Box Office Blues – America Has Changed. Hollywood Must Adapt or Die.

The usual suspects chimed in with the usual excuses when The Fall Guy opened “soft.” I thought the movie would have done better. I predicted it would top the box office, even Dune, which has made nearly $300 million domestically so far.

Universal took a chance with a non-branded film to open the summer, says Brook Barnes at the New York Times:

It was the first time in 19 years that Hollywood’s summer season — a four-month period that typically accounts for 40 percent of annual ticket sales — did not start with a superhero or a sequel. Last year, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” from Marvel started the summer with $118 million in opening-weekend ticket sales, going on to take in $846 million worldwide.

The upside is that, says Barnes, word of mouth might mean people do go see it and it becomes a hit. I hope so. As a Gen-Xer I remember the Fall Guy because I watched it every week.

Here is what Scott Menzel said on Twitter:

Here are twelve reasons why I believe films fail at the box office nowadays:

1. Prices – Ticket and food prices at theaters have become astronomical. $12-$25 for tickets. $12 to $20 bucks for a popcorn and soda.

2. Streaming Services – There is so much to watch on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Prime Video, etc that the average person doesn’t feel the need to go see the majority of movies in a theater nowadays.

3. Content consumption has drastically changed. People would rather watch TikTok or things when they feel like it than sit in a theater for 2 hours.

4. A general disdain for the moviegoing experience. While ticket and food prices do factor in here, there is more to the story than just that. A lot of people have had bad experiences at a movie theater which, as a result, causes many of them to not want to return. People on their phones. People talking during the movie. People being rude. People fighting. People don’t feel like the experience is worth their time or money.

5. Marketing. I feel like so many marketing campaigns just don’t sell the average consumer nowadays. Studios need their movies to stand out and feel unique. Most marketing feels so generic nowadays.

6. Timing is everything. There was a time when long lead times really help sell a movie but nowadays I feel like if you are going to promote a movie finding the perfect time to do so is key. And if you launch it way in advance, you have to make sure that you have a set plan to ensure people remember it months later and the hype for it doesn’t disappear.

7. A general lack of trust in critics and reviews. With so many movies being overly praised and in some rare cases being overly criticized, I think general audiences have grown increasingly wary of critics and reviewers.

8. Bankable names/IP. Just because an actor or filmmaker makes good movies doesn’t always mean that is going to translate to ticket sales. There are so few movie stars left that actually selling tickets without some sort of popular IP attached to the project has proven to become a big problem in Hollywood.

9. Over saturated marketplace. Too many films that look or feel the same. All genres should not be treated equally. And, it is possible, with a film like The Fall Guy, that some might have experienced a bit of Gosling burnout. After 10 months of Barbie, maybe he needed a bit of a break from the general public to build up more of a demand.

10. Budgets. The budgets on these projects is just out of hand. Hollywood needs to figure out how to get budgets lower. Way too many films with budgets over 100 million.

11. General public vs. Hollywood. I do think a lot of the general public has a problem with Hollywood. I think there is definitely a divide between what audiences will pay to support and what others will wait to watch for free.

12. Screenings. Too many screenings of certain movies have proven that the box office return will suffer. There are certain people who would have paid to see some of these movies in theaters but didn’t have to because they saw them for free.

These are all good points but I find most people still aren’t talking about the biggest reason: Hollywood has alienated audiences.

On the franchise front, they alienated their base, the “fanboy” demo aimed at males. This was an incredibly reliable demographic that made Hollywood some of the biggest profits of all time. And it’s true that girls were left out of it. While that was a drag, it wasn’t enough a drag to sink the Titanic.

Hollywood decided audiences were the problem, not them. They didn’t want to live with the “shame” of making so much dirty money from what the new generation viewed as “too white, too male, too heterosexual.” So they punished them by giving them the “strong woman” movie.

Telling it like it is:

This would be like taking the McDonald’s French fry, which is not healthy, and deciding you wanted to fix all of the people who have come to rely on the not-healthy French fry by making it healthy. Let’s turn it into baked zucchini instead! Eat you, you terrible people. The obesity epidemic is not our fault. Do you think McDonald’s would ever do something that catastrophic? Well, that’s what Hollywood did, especially Disney. They bought everything, made obscene amounts of money, and then worried about their status.

You know that no one is ever going to admit any of this out loud, but over time, audiences just lost interest and pivoted to something else. That’s where the streaming problem comes in, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame them. Hollywood can and has survived competition from other technologies. What they can’t survive is being out of touch with the reality of all of our lives.

How do you make people come to the movies? You make something they can’t NOT SEE. Last year, everyone had to see Barbenheimer because it was something you can’t NOT SEE.

Stories Hollywood won’t tell but should:

A woman lying about sexual harassment to cash in on it

Jessica Reed Kraus, one of the few journalists out there humanizing Trump supporters and telling stories about them in an honest, interesting way.

The Jussie Smollett story is fascinating. An indictment of the media and a faked story of being attacked by Trump supporters. But of course, that won’t happen. He’s in career-repair mode:

The war between women athletes and the transgender activists is a major story in America right now that Hollywood will not touch. Why won’t they? Well, you know why. If they did, they would have to tell it only from the point of view of the activists. That is where we are now and why so much of Hollywood has painted itself into a corner. They’re not getting out of it unless they actually get back to doing what they used to do: being brave, making movies people can’t not see.

I have no idea whether these stories would sell or not. This is just to show you a fraction of the stories Hollywood won’t tell.  And that makes me uncomfortable. I would hope that they had more courage than they do. It makes me wish I ran a movie studio so I could start making movies that capture the zeigeist. Hollywood can’t do that anymore. They are under the thumb of people with clipboards, counting heads and taking names. If anyone of them slipped up, their careers would be over.

Let me ask this, how is that a sustainable model for creativity? The answer: it isn’t. It’s a model for failure.

The Fall Guy didn’t appear to be a “woke” movie, like The Fabelmans didn’t. But if you can’t talk about what people are talking about. If you don’t have the courage to live with all of us in the present, then it seems to me there is no way you can compete with TiKTok or Youtube where people aren’t afraid to dive in and debate this stuff. They either do it with parody or they do it with commentary. The point is, they do it.

I hope people go see The Fall Guy. I hope Hollywood doesn’t come away thinking only IPs will sell. Because they won’t, not if they do what Hollywood seems to want to do now – correct YOU. Change what you want. Make you want something “correct” so they won’t be blamed for ruining society by pandering to the silent majority.  But it should be about them. It should be about YOU.

None of this is going to end, I don’t think, until the Left is cured of its Trump Derangement Syndrome. That has paralyzed Hollywood, comedy and everything else. Once it evaporates, which I hope it does, we can all go back to being ourselves.