Oscars 2024 – Why Hollywood Movies Are Bombing at the Box Office

Michael Cieply might be the Last Known Reporter doing reliable film coverage at the moment. He has written a detailed investigative report over at Deadline to bring to readers some hard truths about the Academy Museum, and he did it in, I think, a fearless way. That’s why I did not want to allow it go unnoticed.

Cieply had not visited the museum until this year. He says it left him “feeling vaguely uneasy, as if it had somehow been designed to dismiss or downplay most of what I’d experienced in 40 years of covering and working in the film business.”

But then he decided to delve more deeply into it, because something felt off to him. And that right there, just that brief moment of his asking the question at all — that’s journalism.  That gut feeling that tells a good journalist there’s a story there. He writes:

Being a digger by nature, on Wednesday afternoon I dug out a couple of Academy Museum Foundation tax filings that were slightly outdated, but had only recently surfaced on the Candid nonprofit monitoring service. No great surprises popped up, except one: There was an intriguing shift in a required description of the film museum’s “mission” between the successive filings for fiscal 2020 and 2021.

In the first, dated March 10, 2022, the museum was simply “dedicated to the arts and sciences of motion pictures.” In straightforward (if somewhat clunky) fashion, it would be “devoted to the history of the motion picture industry, educational exhibits and activities relating to how motion pictures are made, displays of memorabilia, and other functions that will permit visitors to experience” the making of movies.

Fair enough.

Yet two months later, on May 10, 2022—and this was before Bill Kramer and Jacqueline Stewart took their current posts as chiefs, respectively, of the Academy and of the Museum—the mission statement noticeably shifted.

In describing the museum for the fiscal 2021 filing, the foundation now said its job was to advance ‘the understanding, celebration and preservation of cinema through inclusive and accessible’ initiatives. The museum would work, it said, “in active partnership with motion picture artists and specialists, scholars, staff, and diverse communities to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema, inspiring discourse, connection, joy and discovery.”

Contextualize and challenge dominant narratives.”

What happened in the development of the Academy Museum is what’s happened to Hollywood–and it mirrors what’s happened to nearly every major institution in this country post-2020. The people in charge adopted what more and more people are calling the new ideology of the “woke” left. Call it whatever you want–it’s a well-defined ideology with its own rules that everyone who wants to be seen in the right light is mandated to follow, or else the watchers will send their Children Spies after you. No one at the top can afford to have that happen.

The reason so few people do actual journalism anymore, at least in the mainstream, is that they can’t afford to be called out, screeched at, scolded, and finger-pointed like the last remaining non-pod person in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Make a wrong move, say or write the wrong thing, and they could lose everything in an instant. Their job, their friends, their status, their platform, their audience, their entire reputation. Poof. Gone. Just like that.

Someone actually built a whole database called Canceled People to keep a record of everything that’s happened during this latest mass panic.

Some of the comments on Cieply’s piece tell the tale.

Like this one:

SMH. The white fragility in this piece is astounding. The museum is one arm of The Academy, which has undergone changes of this scope for some time, voted in by the very filmmakers you’ve covered.

40 years in the industry makes you likely AT LEAST 60. Step aside and make room for a new generation of storytellers, actors, filmmakers, critics, and journalists, which yes, will make you more irrelevant than you feel right now. Welcome to life as a minority.

And this one:

It sounds like the author is uninterested in the film industry stories that were suppressed and dismissed during the 40 years he was exploring a limited viewpoint. His lack of curiosity in stories that don’t reflect his own experience is what makes him irrelevant. His viewpoint is a piece but he wants to be the whole puzzle or nothing at all. A disappointing but not unusual attitude—I hope Deadline skips the bitter, insulated types and instead platforms old guard folks who are excited about the bigger world of stories being told.

And this one:

Gotta love this thing where white people keep being given a platform to complain about not enough white people being represented. Representation matters, folks.

This one is the best:

A pathetic piece. You’re mad because you don’t see enough of your white male gaze? You’re irrelevant because it’s not all about you? Integration of other kinds of people makes you feel “disoriented” and “challenged?” Damn, man. Get a grip. Get a life. Get some awareness. Get another job so we don’t have to read this moaning and whining.

Yes, those are the kind of comments that now serve to police the thoughts and behavior of anyone who dares deviate from the proper path. The “woke scolds.” They’re always out in force, in the comments at Deadline, at The Wrap, here, and everywhere else–marching in lockstep like uniformed officers patrolling the neighborhoods to keep everyone in line. To remain your sense of self, you just have to ignore it. Let the shitstorm rain down. Shrug and walk away. Let them throw tantrums and wear themselves out.

Fear of the truth is why so few people are really willing to talk about THE PROBLEM.  To solve the problem, we have to be able to name the problem. It doesn’t matter how people spin in, the bottom has dropped out.

Without even reading that story in Bloomberg, I can promise you that they will blame everything else before they recognize the main reason so much of the audience has tuned out. They will never get to the core reason because they can’t bring themselves to admit it. Not even to simply mention it, not even to talk about it. Although every sane person knows the reality of what’s happened, is simply too dangerous to acknowledge.

