchair movie executive" at which that press sneers do see, and doubt, far from unreasonably.
As it happens, streaming platforms are largely studio-owned--with Disney owning Disney Plus, for example. And so an important part of the revenue for Disney movies consists of Disney Plus buying the rights to stream a Disney-made movie. (As Anthony D'Alessandro explains in the item devoted to Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the $180 million Deadline reports for the revenue from streaming "includes the amount for which Disney sells the film to itself, Disney+ being the pay-one window for the studio's movies.")
In and of itself this should shock no one who has been paying attention. In the current world economy, where things like antitrust law are so often dead letters, "related-party" trade in its various forms makes up a very high proportion of the world's total trade. Indeed, of the U.S.' import-export trade in goods in ">2021 and 2022 over 40 percent was represented by related-party trade of this kind. Still, as Investopedia explains, while "there are rules and standards for related-party transactions," there are conflicts of interest, and particular difficulties for auditing the transactions, with "improperly inflated earnings, even fraud" something that can--does--happen.
Thus some see such numbers, and wonder. After all, no more are Hollywood studios than the rest of the corporate world known for their impeccable accounting, or for their forthrightness about financial reality--and it is all too easy for a studio to fatten the bottom line for a movie by selling it to its streaming service at an inflated price, or should the alternative prove more desirable at the time, sell the movie at a below-market price to help out the streaming service. And if it seems to me that the entertainment press does not much interest itself in such questions (like the rest of the press they are more likely to do PR for big companies than properly cover them), I have seen in comment threads and various other fora that the "armchair movie executive" at which that press sneers do see, and doubt, far from unreasonably.
The Erosion of Movie Ticket Sales Before the Pandemic
Writing in this blog in the past I have repeatedly discussed how after the collapse of theatergoing in the 1950s and 1960s North American theatergoing stabilized at about 4-5 per capita ticket sales a year.
I made that calculation over a decade ago, and it seemed to me that the situation did not change so dramatically as to compel redoing that calculation.
Reexamining the numbers for the 2010s I am no longer convinced of that. Certainly there has been nothing so dramatic as the collapse of filmgoing when Americans became TV-watchers. Still, consider these figures for 1995-2019 as split into five year periods.*
In 1995-1999 the average was 4.4 tickets per capita per year.
In 2000-2004 it was 4.6.
In 2005-2009 it was 4.2.
So far, so good. Of course, after 2009 the figure fell below 4, but that was in the wake of the shock of the Great Recession, after which the figure got back up to about 4 in 2012, so it looked like the old pattern held up to that point, 4-5 trips a year plausibly remaining the norm. Still, 2012 proved the anomaly just a few short years on. When we take the two five-year blocks after 2009 as wholes, we find that in 2010-2014 the figure was just 3.8 tickets per capita, and if one could think of the number as depressed by the Great Recession, in 2015-2019 the figure was 3.6. Of course, even this rounds up to four, so that one could say that North Americans saw four movies theatrically a year, but that is not the same as 4 to 5, while within the 2015-2019 block one could see the decline continue, the figure hitting 3.4 in 2019--a pre-pandemic low.
The shift from 4-5 in 1995-2009 to 3-4 in 2010-2019, a slippage of one trip a year, can seem a small thing relative to the drop in the '50s and '60s from thirty per capita movie tickets a year to just four. But proportionately it is still quite a bit, a decline of a fifth or a quarter from what it had been in the early 2000s to the late 2010s.
Of course, 3.6 per capita ticket sales, or even 3.4, is now quite a bit more than the business Hollywood is doing. In 2023, which plausibly looked like the "new normal" for the industry in light of moviegoers' habits and the abundance of major releases on offer, ticket sales were more like 2.2 per capita--2 to 2.5 rather than 3 to 4, another big drop, which may not represent the end of the fall. After all, 2 to 2.5 per capita ticket sales a year still indicates a good deal more moviegoing than we see in some other advanced industrialized countries (in Germany and Japan it is more like 1-2), suggesting that still less is far from implausible, while the factors that are driving moviegoing down continue, not least competition from other sources of entertainment (why not just stay home and watch streaming?), and of course, the reality that Hollywood's model for making hits seems to be in a state of collapse, with any shift to a successful new model at best in its earliest stages--and very possibly pure fantasy in the face of the financial, technological and cultural trend.
