[COLUMN] Not Every Box Office Flop Needs to be a Referendum on the Future of Cinema | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

On Thursday, The New York Times published an interview with director Greg Berlanti under the headline, “Can Movies for Grown-Ups Still Sell Tickets? Fly Me to the Moon Is a Test.” That is a lot of pressure to heap on a high-concept romantic comedy about faking the moon landing. However, it’s par for the course in discussions of modern Hollywood.

It seems like every major release this year has been positioned as an existential referendum on theatrical distribution. Following the under-performance of David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, The Guardian ran an op-ed headlined, “How did The Fall Guy flop – and what does that mean for cinema?” Covering the opening of John Krasinski’s IF, The Los Angeles Times asked, “Is that a disappointment? An ominous sign of the box office times? Or is the final story on IF yet to be written?”

There is a certain apocalyptic tone to the coverage of these box office results. This makes a certain amount of sense. By late April, this year’s total box office was running 20% behind where it had been in 2023. By the end of May, that figure had climbed to 23.6%. That is terrifying, particularly in the larger context where studios like Paramount are being bought and sold and observers speculate that theatre chains like AMC are facing bankruptcy.

Of course, there is a wider context to consider. One of the reasons that the total box office figures are down is because there are simply fewer movies thanks to the long tail of the writers’ and actors’ strikes that paralyzed Hollywood last year. For example, there were only 31 wide releases (over 1,000 screens) in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 44 in the same period in 2023. Think of it as an inverse Field of Dreams: “If you don’t screen it, they won’t come.”

More than that, there is some cause for relief. In June, Inside Out 2 became the first movie to gross over a billion dollars since Barbie and became Pixar’s most successful release ever. Almost single-handedly, Inside Out shrunk the year-on-year box office decline to 19%. Despicable Me 4 opened to over $120m over the July 4th holiday weekend. Deadpool and Wolverine is currently tracking for a $160m opening weekend, which would break all records for an R-rated movie.

More broadly, there is a sense in which reports of the box office deaths of both The Fall Guy and IF were at least slightly exaggerated. Despite soft openings, both movies legged it out to respectable (if not awe-inspiring) box office totals. The Fall Guy ended up at $177m and IF topped out at $184m. At more responsible budgets, those would have been clean hits. As box office analyst Scott Mendelson has pointed out, both films demonstrated “pheromonal post-debut legs.”

More broadly, this year has seen a number of genuinely impressive box office results, including several existing franchises hitting record highs. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the highest-grossing entry in Warner Bros.’ “MonsterVerse” franchise. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes had the second-highest opening in the series, actually earning more in its sixth weekend than its fifth. A Quiet Place: Day One recorded the biggest opening in the franchise’s history.

As such, there is no real pattern to be derived from the available data. There are fewer big movies than last year, and so the overall box office is down. Some movies that analysts expected to perform well are performing well, and others are performing poorly. Some franchises are thriving, and others are faltering. There aren’t enough audiences going to the cinema, but that seems to largely be down to the fact that there are not enough movies to draw them out to theatres.

Still, that’s a very neutral and even-handed framing of the current situation. It doesn’t offer any simple explanation or reassuring conclusion. It also doesn’t reflect the very real and very understandable panic that is being felt by those inside the industry, both in the studios producing these movies and the theatres that want to show them. Even beyond the fact that sensationalism sells, it makes sense that the stakes on every major release feel like life or death.

Nevertheless, it is undeniably frustrating to watch this cycle play out each and every weekend. In some ways, it is darkly funny to watch analysts earnestly argue that the entire future of cinema as an artform rests on the box office performance of a movie that orchestrates the bulk of its score around an instrumental version of I Was Made for Loving You. (After all, Trolls World Tour was one of the defining films of 2020, so anything is possible. This is the upside down.) However, it is also bizarre to watch industry observers in a state of constant meltdown over a series of movies that are, quite frankly, mediocre.

Even allowing for the disappointing opening weekends of The Fall Guy and IF (and probably Fly Me to the Moon), it is not as if audiences are rejecting masterpieces like The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. It’s absurd to rank films like The Fall Guy, IF and Fly Me to the Moon alongside genuine masterpieces that flopped at the box office like Blade Runner and The Thing. If critics want to hold weekly referenda on the state of cinema, they should probably pick better champions.

