Does It Hold Any Lessons For Hollywood?

The final calendar day of summer is Saturday, September 23rd. For Hollywood, the summer blockbuster season typically ends before Labor Day Weekend. When the kids go back to school, the summer tentpole films fold up the cinematic Big Top and turn their attention to next May. The only recent exception was Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a Marvel film that hit theaters on September 3, 2021. It raked in just shy of $ 95 million that Labor Day Weekend.

Give the people what they want is an expression often associated with circus showman P.T. Barnum, but it’s also the mantra of every studio executive in Hollywood responsible for programming a profitable summer movie slate. Remember that Barnum is also credited with saying there’s a sucker born every minute (although historians doubt Barnum would be foolish enough to insult his customers). Are the 2023 summer box office champs what the people wanted to see while beating the heat in their local theaters? Or were these films just what audiences were given based on some profitability metric?

Are there any lessons to be learned from the box office this summer? Why did some films rocket into the box office stratosphere while other apparent “sure things” fizzled upon release? Here are some thoughts:

Established Brands Still Rule the Marketplace: Over the Barbenheimer weekend many mainstream media outlets were trumpeting the box office success of two “original concepts”, films that weren’t simply the latest installment in existing film franchises. While that’s technically true, Barbie is based on a toy that debuted at the New York Toy Fair on March 9, 1959, and Oppenheimer is a biopic about a famous scientist by one of the most revered directors working today (Christopher Nolan). One film is based on a world famous toy brand; the other is by a world famous auteur. So even the “original concepts” in 2023 are from established brands.

Of the remaining eight films in the Top 10 of the 2023 summer box office five are sequels (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part I, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts). One is a live-action remake of a popular animated film, The Little Mermaid; another is a curio that found traction with conservative-leaning audiences, Sound of Freedom; the last is Elemental, the newest offering from Pixar, the most successful animation studio in history.

In Hollywood, give the people what they want looks a lot like give the people what they wanted before. Metrics make the decisions. Cinematic universes and properties with pre-existing brand awareness still trump new ideas. It’s like strip-mining a creative vein until it’s completely played out.

It’s Possible to Have Too Much of a Good Thing: Familiarity breeds contempt. That expression is credited to Geoffrey Chaucer from his work The Tale of Melibee published in the 1300s. Nearly a thousand years later it may be a good maxim for Hollywood execs to live by.

There was a time when Marvel and DC released one movie a year. It was an event. Now it seems like they release one film per quarter along with their earnings reports. To dilute the market even further, Disney/Marvel and DC offer television shows featuring their costumed heroes in the downtime between theatrical releases. Why did The Flash underperform at the box office? Maybe in part because there have been 184 episodes about Barry Allen and his supersonic adventures on television over the past nine years.

So, if superhero fatigue is on the rise, how did Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 gross nearly $ 359 million and land at #3 on the summer box office Top 10? There’s no GOTG television show to water down the appeal of the characters. It’s the concluding film in a trilogy with no immediate plans to return to this creative well anytime soon. In short, a Guardians movie is still an “event”. It is worth pointing out that Volume 2 did outgross Volume 3, making just shy of $ 390 million in 2017.

Then what about Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse which currently sits at #2 on the summer box office Top 10 with a domestic gross of almost $ 381 million? The performance of this superhero title actually proves the point. It’s only the second installment in an anticipated trilogy of animated films about everyone’s favorite webslinger. Even as an animated film, the Spiderverse movies are novel with their roughhewn, hand-drawn aesthetic. This is no Pixar version of Spiderman, and this new approach to presenting one of the most filmed superheroes of all-time reinvigorated the Spider-man audience. It made the old new again.

The entertainment industry often operates under its own set of rules. The principles of economics don’t always seem to apply. Selling fun to the general public isn’t the same as selling them toilet paper. However, one old-school economics concept underscores this entire line of discussion: scarcity.

If you flood a market with any product, demand goes down. The summer of 2023 has shown us the limits of superhero films for the first time. In the past, if a comic book film underperformed, it was simply dubbed a bad movie. Maybe it’s time to consider that it’s becoming a tired genre because producing a half-dozen of these films a year has watered down their appeal.

Budgets Have Ballooned to Unsustainable Levels: Somewhere the bean counters in Hollywood had a meeting where their in-house box office prognosticator said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is: we have the #7 film on the summer box office Top 10. The bad news is: we lost a ton of money on this release.”