* For the 1995-2019 calculations I derived the figures on tickets sold from the web site The Numbers, the population figures for the countries encompassed in the North American film market from the World Bank's DataBank.
I made that calculation over a decade ago, and it seemed to me that the situation did not change so dramatically as to compel redoing that calculation.
Reexamining the numbers for the 2010s I am no longer convinced of that. Certainly there has been nothing so dramatic as the collapse of filmgoing when Americans became TV-watchers. Still, consider these figures for 1995-2019 as split into five year periods.*
In 1995-1999 the average was 4.4 tickets per capita per year.
In 2000-2004 it was 4.6.
In 2005-2009 it was 4.2.
So far, so good. Of course, after 2009 the figure fell below 4, but that was in the wake of the shock of the Great Recession, after which the figure got back up to about 4 in 2012, so it looked like the old pattern held up to that point, 4-5 trips a year plausibly remaining the norm. Still, 2012 proved the anomaly just a few short years on. When we take the two five-year blocks after 2009 as wholes, we find that in 2010-2014 the figure was just 3.8 tickets per capita, and if one could think of the number as depressed by the Great Recession, in 2015-2019 the figure was 3.6. Of course, even this rounds up to four, so that one could say that North Americans saw four movies theatrically a year, but that is not the same as 4 to 5, while within the 2015-2019 block one could see the decline continue, the figure hitting 3.4 in 2019--a pre-pandemic low.
The shift from 4-5 in 1995-2009 to 3-4 in 2010-2019, a slippage of one trip a year, can seem a small thing relative to the drop in the '50s and '60s from thirty per capita movie tickets a year to just four. But proportionately it is still quite a bit, a decline of a fifth or a quarter from what it had been in the early 2000s to the late 2010s.
Of course, 3.6 per capita ticket sales, or even 3.4, is now quite a bit more than the business Hollywood is doing. In 2023, which plausibly looked like the "new normal" for the industry in light of moviegoers' habits and the abundance of major releases on offer, ticket sales were more like 2.2 per capita--2 to 2.5 rather than 3 to 4, another big drop, which may not represent the end of the fall. After all, 2 to 2.5 per capita ticket sales a year still indicates a good deal more moviegoing than we see in some other advanced industrialized countries (in Germany and Japan it is more like 1-2), suggesting that still less is far from implausible, while the factors that are driving moviegoing down continue, not least competition from other sources of entertainment (why not just stay home and watch streaming?), and of course, the reality that Hollywood's model for making hits seems to be in a state of collapse, with any shift to a successful new model at best in its earliest stages--and very possibly pure fantasy in the face of the financial, technological and cultural trend.
* For the 1995-2019 calculations I derived the figures on tickets sold from the web site The Numbers, the population figures for the countries encompassed in the North American film market from the World Bank's DataBank.
"Jobs for People Who Don't Need Money"
Looking at recent reports about the working conditions faced by film and TV writers, actors, musicians and other artists one thing that has come up again and again is that the severity in the deterioration of conditions for all but the superstars has made it decreasingly possible for even those who have supposedly "made it" (landed a regular role on a hit show, signed with a major label) to live from their work. One consequence is that everyone must have another source of income--"you had your . . . day jobs or you had a trust fund" as Mad Men veteran Jason Grote put it. Especially as the demands, and costs, of trying to hold down a "day job" while making a career as an artist should not be trivialized (perhaps especially in these times, when wages' purchasing power have plummeted so), those who do not need to work for such an income have an advantage, even at this level, with the result that actual working people are finding less and less opportunity to pursue such a career. The result is that if the arts have probably always been dominated by the privileged, it may be that in our time this is becoming appreciably more rather than less the case.
