2023 marks a year of transformative change for the film industry

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photo / Universal Pictures

OPINION

Well, some birthday that turned out to be. Hollywood began to emerge as the nexus of cinema in the early 1910s, but it wasn’t until 1923 that arguably the two most influential studios still operating today formally set up shop. Known back then as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio and Warner Bros. Pictures – and now simply as Disney and Warner Bros. – these two mammoth media corporations both marked their centenaries this year. And as celebrations go, they were absolute shockers: think smashed glassware, cheesy dip spilt on the cushions and beer dregs poured into your favourite pot plant.

It wasn’t all bad. In July, Warner Bros. released Barbie, which went on to become the most successful and talked-about film of the year, with international box-office takings of £1.14 billion ($2.33b). And Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and The Little Mermaid – two very on-brand releases for the most brand-crazed studio of them all – took roughly the same amount again between them.

So, sure, money was made. But at the same time, hard-won reputations were lost, or at least dragged through the mud. The main flashpoints were the writers’ and actors’ strikes, which began in April and July respectively and ground on for 148 and 118 days. Each was prompted by a jumble of issues, though the most headline-grabbing was the rising threat of AI; actors were, for instance, less than enamoured with studios’ plans to keep CG replicas of them on file – so that, after death, they could be digitally exhumed for future projects.

It boggles the mind that executives didn’t understand how contentious this idea would be. But the strikes were so bitter and protracted precisely because Hollywood’s boardroom tier has rarely been so out of touch with or loathed by the artistic types that shore it up. Think back through the past decade of upheavals – #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, cancel culture, pan­demic shutdowns, political feuds – and it’s hard to recall a single one the industry’s leaders didn’t make worse.

In 2023, the poster boy for CEO ineptitude was Warner Bros.’ own David Zaslav, who became personally embroiled in a slew of avoid­able PR disasters. As the writers’ strike raged and studios pleaded penury over demands for better com­pen­sation, Zaslav flew to Cannes and threw a glitzy party at the Hotel du Cap. Meanwhile, his damage-limitation strategy for the studio’s long-delayed and obviously troubled DC Comics blockbuster The Flash was to personally hype it as “the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen”.

Even at the best of times, film is an unsteady business – in which, as the screenwriter William Goldman famously concluded, “nobody knows anything” – so cast and crew typically want to work for either a genuine visionary or a safe pair of hands. A studio boss prepared to claim that an all-gobbling US$270 million ($435m) turkey represents the pinnacle of the cinematic arts does not fall into either of those categories.

Indeed, having lost an estimated US$200m ($322m) after promotional costs were factored in, The Flash became the biggest flop in superhero movie history. Yet it may lose that record before the year is out. Released last month, The Marvels – the 33rd film in Disney’s own in-house superhero cinematic universe – arrived on a tide of worri­some buzz, which, as with The Flash, turned out to have been grimly justified.

But was the fact that the film amounted to 105 minutes of leaden banter, mangled plotting and sludgy visual effects the only reason Marvel fans steered clear? Maybe those same fans’ patience had already been pulled beyond snapping point by the series’ dreary post-pandemic run – the backlash against which calcified around ­Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum­ania, which in February was pelted with the worst reviews the franchise had ever received.

It’s also possible that the dire “go woke, go broke” warnings, long touted by reactionary YouTubers, are starting to bite in the real world. I’ve never been convinced this stuff found much traction over here in the UK – it’s hard to believe British Marvel enthusiasts were suddenly revolted last month over racially diverse, female-first casting. But in America, culture is a partisan team sport, and it feels notable that Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, suggested at a conference last month that the studio’s overtly progressive messaging in its products was on its way out.

Whatever the underlying reasons for the collapse in Marvel ticket sales, we did discover this year that even a business model as nakedly pandering as Disney’s isn’t bulletproof. Instead – and I can scarcely believe I’m writing this – cinema that married spectacle to substance showed the first flickerings of a mainstream comeback.

In the UK, The Marvels’ meagre £6.5m ($13.3m) takings were surpassed by those for Killers of the Flower Moon – a darkly ravishing three-and-a-half-hour sprawler from noted Mar­vel sceptic Martin Scorsese, which is expected to slip over the £10m ($20.4m) line just before Christmas.

Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Norma Jean, Lily Gladstone and Sarah Spurger in Killers of the Flower Moon. Photo / Film Stills

So, 2023 was the year when the films Scorsese once famously compared to “theme parks” started wobbling on their steel supports. What did we queue for instead? Scorsese’s film, for one. And, for another, as already mentioned, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which showed how even the tackiest premise could be turned to honourable (and uproarious) artistic ends.

Then there was Ridley Scott’s Napoleon – a swaggering dad-­cinema dazzler that, extraordinarily, sold more than twice as many tickets as Wish, Disney’s U-rated animated princess musical, on the weekend the two films both opened. And in the foreign-­lang­uage field, strong reviews and canny marketing propelled Justine Triet’s Cannes-winning whodunnit Anatomy of a Fall past £1.3m ($2.7m), ­making it the most popular French film to play in Britain since 2012′s Untouchable, a Weinstein Company pet project which took £2 million ($4m) more than a decade ago.

The broader turn away from fran­chises claimed some series scalps. A starring role for Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge couldn’t stop Indiana Jones from meeting his critical and commercial doom, while the Fast & Furious team ran out of road. Even the year’s best thor­oughbred blockbuster, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, was, in box-office terms, underwhelming, which is a funny word to describe a film in which Tom Cruise drives a motorcycle off a cliff.

Sequels? Pah! We were too busy rediscovering the joys of provocation and surprise. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who have scampered over to me in the past month or so and either hissed or shrieked: “Oh my God, I’ve just seen Saltburn.” Some loved it, some didn’t. But all were desperate to talk.

Most thrilling of all, though, was the fate of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer: an existentially harrowing, three-hour period piece about a theoretical physicist, which (with the notable exception of ­Barbie) turned out to be the crowd-pleasing smash of the year.

There is no recent precedent for Oppenheimer’s extraordinary success. The last 15-rated film to have cracked an annual box-office top 10 that didn’t fall into the comedy, fan­tasy or action genres was Saving Pri­vate Ryan, in 1998. Yes, it was partly thanks to the “Barbenheimer” phen­omenon: the novelty of seeing two drastically different (and individually unusual) studio films in close proximity became, to cinema owners’ delight, a major selling point. But it also just did well be­c­ause it was so extraordinarily good.

Thanks to the dominance of franchises, mainstream cinema has barely changed its look or form in the past 20 years. Yet with its hypnotic cutting, soul-scouring close-ups and borderline abstract effects, Nolan’s film felt like something utterly fresh – a lunge forward at the money-making end of a medium blighted by stagnancy.

Meanwhile, in animation, a similar renaissance was afoot. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse took the bold hybrid style of its 2018 ­predecessor – the mix of computer graphics and hand-drawn art that lent it the texture of a living comic book – and pushed it to ink-­splattering, pixel-whizzing new extremes. The result was a film that categorically could not have been made 10 years ago. In fact, I’m not entirely sure how they made it even now. And again, we flocked to ­cinemas to see it.

Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse offers a creative departure from traditional animation styles.

Overall, 2023 was a landmark year for animation – despite Disney’s travails and the murderously cynical and lazy Super Mario Bros, which did undeservedly big business over the Easter break. We got two further masterpieces from Aardman and Studio Ghibli in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and The Boy and the Heron (which, having been shown at the London Film Festival, arrives in cinemas on Boxing Day), and two wild gambles that paid off gloriously in Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s Nimona and Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume. Perhaps most staggering of all, even the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles: Mutant Mayhem was a knockout.

Who wouldn’t you want to be next year? Whoever it was at Sony Pictures that decided it was a fantastic idea, actually, to release three live-action Spider-Man spinoffs in the space of nine months in 2024. Or the top dogs at Marvel, who must be eyeing their slate of seven forth­coming films, at various stages of production, with a ­newfound sense of dread. Or whoever at the studios is going to be negotiating new contracts with the film crew union IATSE, who will have been watching this year’s strikes with beady interest.

But I’ve no doubt it’ll be a ­particularly exciting year to be a cinemagoer. Whether what we’ve just witnessed in 2023 represents a brief tremor or an all-out earthquake remains to be seen. But it feels like more change is coming – and superheroes will not, for once, be the ones to save the day.