But here goes: Audiences didn’t abandon Hollywood and the Oscars. Hollywood and the Oscars abandoned their audience. They did this by renewing their vows with the Democratic Party, progressive activism, leftwing politics and yes, the “Great Awokening of 2020.”

The documentary about what happened at Evergreen College back in 2017 was one of the first to describe it.

Here is Vice’s report:

And Benjamin Boyce’s lengthy series on the college (he attended Evergreen around the same time).

Evergreen is a cautionary tale:

“Evergreen enrollment all but collapsed. Enrollment has since plummeted 41%, to 2,281 students in fall of 2020, and was expected to top at around 2,000 in 2021. In February 2022, the chief enrollment officer reported that total enrollment had fallen to 1,952 students.” –– Wikipedia

In case you were wondering what’s happened to this country, to Hollywood, to the Oscars–it’s all there in the Evergreen story. Because the activists in those documentaries represent exactly the same ideology as those who now have America by the balls, culturally and institutionally, just as they did with the Evergreen staff. Why? Because they are good people, good liberals, who do not wish to be seen as “right-wingers” or “racists.” So they pander, they apologize, they capitulate. But in doing so, they forget that it’s a big country out there. 336 million or so souls, and only a small fraction of those are graduates of what my nephew calls “Social Justice Military Academies.”

But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere and in everything. Its adherents know that they need to brand themselves as down with the Woke in order to survive. Like this M&M’s ad:

Gen-Z is a substantial 20% of the population, but only about half of them are what we would call “woke.” So you’re looking at roughly 30 million people who have now become the target audience for products, for content, for food and for films. Appealing to that sliver of the market ain’t gonna cut it for the rest of us, folks.

Gen-Z are also rightfully worried about the cost of living. They’re not going to blow a wad at the movies unless there is a really good reason. To them, it’s like going to an amusement park or the mall. It’s a good time maybe. But it doesn’t carve out a claim to their cultural identities like it used to for previous generations. They have an overabundance of online content that already serves that purpose.

All of this has been done by the industry with good intentions. They didn’t just want to serve 13-year-old boys. They didn’t want to be known for that. But by consummating their marriage to politics, to the Obama coalition specifically, they’ve become too politically and socially conscious to be able to make great movies anymore. There is always some strict overseer standing there with a clipboard, making sure they are in “compliance.” When ideology became the focus, authenticity was lost.

Worse yet, this doesn’t mean that disaffected people will still show up for movies that aren’t woke. The whole entertainment brand has been wrecked. Audiences no longer trust Hollywood. They figure, why not just wait until it’s on streaming then we can switch it off it’s bad. There are exceptions, of course. We’ve seen proof that when studios strive to deliver great movies again, movies that aren’t identity-focused, the box-office can still rock. The more they manage to do that, better off they will be, if they care to salvage what’s left of their industry.

The Academy Museum could have been, in the parlance of our times, “lit.” It could have been a monument to Hollywood badassery. Instead, it’s been conceived as a kind of a shield or a badge–a way for the very very wealthy to indicate outwardly that they are “good,” that they “care,” and that it’s actually okay if they have all of that money because they’re “doing good things” for the world. Ultimately, though, it’s self-serving. Because that history doesn’t really belong to the donors of the museum. It belongs to all of us. That’s the only reason to go to a museum about the Oscars.

I do think there are several upcoming movies that will light up the box office they way movies used to–Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning being one of them. Oppenheimer should do very well. Barbie seems like it might, but we’ll have to wait that one out. Hollywood knows how to do this. They’ve been doing it for decades. They’ve been successful for decades for one reason: they served their primary audience, a.k.a. the majority.

Getting back to Michael Cieply, I’ll leave you with two scenes from two movies I love that say what I want to say much better than I can. The first, “You want Michael Cieply on that wall. You need Michael Cieply on that wall.”

The second is about not giving in to the crowd, and having moral courage. There was a time when so many people weren’t snitches and spies.

Movies exist to remind us how to be honorable individuals. Great art takes its place permanently in our hearts and minds, no matter the generation, as long as it is still valued AS ART rather than a magic mirror to reflect a façade of our purity and our goodness.

The new entertainment industry is so much bigger than movie theaters. Streaming, TikTok, YouTube–hell, we can be the stars of our own movies these days. When millions of us have the tools in our pocket to be content creators, there’s an endless supply of content to be consumed.

The one thing we don’t ever have enough of, though? GREAT STORIES. Hollywood has either forgotten how to tell good stories or the gatekeepers won’t allow those stories to be told. Perhaps they’ve lost touch with what we used to call the “common man” so they don’t even know how to tell stories that everyone will love. Well, those two clips above exemplify the type of films that everyone can watch, and everyone can get, and many will love.

Tell good stories. Tell universal stories. Tell truthful stories. Write what you know. Write who you are. Stand up for the truth. Have personal courage. For the love of all things holy, stop pandering. Stop making dogmatic movies that only a niche audience will enjoy. Would a Christian rock concert be fun for anyone who isn’t a Christian? Probably not. Hollywood needs to think about that when it writes its next chapter.