Miserable as this is for all those who have artistic aspirations who committed the crime of not being born rich, it seems quite plausible that this has played its part in the extreme remoteness of the arts from the lives of the vast majority of the population in our time--to the impoverishment of both the arts, and society at large.
Miserable as this is for all those who have artistic aspirations who committed the crime of not being born rich, it seems quite plausible that this has played its part in the extreme remoteness of the arts from the lives of the vast majority of the population in our time--to the impoverishment of both the arts, and society at large.
"Raising Eyebrows"
I have never cared much for the journalistic cliché that some remark or act has been "raising eyebrows"--their way of conveying that said remark or act has prompted mildly disapproving surprise. Apart from the ambiguity about whose eyebrows were raised, precisely, and why (weasel words time!), there is the fact that it is so often a poor descriptor. If at times muting the reaction to something quite serious, it is much more often a matter of insufferable priggishness at some trivial breach of "the proprieties," undeserving of the respect implicit in the journalistic coverage. It seems more fitting to speak of "dropping monocles" than "raising eyebrows" in such cases.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
What's Happening with Boxoffice Pro?
For quite some time I have found Boxoffice Pro's comprehensive forecasts of upcoming and recently released films' grosses and their systematic updating of great interest, especially in these times in which so many movies surprise us amid what may be historic changes in the business of film--big franchise films crashing and burning (like The Flash), or unlikely-seeming movies becoming colossal hits (like Oppenheimer), as Hollywood confronts the possible end of the high concept-dominated post-New Hollywood era.
Alas, for some weeks now the forecasting section of the site has been much reduced, with just a handful of long-range (or even weekend) forecasts appearing this past month. (Thus The Fall Guy forecast I cited has not had a single update.)
I imagine that the impoverishment of the forecasting section is a temporary situation. (After all, Boxoffice Pro is a major film industry trade publication in circulation since 1920, before "movies" became "talkies.") Still, I have no idea when things will get back to normal that way--and can only look forward to when they do so.
Alas, for some weeks now the forecasting section of the site has been much reduced, with just a handful of long-range (or even weekend) forecasts appearing this past month. (Thus The Fall Guy forecast I cited has not had a single update.)
I imagine that the impoverishment of the forecasting section is a temporary situation. (After all, Boxoffice Pro is a major film industry trade publication in circulation since 1920, before "movies" became "talkies.") Still, I have no idea when things will get back to normal that way--and can only look forward to when they do so.
Daniel Bessner's New Article in Harper's
Daniel Bessner's "The Life and Death of Hollywood" is exactly what journalism ought to be but all too rarely is--a deeply informed piece of reporting that goes beyond mentioning some facts or passing on some impressions to putting together a picture of its subject and explaining how things stand to the reader with, in this case, the analysis of Hollywood's development in recent decades, especially as seen from the standpoint of its writers, benefiting greatly from its combination of critical perspective, historical background and attentiveness to contemporary economic fact.* In this piece Bessner quite rightly explains Hollywood as undergoing its own piece of the broader neoliberal turn, affecting it in the same way that it has affected the rest of America's economy and society. Just as has happened elsewhere, the convergence of deregulation (in this case, particularly the collapse of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan administration, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under Clinton), combined with creditist monetary policy to produce an extraordinary concentration of ownership, production and market power, and a triumph of speculation and short-termism, that has had catastrophic effects for the workers involved and society at large as the game became one of "winner take all." Thus did the early '00s see a half dozen vertically integrated giants (Disney, Time Warner and the other usual suspects) "raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television," while the ultra-loose monetary policy Ben Bernanke ushered in enabled further concentration as a mere three asset-management companies (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) to concentrate in their hands the ownership of, well, nearly everything ("becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500"), with the media giants no exception to the pattern. (As of the end of 2023 Vanguard "owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery," while also having "substantial share[s] of Amazon and Paramount Global.") Indeed, even the talent agencies supposed to represent the writers to those companies similarly became an oligopoly of a few giants in turn owned by asset management firms.