That was the fate of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny which sits in that #7 position with summer grosses of just over $ 174 millon (against an estimated production budget of just under $ 300 million). Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I suffered the same fate at #8 on the summer box office list with domestic grosses of $ 168 million (against an estimated production budget of $ 290 million).

Twitter and other social media were abuzz with claims that each film had “lost” an estimated $ 500 million when you factor in marketing and promotional budgets. Those criticisms overestimate the promotional budgets and ignore foreign box office, digital sales, physical media, merchandising and the like. However, one thing is true: the latest adventures of Indiana Jones and Ethan Hunt barely earned half of their production budgets at the U.S. box office.

While Dial of Destiny received mixed reviews, Dead Reckoning: Part I was uniformly praised. (My own rave review can be found here.) The scarcity/familiarity argument might suggest that the seventh installment of a franchise is a bridge too far, that audience fatigue has set in. But that ignores the fact that the highest grossing film in the series is the sixth one, Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018), with a total domestic gross of 220 million dollars. It’s worth noting that the production budget for Fallout was $ 178 million compared to Dead Reckoning’s $ 290 million. So, the highest grossing film in the Mission: Impossible franchise wouldn’t have broken even on its domestic grosses if it had the production budget of Dead Reckoning.

The Movie Star Era is Over: Last summer Tom Cruise rocketed to the top of not only the summer box office charts but also the overall annual box office list with Top Gun: Maverick, grossing nearly $ 719 million in the U.S. alone with a worldwide gross of just under $ 1.5 billion. The Father of the Summer Blockbuster Steven Spielberg stated publicly that Cruise was the post-pandemic savior of the theatrical experience. In my own review of Maverick, I hailed Cruise as the last remaining movie star in a theatrical world driven by Intellectual Property (IP) and franchises.

So, the next Mission:Impossible film with that mega star is going to blow the doors off the multiplex, right? Not so much as we’ve already noted. But, once again, the scarcity theory rears its head. Was the public missing Tom Cruise? Or was the public missing an iconic character from the 1980’s who hadn’t been seen on screen in over three decades? The performance of Dead Reckoning may give us the answer to that question from last summer. The box office numbers would suggest it was the absence of Pete Maverick from the big screen for 36 years and not the movie star behind him.

So, why didn’t Harrison Ford ride that nostalgia wave when he donned his fedora for one last adventure this summer? Several things come to mind: it’s not a Spielberg film, the fourth Indiana Jones adventure was a dud, and the nostalgia factor wasn’t enough to put film goers in seats.

I’ll also offer a theory from the narratives of the films themselves. In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s headstrong pilot is still the best. He spends the entire film teaching the young whippersnappers a lesson about flying. That narrative resonates with the middle-aged audience that first saw Pete Maverick soar when we were in high school.

Dial of Destiny on the other hand is a touching farewell, the end for an iconic hero. In Lethal Weapon (1987), the frequent refrain of Danny Glover’s aging police detective is “I’m too old for this sh#@.” In that film it was cynical and funny. Having that vibe coming from Indiana Jones throughout a two-and-a-half hour film tends to kill the fun. Those of us who grew up on these films did get a better send-off for an iconic character than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) gave us, but seeing an 80-year-old Indy reminds its target audience that we are all destined to fade away, and that doesn’t lend itself to repeated viewings.

It’s Clearly the Colons: I could likely parlay this piece of wisdom into a gig as a studio exec, but I’m going to give it away for free. Six of the Top 10 films of all-time (by domestic grosses only) and three of the 2023 Summer Top 10 have colons in their titles. This can’t be a coincidence. From Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens (#1 with over $ 936 million) to Avengers: Infinity War (#8 with nearly $ 679 million), the choice of punctuation has clearly yielded big bucks. (Now I’m wondering how much that dash is worth.) This is why Oppenheimer 2: Nuclear Boogaloo is currently in pre-production.

All joking aside, many business savvy executives are paid considerable salaries to read the Tarot cards of box office results and tell the fortunes of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. Trends are tough to spot until you lose a fortune on the film that emphatically lets you know a particular genre is no longer popular. Hopefully the Writers Guild and Screen Actor’s Guild strikes will wrap up soon, or there may be no 2024 Summer Box Office list to discuss.