Shocking! Hollywood’s Unrealistic Expectations Causing a Box Office Apocalypse!

The dawn of Memorial Day in Los Angeles was met with sunny skies and a cheerful atmosphere, a stark contrast to the gloomy box office performance over the weekend that prompted a wave of sighs and grumbles throughout Hollywood.

It’s remarkable to see how Hollywood bigwigs still harbor a faith in magic. They seemed to believe that the six-month-long strikes by writers and actors last year would not affect this year’s summer box office. Even in 2023, as the film industry continued to heal from the COVID-19 shutdown, they seemed to think it was a good idea to let writing and production come to a halt again, to save some money in the short term and dissolve a few imprudent deals, while the high earners in the industry grappled with the streaming services they hastily brought to life.

Outside the world of the ultra-rich, these delays, particularly the postponement of high-budget films, threw this summer’s movie lineup off balance and left movie theaters hanging. Yet, it’s astonishing to see how everyone is taken aback to find that these actions have tangible consequences on ticket sales. This Memorial Day saw the worst box office performance in nearly three decades. What went wrong?

One must question the rationale behind Hollywood’s lack of reasonable expectations. For instance, it’s perplexing how someone thought that “The Fall Guy,” a delightful yet high-octane romantic comedy based on a moderately successful TV series from the early ‘80s, could compete with the early blockbuster hits typically released by Marvel. Similarly, it’s hard to comprehend the unrealistic hopes pinned on a holiday weekend featuring “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” a prequel to a film nearly a decade old and part of a 30-year-old franchise, and “The Garfield Movie,” inspired by a newspaper comic strip that reached its cinematic peak two decades ago.

At the theaters, “Furiosa” and “Garfield” were accompanied by “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which had a successful opening weekend on May 12 due to lack of competition, and John Krasinski’s animated “If,” which is doing reasonably well, primarily because it wasn’t burdened with overly ambitious projections.

Scanning this weekend’s movie listings felt like being caught in a time warp — with “Mad Max,” “Garfield,” “Planet of the Apes,” and “The Fall Guy” still on the big screen, it made me question if I had experienced life at all. Was there a “Bionic Woman” movie playing somewhere? Or perhaps a movie version of “Love American Style?”

As a nostalgic individual caught between the Boomer and Gen X generations, I admit that “Top Gun: Maverick” was a grand success. However, as last year’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” showed, no one truly wants to exist in a movie theater version of Pottersville, where everything is the same yet slightly altered.

For the record, my husband and I went to see “Furiosa,” which perfectly described my mood once the movie ended. As Joshua Rothkopf from The Times noted, the film managed to “take the fun out of survival.” I can’t help but feel there’s too much sand flying around in movies these days, with “Dune: Part Two” and parts of “The Fall Guy” also contributing, but perhaps that’s just my personal gripe.

Even without the strike, this summer’s box office was bound to be somewhat disappointing — the euphoria of “movies are back” created by last year’s “Barbenheimer” cannot be bottled up and repeated. However, the strikes orchestrated by the studios ensured it would be far worse, setting the industry back at least a year and rekindling all the challenges that the pandemic had exacerbated.

Industry observers are once again lamenting the rising cost of tickets and concessions, the shorter gap between theatrical and streaming release, the surplus of content offered by streaming services, and the pandemic-induced habit of staying home.

Add to this the challenges of marketing films when traditional television ads have disappeared along with linear television, and the transition to a personalized digital world where the magnificence of filmmaking is reduced to a window on a hand-held screen that can be swiped away with a finger.

Is it any surprise that we’re subjected to half an hour of trailers before every movie? (That too isn’t working, as assigned seating makes it easy for viewers to skip the trailers.)

Knowing what’s playing, when, and where has become more of a task.

Not too long ago, people could open a newspaper like The Times and find movie ads, which included a list of theaters showing each film, alongside extensive listing sections. Now, in this digital age where everything is do-it-yourself, potential moviegoers can conduct a “near me” search, but they need to know which movies are currently out to do that. (And they need to do it quickly, as films often disappear from theaters after a few weeks.)

As a member of The Times’ entertainment team, I would love to see the return of listings and the ads that fund them, but that doesn’t seem likely in the foreseeable future.

Nor does it seem likely that there will be price reductions at the box office and concession stands, where a family of four can easily spend over $100 (though the AMC and Regal passes do offer substantial savings for regular moviegoers).

But as “Barbenheimer” demonstrated, people will leave their couches, find parking, and pay for popcorn if the movies make it worth their while. And this post-strike period presents an opportunity to figure out how to do that better.

The current tightening among streaming services could provide movies an opportunity to regain some of the ground lost to television over the past decade, but only if studios start taking more risks with fresh and diverse content.

Another “Planet of the Apes,” “The Garfield Movie,” and a “Mad Max” prequel — even one that premieres at Cannes to mixed reviews — do not constitute fresh and diverse content.

Neither do “Inside Out 2,” “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “A Quiet Place: Day One,” “Deadpool and Wolverine,” and “Despicable Me 4,” though many predict these will draw larger crowds to air-conditioned theaters as the summer progresses.

Long criticized for their diminishing artistic value, franchise films have become a box office staple — serialized storytelling, or television, for the big screen. And like the old model of television, studios are increasingly tying success to a very narrow viewing window. The opening weekend has become the cinematic equivalent of a TV show pilot, and movies that don’t perform well in their first two weekends are often branded as failures, attracting all the negative publicity that follows.

Meanwhile, the film industry has almost entirely surrendered the types of stories once told in mid-budget films — which often had smaller opening weekends but lasted longer — to television.

Now, as the television industry, disrupted by streaming, figures out a way forward — perhaps shifting towards traditional, long-running sitcoms and procedurals — it might be time for the film industry to produce fewer mega-budget blockbusters and more mid-budget films.

Even with the recent closure of numerous theaters in Southern California and across the nation, there are still plenty of seats to fill. The boom of massive multiplexes in the late ’90s and early ’00s resulted in theaters as large as small airports, often featuring more than two dozen screens. In recent years, many of those screens have been showing the same four or five movies; if one or two of those movies fail to attract large audiences, that leaves a lot of empty seats that could be filled by non-blockbuster films — perhaps created by TV writers, producers, and actors who are currently desperately seeking work.

This might seem like wishful thinking, but regardless of how Hollywood decides to do it, the pressure to lure millions of people into theaters over a couple of days to see one or two films needs to be alleviated. Whether it’s a sequel, prequel, reboot, or (heaven forbid) an original idea, not every film should be expected to make half a billion dollars, or even half its total budget, on opening weekend to be deemed a success.

“The Fall Guy,” which was quickly labeled as a harbinger of gloom for this summer’s box office, is nearing the $150-million mark in global sales, despite being moved to streaming. This may not be a smashing success for a film that cost $138 million to make, but it’s not a failure either. With its unique blend of romance and high-budget action sequences, the problem might lie more with the film itself than the state of moviegoing. Framing it as a litmus test for summer 2024 didn’t help; those who didn’t see it soon after it opened were greeted with headlines prophesying not only its failure but the potential doom it might spell for the future of cinema.

That’s a lot for Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt to bear.

Six months of strikes will inevitably cost studios, theater owners, and advertisers a fortune — there was never any way to avoid this, regardless of what the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers had to say during the negotiations. If studio executives were prepared to part with their share of that money to reboot the industry, they’d better start making some changes. But banking on a “Mad Max” prequel and a “Garfield” sequel to somehow turn things around is a much bigger failure than “The Fall Guy.”