In the wake of the reduction of film and TV production to an oligopoly owned by a few financial firms, and the inevitable ascent of a pseudo-efficiency-minded short-termist control freak mentality among studio executives, it was no accident that, in line with his cite of Shawna Kidman, the share of "franchise movies" in "studios' wide-release features" surged from 25 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2017--the age of "multistep deals" and "spec scripts" increasingly a thing of the past, exemplified by the crassness of Disney, and perhaps especially its Marvel operation, which "pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story." (Thus did the writers have to generate a whole season of scripts for WandaVision without knowing how the season was supposed to end, because the "executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show." Thus did Marvel bring the TV-style "writer's room" into filmmaking--if one calls the result filmmaking--as the TV networks replaced their writer's rooms with "mini-writer's rooms" offering those who work in them still less.) Amid the declining readiness to support the development of many ideas in the hope that one would pay off (thirty scripts to get one which might be made into a movie in the old days), amid the declining creative control and bargaining power of writers ever at a disadvantage in relation to the executives whose media courtiers celebrate them as "geniuses" (as with a Kevin Feige), amid the studios playing the old game of exploiting technological changes to contractually cut writers out of any share in the profits (in this case, streaming and its revenues, as Bessner shows through the case of Dickinson creator Alena Smith), writers lost in just about every way. Moreover, the post-pandemic economic shock has dealt them another blow as media companies that had, however exploitatively, been funding a lot of production retrenched, and all too predictably won the labor battle of 2023--at the end of which they may be said to have imposed an at best thinly veiled Carthaginian peace, with what is to come likely to be worse.
Given all that Bessner naturally declined to end his story on a note of false optimism, instead going from the "Life" to the "Death" part of his title. As he notes one could picture various palliatives helping, like government regulation of asset ownership (or indeed, mere application of antitrust law here), but all this seems unthinkable--precisely because what is happening here is so much of a piece with what is happening in all the rest of the economy, and it is all too clear how that is going. Indeed, one can picture things becoming even worse still in the fairly near term if the Hollywood executive class manages to realize its fantasies of using artificial intelligence to dispense with its workers entirely in even a small degree--or even in spite of the technology's inadequacies, simply tries and fails to do so, but destroys a lot of careers and "disrupts" the industry in all the wrong ways in the process.
* Reading Dr. Bessner's biography I found that he is not a reporter but a professor of International Studies--and cannot help wondering if that did not make all the difference for the quality of the item, especially where the avoidance of the hypocrisy of "objectivity" and the contempt for context that characterizes so much contemporary journalism are concerned.
In the wake of the reduction of film and TV production to an oligopoly owned by a few financial firms, and the inevitable ascent of a pseudo-efficiency-minded short-termist control freak mentality among studio executives, it was no accident that, in line with his cite of Shawna Kidman, the share of "franchise movies" in "studios' wide-release features" surged from 25 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2017--the age of "multistep deals" and "spec scripts" increasingly a thing of the past, exemplified by the crassness of Disney, and perhaps especially its Marvel operation, which "pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story." (Thus did the writers have to generate a whole season of scripts for WandaVision without knowing how the season was supposed to end, because the "executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show." Thus did Marvel bring the TV-style "writer's room" into filmmaking--if one calls the result filmmaking--as the TV networks replaced their writer's rooms with "mini-writer's rooms" offering those who work in them still less.) Amid the declining readiness to support the development of many ideas in the hope that one would pay off (thirty scripts to get one which might be made into a movie in the old days), amid the declining creative control and bargaining power of writers ever at a disadvantage in relation to the executives whose media courtiers celebrate them as "geniuses" (as with a Kevin Feige), amid the studios playing the old game of exploiting technological changes to contractually cut writers out of any share in the profits (in this case, streaming and its revenues, as Bessner shows through the case of Dickinson creator Alena Smith), writers lost in just about every way. Moreover, the post-pandemic economic shock has dealt them another blow as media companies that had, however exploitatively, been funding a lot of production retrenched, and all too predictably won the labor battle of 2023--at the end of which they may be said to have imposed an at best thinly veiled Carthaginian peace, with what is to come likely to be worse.
