What’s to Blame for Hollywood’s Box Office Blues?

Plus: How to Do Distribution Right

Author

Steve
June 04, 2024

Happy June Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

Subscribe to get Hollywood Tech Nerds magically delivered to your inbox every Tuesday!

What’s to Blame for Hollywood’s Box Office Blues?

A few weeks ago I lamented having to write about Hollywood’s box office numbers, yet here I am doing it once again. This is how I get in trouble: I say I’m not going to do something but I go ahead and do it anyway! Like when I promised my Aunt Joan I wouldn’t reference her legal troubles in any future newsletters when she threatened me with a C&D letter. Oops!

There’s been a surplus of coverage on the causes of the biz’s lackluster early summer releases. Writing in The Nation, Jeet Heer blames an “addiction to blockbuster franchises”:

Furiosa, the fifth film in the venerable postapocalyptic Mad Max franchise, joins a long string of movies—many from long-standing franchises that were previously cash cows—that have either bombed or greatly underperformed. In the last two years, this includes Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, as well as a string of flops from the once-dominant superhero genre adapting works from Marvel and DC comics.

I do agree with this analysis in a very general sense, but there are some specific nuances here that do require a bit of explanation. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning’s almost $300 million budget was significantly inflated by COVID shutdowns and then had the misfortune to open the week before “Barbenheimer.” As film critic Bilge Ebiri writes in Vulture, Furiosa is a prequel to a movie that “was itself not a gargantuan hit. It was that pesky creature Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with: a beloved work of art that did okay business.”

Why, then, is the expectation that the prequel to a 9 year old movie that did modestly well would be striding atop the Memorial Day box office weekend?

Ebiri and Heer both echo my own thinking about how the false promise of streaming saving the business is inextricably tied to these theatrical issues. Heer writes:

Streaming services, along with other tech industries… are fledgling businesses with no track record of strong profits. Their expansion was driven by liquid venture capital needing to park money in speculative ventures that could one day achieve market dominance. Once easy money dried up, streaming services lost access to the funds that drove their rapid growth and ability to create a seemingly endless array of new content. Since then, the streaming services have been sinking, and laying off employees.

Ebiri observes that “we have to abandon the destructive binary in which only the biggest movies get to open in theaters while smaller, more marginal releases — the ones that actually demand attention and care — are seen as disposable streaming junk.”

How to Do Distribution Right

Speaking of distribution, IndieWire has an interesting article by Brian Newman all about how indie filmmakers should be approaching the modern movie distribution landscape. You should read the entire thing, but I’ve pulled out a few interesting pieces:

Just a few years ago, maybe even a year ago, one could count on making a good amount of money when your film went to transactional windows — PVOD, or premium VOD, where people pay around $20 USD for early access to a film, or in TVOD, where people pay a smaller fee to rent or buy the film a little bit later. But now that most consumers have between 4-6 subscription services in their monthly bill, many of them are not willing to spend money on a movie when they can probably wait and see it on SVOD later.

I’m a member of a number of independent filmmaking subreddits and Facebook groups, and this is a complaint I see often: TVOD just isn’t generating rentals or purchases the way it used to, except in specific outlier instances where it does fine.

The filmmakers in these groups tend to blame distributors, but the fall-off is more likely just as Newman has suggested: consumers are already shelling out for multiple subscription services. Why would they bother with a TVOD purchase for something they could theoretically watch for “free” later? Indie filmmakers might find better results looking at AVOD portals for their movies.

Newman also indicates that, despite the doom and gloom in Hollywood, some curious things are happening for films on the arthouse circuit:

While audiences might not be showing up for docs, they are showing up for other things. Many of the better and curated arthouses say that audiences are showing up for strong narratives, and there’s a growing sense that the theatrical window is becoming more important than ever before. If a film can make it past that first week and be doing well, the word of mouth can spread. In addition, younger audiences are coming back to theaters, especially for repertory cinema and special events.

Be sure to check out the entire article!

I do think we’re in a transitional time for the theatrical experience, and Hollywood’s best bet moving forward will necessitate being more skeptical of tech, doing better pre-production planning to avoid endless reshoots, and not relying on opening weekend box office to make or break their movies. Will they make these fundamental changes? I’m not optimistic!

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Why Hollywood creatives prefer a Skydance merger for Paramount. (link)

Netflix’s new Jennifer Lopez movie might be the future, unfortunately. (link)

Ed Zitron on the “Rot-Com Bubble”. (link)