If the doctors are to be believed, cinema is suffering from a volatile medical condition. It is less than a year since Barbenheimer confirmed its rude good health. The doctors smiled warmly and promised a long, active life. Now they have entered the hospital room with funereal expressions. I don’t like the way they’re staring at that clipboard. Might it be time for our old friend to “get his affairs in order”?
Twitchy analysts have plunged into epic tizzies over the fates of two films in particular. The Fall Guy, a shallow-browed action comedy with Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, opened softly and, a month after release, looks unlikely to recuperate its combined budget and marketing costs. Two weeks ago Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga helped (if that is the word) the US box office to its worst Memorial Day weekend figures since 1995. Both films got good reviews. Both seemed commercial.
The speculation about why Furiosa started slowly has been deranged. We hardly have space to list the conflicting explanations. Unsurprisingly, the odd right-wing bore attempted to argue it was all to do with the “woke”. The world is sick of female protagonists, you see. Tell that to the millions who made Barbie the highest-grossing film of 2023. There was a marginally less preposterous attempt to argue that audiences can’t be doing with prequels. Okay, then.
I have no neat answer as to how this happened, but I would quietly point out that, for all the subsequent hoopla around Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 film – fourth in George Miller’s postapocalyptic sequence – could not be described as a monster hit. It was not even in the box-office top 20 for that year. Films that made more in 2015 included San Andreas (that earthquake thing with the Rock), Hotel Transylvania 2 (kiddie horror cartoon) and, erm, Home (a DreamWorks animation whose existence I had completely forgotten).
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Maybe the problem here is not with the box office but with skewed industry expectations. Cineastes talk about Fury Road a lot. It won more Oscars than any other 2015 release. But the film just does not register with the public as do the real blockbusters. The awful Jurassic World took 4½ times as much in 2015, and it wasn’t even the year’s highest-grosser. Maybe we should be celebrating the news that Furiosa is the first film in the Mad Max series to top the US box office on release. That’s something.
We haven’t mentioned the ever-shortening window between theatrical and streaming. Not a mad argument. You can already rent The Fall Guy for home viewing from all the usual places
Is the problem a wider one? There was a lot of talk about cinema tickets becoming prohibitively expensive. This line has been around for a while. “This is a working man’s art form,” Quentin Tarantino said in 2016. “It’s not the opera, it’s not theatre, it’s not going to a big concert. The idea was anyone could go and see a movie. We have priced them out.”
Maybe. A standard ticket for Bad Boys: Ride or Die at the nearest multiplex to me in central Dublin costs €12.99. That is no longer a negligible amount of money. But just about everything else in contemporary entertainment has gone up at a greater rate. Gig tariffs make the eyes water. “While prices started at over €100 for both [Taylor] Swift and Coldplay tickets, dynamic ticket pricing meant that when the cheapest seats were sold prices started to climb,” Conor Pope wrote in this paper last year. “The highest priced tickets for Swift, meanwhile, cost about €750.” My understanding is the promoters were not short of buyers for that upcoming concert. Cinema remains relatively decent value as long as you remember that nobody is forcing you to also buy a lampshade of Coke and a trough of popcorn (and that almost everywhere is cheaper than central Dublin).
We haven’t mentioned the ever-shortening window between theatrical and streaming. Not a mad argument. You can already rent The Fall Guy for home viewing from all the usual places. That feels like the industry throwing up its collective hands at the traditional means of exhibition.
And yet. We say it again. It is less than a year since cinemagoers descended like locusts upon Barbie and Oppenheimer. The audience is still there if you give them what they want, and what they want may not, amazing as it sounds, be yet another translation of Marvel’s back pages or revisitation of a Film Twitter obsession (no harm to Fury Road). Almost as difficult as cracking the content, however, is working out how to market the damn stuff. The Barbenheimer portmanteau fell out of the sky as a happy accident. Find a way of convincing the world it really, really wants to see Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F – coming your way next month – and the industry will give you a star on Hollywood Boulevard.