Given all that Bessner naturally declined to end his story on a note of false optimism, instead going from the "Life" to the "Death" part of his title. As he notes one could picture various palliatives helping, like government regulation of asset ownership (or indeed, mere application of antitrust law here), but all this seems unthinkable--precisely because what is happening here is so much of a piece with what is happening in all the rest of the economy, and it is all too clear how that is going. Indeed, one can picture things becoming even worse still in the fairly near term if the Hollywood executive class manages to realize its fantasies of using artificial intelligence to dispense with its workers entirely in even a small degree--or even in spite of the technology's inadequacies, simply tries and fails to do so, but destroys a lot of careers and "disrupts" the industry in all the wrong ways in the process.
* Reading Dr. Bessner's biography I found that he is not a reporter but a professor of International Studies--and cannot help wondering if that did not make all the difference for the quality of the item, especially where the avoidance of the hypocrisy of "objectivity" and the contempt for context that characterizes so much contemporary journalism are concerned.
Upton Sinclair on the Greeks
Discussing the literary legacy of the ancient Greeks in Mammonart Upton Sinclair asks just "how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, and how much do we just pretend to admire it?" Recalling Samuel Johnson's quip about a dog walking on two legs, and how "it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all," he suggested that the conventional exaltation of the Greeks is based not on a clear-headed judgment of the poetry and drama by modern standards, next to which these works are technically crude and representative of a world-view so unacceptable to modern people that as a matter of course we can seem "in denial" about it (far from Greek art being an art "of joy and freedom," their theme was invariably "the helplessness of the human spirit in the grip of fate," and at that, a fate which destroyed them), but rather a matter of "superstition" that has been "maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket," and the snobbery to which they cater (Classicism in itself become so "leisure class" by his time as to make "Homer . . . to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British sartorial"). Indeed, in Sinclair's view those who (like a Matthew Arnold or William Gladstone) "write volumes of rhapsody about Homer" testify less to Homer's superlativeness as a poet than his works' accordance with their prejudices--his "ha[ving] the aristocratic point of view, and giv[ing] the aristocratic mind what it craves," namely a vision of life in which aristocrats "unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires" act out and are flattered in their self-importance by seeing the gods themselves take an interest in their personal tales, all as, one might add, they generally sing conservatives' militarist, patriotic, values.
This is not to say that Sinclair contemptuously dismissed it all (let alone was in any way a promoter of the kind of "cancel culture" that today seeks to "cancel" the Classics along with so much else). If Sinclair stresses the Greek pessimism he thinks too much overlooked, he is historically-minded enough to acknowledge, as others of like ideology have done, that to the ancient mind the world easily seemed "a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces which he did not understand," and out of this "made . . . a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but mournful despair"--and not confuse all this with the "dispensation of official pessimism" in more enlightened modern times (as with the apparent "'Classical' attitude" of "pathetic and heroic" "resignation to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth" of the aforementioned Arnold), which he saw as coming from quite other sources. Indeed, for all the limitations of that ancient mind Sinclair owns to pleasure in being able to see for ourselves "the beginnings of real thinking, of mature attitudes toward life" in in their early writings, and much else besides. If Sinclair finds much in Homer ridiculous and repellent, it seemed to him that one still did find "beautiful emotion"--albeit not the ones that moved lovers of the "heroism" of an Achilles, but "the mothers and fathers, the wives of children of those heroes [who] express for them an affection of which they are unworthy." He finds much to admire in the satire of Euripedes, "jeering at militarism and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy classes." Yet, if it seems to Sinclair appropriate to qualify one's criticisms, and that the works have their worthwhile aspects, that exaltation of the Classics in the familiar way as a matter of superstition and snobbery above all else stands.
