The Hollywood Reporter Wonders If This Time, Hollywood Really Is In Trouble

You can't survive long on costly failure after costly failure.

The Summer Box Office Crisis: Is the Sky Really Falling This Time?

With fewer big movies out as a result of the strikes, theatrical revenue is plummeting every week as fans grow accustomed to staying at-home.

ComicsGate had a good point about the word fans: Don't call them "fans."

Call them what they are: Customers, or potential customers.

"Fans" suggests that people love you so much they will show up for whatever crap you churn out. t "Customers" suggests you have to woo them and provide them with good value for money.

Hollywood would do well to correct its mindset. No one needs what they're selling. It's not fuel or food. It's a diversion.

They need to stop thinking they're stars and "creators" and start thinking that they work in a customer-service industry.

...

Toward the end of the SAG-AFTRA talks, studio chiefs were accused of being disingenuous when saying their 2024 release calendars were in danger every day the four-month strike dragged. Now the impact of those warnings is coming into view.

Dee you bitch.

Without the usual parade of tentpoles, including a Marvel superhero pic to kick things off over the first weekend of May, the early summer box office is in tatters after a tough winter and spring. Domestic box office revenue year-to-date is $2.68 billion, down a whopping 24 percent over the same corridor last year and 42 percent behind 2019, the last normal year before the COVID-19 crisis, according to Comscore. In fact, every week has been down this year from 2023; the smallest gap was 11 percent, when Dune: Part Two and Godzilla v. Kong: The New Empire opened.

The deficit has reignited the sky-is-falling debate over the future of theatrical, and whether it can survive the post-pandemic world and the rise of streaming. Box office observers agree that the ecosystem is incredibly fragile but hang on to the hope that moviegoing will pick up in the coming weeks when all-audience tentpoles Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and Deadpool & Wolverine come out, followed by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in early September. But there won't be a steady volume of product until 2025. Nor does it help that many movies are opening behind expectations (all eyes will be on Bad Boys: Ride or Die this weekend to see if it can clear $48 million to $50 million in its launch). "We are concerned," says one studio insider. "You'd be a fool to not be thinking about that. People are not in the moviegoing habit and are firmly ensconced in appointment viewing, which is a huge problem. But there hasn't been a real igniter."

Movies like The Fall Guy or Memorial Day's Furiosa were never intended to be all-audience summer tentpoles that could generate huge grosses, but people expected them to be merely because of when they were dated. The Apes franchise, which saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes released in May, has never risen to the full-blown tentpole level since it is sci-fi and targeted at older and younger males.

Oh, so you do understand that some genres naturally appeal more to males.

Weird how Hollywood keeps remaking male-appealing genres for the sake of appeasing women.

Except for one installment, all the films have grossed less than $500 million globally....

[W]ith every movie that disappoints and underperforms, whether Furiosa or The Fall Guy, studio insiders are growing more and more alarmed. "It's mind-numbing that Furiosa hasn't grossed $50 million domestically," says another studio exec. "My worry is that studios will put on the brakes and make fewer movies, which will further contribute to the problem."

The May 31 to June 2 weekend is a terrifying snapshot of what can happen when there isn't a series of tentpoles waiting to unfurl during the summer.

Well, there used to be a few franchises that men would turn out to see, but you decided to remake them all into Girlboss Princess movies.

Dee you bitch, I am not going bankrupt because of your lack of grace.

..

To date, Apes is the only summer film to have cracked $100 million domestically even if it, along with IF, are considered moderate successes in their own right (IF has grossed $80.2 million domestically). At the same time last year, The Little Mermaid had grossed $206 million and Guardians $328 million.

"When The Little Mermaid opened to $118 million, people called that soft," reminds one studio source. "Can you imagine?"

Is this something?

Another Alien movie. Yayyy.

It looks good. Most Alien movies look good. (Alien 3 came out during that really bad phase of CGI when everyone was determined to use it but most of it looked awful.

So it looks good. So did Prometheus. (Shots fired.)

I don't know how many times people will pay to see the same basic story.

M. Night Shayamalan produced another weird horror movie with a complicated premise:

Here's another Shayamalan movie with an overly-complicated premise: A guy takes his daughter to a pop concert but learns the whole concert is a trap for wanted criminals. And the "hero" is some kind of super serial killer the cops are trying to catch.

And I guess we're supposed to root for him...? Why would we root for a serial killer who chops people up?

Or is he chopping people up?

Is that he's a vampire hunter and society is controlled by vampires and the cops are just the vampires' self-defense forces?

Something like that? Did I guess the Big Twist?

The fact that the pop star is called "The Raven Queen" suggests some kind of gothic supernatural element.

I don't know. I feel the same way about Shayamalan's overly-complex, hard-to-explain premises the way Elaine feels about Puddy's attempt to make up his own "move."

Dee you bitch, you're barely even trying anymore.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:23 PM

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