None of these movies were particularly well-reviewed, whether citing Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. The Fall Guy scored 81% at Rotten Tomatoes, which places it in the top 75 movies of the year to date. Its ratings on Metacritic are “generally favorable”, but below the “universal acclaim” necessary to rank among the year’s best films. IF scored 49% on Rotten Tomatoes and 46% on Metacritic. Fly Me to the Moon pulled 67% on Rotten Tomatoes and 52% on Metacritic.

The Fall Guy is an adaptation of a 1980s television show that nobody remembers starring two actors over the age of 40 with no movie star bona fides. Ryan Gosling has only headlined a single movie to open over $30m, and it was considered a flop. Emily Blunt is a wonderful actor, but not a movie star. Gosling and Blunt were the second leads of the two halves of “Barbenheimer”, but neither was the star. The Fall Guy would always have been a tough sell to audiences, even if it had been phenomenal.

IF was an overly saccharine and sentimental family movie that found John Krasinski doing his best impression of Steven Spielberg and landing somewhere around Hook. Kids’ movies tend to do well at the box office, but it was always going to be a tough ask for parents to take kids to movie about a young girl (Cailey Fleming) whose mother (Catharine Daddario) dies in the movie’s opening scenes and whose father (Krasinski) is facing open heart surgery with only the slightest chance of survival.

Fly Me to the Moon is a similarly muddled movie. It offers a fictionalized account of the moon landing in which Madison Avenue advertising executive Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is drafted in to sell NASA to the American public, much to the frustration of Cole David (Channing Tatum). The film struggles greatly with tone; it wants to be both a goofy screwball comedy and an earnest celebration of true grit exceptionalism. These two elements don’t mesh at all, and the result is disorienting.

Of course, box office prognostication is a dark art, even with the comfort of hindsight. It’s impossible to say with any certainty why an audience did or did not turn up for a particular film, and making any argument about it tends to require large sample sizes and boring demographic data. More than that, there’s a plausible argument that The Fall Guy and IF weren’t really box office flops, ultimately netting out to mild disappointments.

Still, these are strange movies to bet the proverbial house on. If nothing else, the box office performance of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is much more disappointing than any of these flops. Even then, the issue isn’t that Furiosa’s disappointing box office performance is a harbinger of doom for the medium as a whole or that it’s destined to make a loss. After all, Australian tax payers covered a lot of the budget.

Instead, it’s sad that Furiosa underperformed simply because Furiosa is really great. It’s one of the best movies of the year, scoring 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and 79% on Metacritic. Furiosa is a much better champion for cinema as an artform than The Fall Guy, IF or Fly Me to the Moon. However, even that failure exists in a larger context, weighed against the massive success of films like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, another of the year’s phenomenal cinematic accomplishments.

Even this weekend, as pundits turned Fly Me to the Moon into the living embodiment of theatrical distribution, there was really great news about a really great film. Oz Perkins’ Longlegs is on track to gross between $20m and $23m, the biggest weekend opening ever for a film distributed by Neon. Incidentally, Longlegs is smashing the previous record of $5.3m set by Immaculate earlier this year. These numbers aren’t huge on their own, but they are solid returns on the budgets of those films.

More to the point, it’s these sorts of performances that will shore up and stabilize the box office. This weekend, three movies are projected to gross over $20m: Despicable Me 4, Longlegs and Inside Out 2. Last weekend, three films also grossed over $20m: Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place: Day One. Before that, the last time that three or more films grossed $20m in a single weekend was in early August 2023, at the height of “Barbenheimer.”

This would seem to be the logical lesson to take away from all of this. In a healthy and functional economy, individual films should not be referenda on cinema as a viable commercial medium. Instead, the marketplace thrives with a diversity of content at reasonable budget levels that can draw audiences to a variety of films. The tendency of major studios to put all of their eggs in one basket, and to gamble the medium’s future on each individual roll of the dice, is not sustainable.

The solution to Hollywood’s current crisis is to take more movies at reasonable budgets, accepting that some will underperform and others will over-index. The era of the superhero is over. From here on out, everybody is in this together.