Reading Sinclair it seems to me that there is an enormous amount of truth in this statement--which, indeed, ought to be evident to anyone who actually tries looking at those writings with clear eyes, as others have done, not all of them inclined to see things his way on most issues. (The critic John Crowe Ransom, who as one of the twelve writers of the Southern Agrarian Manifesto was far, far removed from Sinclair politically, seems to me to have grasped very well, and put even more poetically and succinctly, just how remote the Greek view of life, or at least the early Greek view, was from one of "joy and freedom.") Indeed, present a professor of literature today with the hard facts of just what is in "this stuff" and you are likely to get as their answer a sort of embarrassed agreement that reminds you just how much the Canon, and indeed what we say about the Canon, is the product of timid deference to received judgment, which one is expected to, in the words of Oscar Wilde, "endure . . . as the inevitable." And so the superstition and snobbery of which Sinclair wrote significantly prevail a century on--qualified, of course, by the decreasing extent to which anyone is paying attention to the Classics or to the humanities or to culture at all.
This is not to say that Sinclair contemptuously dismissed it all (let alone was in any way a promoter of the kind of "cancel culture" that today seeks to "cancel" the Classics along with so much else). If Sinclair stresses the Greek pessimism he thinks too much overlooked, he is historically-minded enough to acknowledge, as others of like ideology have done, that to the ancient mind the world easily seemed "a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces which he did not understand," and out of this "made . . . a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but mournful despair"--and not confuse all this with the "dispensation of official pessimism" in more enlightened modern times (as with the apparent "'Classical' attitude" of "pathetic and heroic" "resignation to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth" of the aforementioned Arnold), which he saw as coming from quite other sources. Indeed, for all the limitations of that ancient mind Sinclair owns to pleasure in being able to see for ourselves "the beginnings of real thinking, of mature attitudes toward life" in in their early writings, and much else besides. If Sinclair finds much in Homer ridiculous and repellent, it seemed to him that one still did find "beautiful emotion"--albeit not the ones that moved lovers of the "heroism" of an Achilles, but "the mothers and fathers, the wives of children of those heroes [who] express for them an affection of which they are unworthy." He finds much to admire in the satire of Euripedes, "jeering at militarism and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy classes." Yet, if it seems to Sinclair appropriate to qualify one's criticisms, and that the works have their worthwhile aspects, that exaltation of the Classics in the familiar way as a matter of superstition and snobbery above all else stands.
Alex Garland's Civil War: Some of the Critics' Views
Recently remarking Alex Garland's Civil War the movie theater trade publication Boxoffice Pro characterized the film's promotion as a "bait-and-switch marketing campaign that sold opening weekend audiences on the promise of an action movie" while "delivering a bleak drama that focuses a lot more on journalism instead."
It seems to me that many would regard this as not the only piece of bait-and-switch at work in the film, or even the most important one. As Forbes' Erik Kain remarked, the movie Civil War, in the publicity for which even the "action movie" aspect was arguably less important than the prospect of a drama about American political divisions (there are lots of action movies out there, not so many political dramas with a "high concept" draw like that one), ended up not really being about those divisions, Garland studiously "avoid[ing] the politics of the day in order to tell a more universal story." Kain's view of this approach was favorable, but others have been less impressed (finding in Garland's approach less universalism or "neutrality" than thoughtlessness and evasion and maybe worse in a piece of what one critic has described as a "gutless" cinematic "both sidesism").
However, whatever one makes of it, audiences would seem to have been pulled in by the offer of one thing, and given another. This weekend's gross will likely say something about how the audience's ultimate reaction to that.
It seems to me that many would regard this as not the only piece of bait-and-switch at work in the film, or even the most important one. As Forbes' Erik Kain remarked, the movie Civil War, in the publicity for which even the "action movie" aspect was arguably less important than the prospect of a drama about American political divisions (there are lots of action movies out there, not so many political dramas with a "high concept" draw like that one), ended up not really being about those divisions, Garland studiously "avoid[ing] the politics of the day in order to tell a more universal story." Kain's view of this approach was favorable, but others have been less impressed (finding in Garland's approach less universalism or "neutrality" than thoughtlessness and evasion and maybe worse in a piece of what one critic has described as a "gutless" cinematic "both sidesism").
However, whatever one makes of it, audiences would seem to have been pulled in by the offer of one thing, and given another. This weekend's gross will likely say something about how the audience's ultimate reaction to that.
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