Avatar: The Way of Water, has already taken US$1.7 billion. Photo / Supplied
From Steven Spielberg to Margot Robbie, Hollywood’s finest are out in force with brainy, high-end films such as The Fabelmans and Babylon. Yet people aren’t flocking to cinemas to see them. Superheroes have a lot to answer for.
Another January — another time to make that better version of you. Drink less, exercise more and go to see a film because, for decades, films released this month have exercised our brains and stirred our souls. ‘Tis the season for an Oscar-bait movie, and the 2023 offering is as tantalising as ever — packed with so many stars that a trip to the cinema this month will feel like you are strutting through Hollywood rather than slumped in the Vue off the ring road in Romford.
There’s Empire of Light, the Oscar-winner Sam Mendes’ love letter to the cinema (out in New Zealand theatres March 2), starring Olivia Colman. Next week we have the knotty classical music thriller Tár, starring Cate Blanchett. This week there is Babylon, the ode to old Hollywood in which Brad Pitt plays a fading star and Margot Robbie wears weird dresses. Finally, in cinemas now, The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s magical glimpse into his childhood.
Call them films for grown-ups; films that do not follow a blockbuster formula with endless infantilising superheroes. They add up to a cinema trip a week this month for discerning cinemagoers — but there is a problem. In America, where they are already out, nobody saw them, despite them being the sort of thinky films that people complain are not made nowadays.
The figures are bleak. In the year when, post-pandemic, cinema attendances crawled back, Babylon, made for US$80 million, took a ghastly US$12 million in America. Tár cost US$35 million to make and had a box office taking of US$5.3 million. Armageddon Time, starring Anne Hathaway and Anthony Hopkins, cost US$30 million but had ticket sales of US$1.9 million. She Said, about the exposé of Harvey Weinstein, cost US$55 million and earned US$5.3 million.
Meanwhile, Avatar: The Way of Water — a sequel in which blue aliens talk to sad whales — cost US$250 million but has already taken US$1.7 billion. By the time you read this it may be the most successful film to date. All of which shows that proper films for adults are being made, but not watched in cinemas.
“This a self-fulfilling prophecy by the studios,” the actress Jodie Foster said about the type of movie that Hollywood wants to finance. “They became interested in a larger market share from one piece of material — they decided it was a better risk model to make one $200 million movie with superheroes than 25 films. They changed the viewing habits of the American public.”
Matt Damon echoed Foster, saying that studios this century were interested in making the most profitable movie possible, aimed at a worldwide audience, rather than spending money on auteurs as they did in the 1990s, when directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson broke through.
Oscar dramas rarely topped the box office, but the schism between huge blockbusters and teeny indies used to be less dramatic. Less than 15 years ago box office hits such as Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech dominated the awards. In the past three years, though, there have been victories for the niche Nomadland and Parasite. The mid-budget film has gone missing. They are too much of a risk for studios. Hence the shift to films with mass-market appeal aimed at kids and kidults.
“If you want a film to travel and play big,” Damon explained, “you need the least amount of cultural confusion. So that’s the superhero. They’re easy for everyone. You know who the good person is, who the bad is. They fight three times and the good person wins twice.” He mentioned Al Pacino’s 1975 thriller Dog Day Afternoon. “How do you pitch that now?” he said, with a cackle. “‘A guy who robs a bank for his boyfriend’s sex change?’ In this landscape, how do you get money for it?”
Well, it would be funded by Netflix. Or Amazon, Apple or Disney+. To watch on your sofa, like during the pandemic, forming a habit that cinemas are finding hard to break for any film that does not rely on SFX. Successes such as Avatar and Top Gun: Maverick only work on the big screen, but if viewers are not flocking to cinemas to watch more sophisticated work, then any future of such films will be on the small screen. So it is notable that last year’s best picture winner, Coda, was made by Apple, making it the first streamer to win the big Oscar. This year Martin Scorsese has been given US$200 million of Apple’s cash to make an epic about Oklahoma in the 1920s, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The traditional Hollywood studios must have passed on the film, so Scorsese — ironically cinema’s great cheerleader — is making his second film in a row, after The Irishman, that will get only a short release before everyone streams it at home. And how can cinemas persuade people to fork out for a new Scorsese that will be on your TV in a fortnight?
“And the big question then is: does it matter?” says David Hancock, the chief cinema analyst at the media consultancy firm Omdia. “If cinema is surviving on 100 big films a year and they’re full, then others will make more provoking films that go to straight to streaming — is that just a different way of seeing films?”
Hancock believes cinemas offer a different experience to TV, but adds that habits formed over the pandemic, coupled with home-viewing tech that makes your TV better quality than the local fleapit’s system, make it tougher to imagine a time when cinema attendances for certain films will return to where they were.
At home or in the cinema though, as Foster said, something has changed. There is an existential shift that calls into question the very future of nuanced, nourishing work. Young people watch films in a different way. “How can you watch a movie if you are texting?” Damon said, but distraction is just one problem.
The bigger issue is that spending your teens and twenties watching formulaic Marvel movies shifts what a viewer can handle. Maybe that is why this year’s crop of more original films tanked. Going from Avatar to Tár is like switching from Winnie-the-Pooh to Wolf Hall. Viewers would find it a leap.
And we are yet to endure films by directors who were inspired to get into film-making after watching 30 Avengers films. What sort of pacing, dialogue or subtlety can the next generation of directors possibly learn from watching films that are 80 per cent explosions?
This is a crucial time. Each year’s Top Ten UK film releases used to account for about 35 per cent of the overall box office. Last year the combined gross of the Top Ten, which included a Doctor Strange, a Minions and a Batman, pushed 50 per cent, which means audiences were seeing more blockbusters than ever. If that continues, if nobody turns up to, say, Tár or The Fabelmans, decent budgets will not be granted to make such work for the cinema again.
“Movies as we know them are not going to be a thing in our kids’ lives,” Damon told me last year. He is spot on — we are at risk of losing a way of life. “And that makes me sad.”
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
New York Times: Britt Lower ran off to join not one but two circuses.