In 2023, audiences got a sneak preview of what the next phase for Hollywood will be: a hell of a lot less costly capes and sequels.
It’s about time. As the Trammps once sang, “Burn, baby, burn!”
Just four years ago, assembly-line superhero movies and recycled old franchises were a bottomless well of box-office success. Brainwashed Marvel fans were happily sitting through “Avengers: Endgame” 10 times, and a real-looking “Lion King” remake raked in $1.6 billion.
Right now those salad days seem as far away as BuzzFeed quizzes and posh frozen yogurt. It’s a bloodbath out there. Over the past several months, comic book adventures, action tentpoles and Disney family fare have all been flipped the bird by fed-up ticket buyers.
They’re understandably tired of paying as much as $25 a pop for lazy retreads, and that exhaustion has resulted in a calamitous series of embarrassing failures for the big studios.
Behold 2023’s flop parade: Marvel’s amazingly titled “The Marvels” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”; DC’s “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” “The Flash” and “Blue Beetle”; Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” “Wish” (likely) and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Universal’s “Fast X,” at best, broke even.
“The Marvels” is just one of many hugely expensive flops from 2023. ©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection
“The Marvels” is the latest flop for the once-ironclad MCU. Laura Radford
Ezra Miller’s “The Flash” was a big flop for Warner Bros., just like “Blue Beetle” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods.” ©Warner Bros/courtesy Everett Co
IndieWire reported that of the 15 movies made in 2023 with budgets over $200 million, just one went into profit: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” at $845 million worldwide. And even that take didn’t match the sky-high level of Marvel’s past hits.
Will huge blockbusters vanish entirely? Of course not. But the studios are going to have to give their spend-wildly-on-stale-schlock strategy a serious rethink.
An obvious takeaway from all the upheaval is that audiences are screaming out for originality, or at least for stories that they haven’t seen a million times before.
What’s performed best this year? A doll and a bomb.
The highest grossing movie of the year is Greta Gerwig’s non-superhero “Barbie.” wbpictures/Twitter
“Barbie” will come out on top with $1.4 billion worldwide (there’s no way in Atlantis that “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” will earn that much). Sure, Greta Gerwig’s movie had the benefit of being based on a popular toy, but it was also vastly different from anything else on offer.
And then, on that same surreal #Barbenheimer weekend, there was “Oppenheimer.” Christopher Nolan’s prestige biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, which is favored to win the Oscar for Best Picture, has internationally outgrossed every Disney and Marvel film released this year.
I once wrote down that sentence in my dream journal.
As of this week, “Oppenheimer” has made five times more at the box office than “The Marvels.” And its $100-million budget was less than half of what that MCU disaster cost. “Barbie’s” was $145 million.
“Oppenheimer” is the rare prestige movie to gross nearly $1 billion. AP
That’s another key to survival. Hollywood studios have kept shoveling piles of cash into soulless clones assuming that we’ll happily take whatever gruel we’re given. That’s a risky bet considering that today’s ginormous pictures often need to gross $500 million or more to barely break even.
Hopefully this sea of red ink will mean better, more engaging films for movie lovers — and, by extension, a thriving Hollywood. Like Margaret Thatcher once said, “Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live.”
Then again, after “Barbie,” Mattel reportedly has 17 more movies based on dolls in the works. The more things change…