Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer
Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously.
At the end of the day, it’s a movie about the atomic bomb that doesn’t have a single Japanese person in it, and that thinks the most compelling thing about the bombing is that a well-dressed, comfortable white guy was slightly uncomfortable.
This is the point where I should probably neatly set my bias out on the table. There’s a genre of “Man Cinema” that has always left me cold. “Man”, both in the sense that they’re about Men, but also that they’re beloved by a certain kind of male film-buff audience. Those movies where a Man is forced by Circumstances to do Things He Is Not Proud Of, and the central conflict is his terrible Man Pain, as he glowers into the middle distance, an Island that No One Can Understand. What few women there are tend to either be tools to use, prizes to be won, or The Secret Behind Every Man’s Success, but never really a character in their own right. Basically, the default mode of the 70s New Hollywood; essentially every movie Coppola, Scorcese, or DePalma ever made.1 Or the kinds of movies that one scene in Barbie was making fun of.
Chris Nolan’s movies have always slid right into that tradition. And look, I’m not going to say these movies are bad, or invalid, they’re just not my jam. If Oppenheimer hadn’t been the other half of Barbenheimer, there was basically no chance I would have watched it.
One of the delightful things about Barbenheimer as an event was that it was clear, like Elvis vs The Beatles, it was possible to like both, but everyone was going to have a preference. Long before they came out, I knew I was going to be Team Barbie.
And so? In short, my feelings about the movie are as ambivalent as the movie’s feelings about it’s subject. It is, of course, well made, and I find myself with more to say about it than I was expecting. I also suspect that every criticism I have of the film is also something somebody who really likes these kinds of movies would say, just with different emphasis.2
And with the preliminaries out of the way…
This is a movie about Great Men, who recognize and respect each other, and the Small Men who surround and resent them, biting at their ankles. Greatness, in this movie, is an fundamental condition, recognized by other Great Men, sometimes even long before anything Great has taken place.3
The cast is uniformly excellent. The standout performance is Robert Downey Jr., who is so good in this they finally gave him his Oscar for Chaplin. He continually finds new ways to look Small, playing Lewis Strauss as a bundle of grievance and bruised feelings, starting every interaction with an air of desperation, and ending it with the look of a man who has formed a new permanent grudge.
Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, plays Oppenheimer as a man almost supernaturally serene, exuding confidence with a side-order of mostly-justified arrogance, but with an increasingly haunted look in his eyes.
Both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh make the most of their reduced screen times to show why Oppenheimer couldn’t resist either (although the opposite is less obvious.) It does put Emily Blunt in the unusual-for-her position of playing the second choice, which she seems to relish, and she conveys Kitty Oppenheimer’s blossoming alcoholism as a sort of general aura of decay rather than any specific action.
My favorite character was Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, who was the only person who seemed to be playing a character, rather than a sketch of one. Not only that, he plays Groves as someone both unimpressed but also unintimidated by Greatness; or rather, someone from a completely different Great-to-Small axis as everyone else.
But, there’s not a single weak link in the movie, even the actors that show up for just a scene or two. Most everyone else is are reduced to shadows, because the pacing is, to use a technical term, a little weird. The movie hurtles along at a breakneck page, skipping along the top of the waves from scene to scene, at times seeming more like sketches of scenes that actual drama—the characters arrive, strike a pose, deliver a series of one-line monologues, and then the movie moves on.
This is exacerbated by the movie’s nested-flashback structure, which I liked quite a bit. Three stories plays out across the movie—the period around and including the Los Alamos project, Oppenheimer’s security hearing after the war, and Strauss’ (failed) senate confirmation hearing. The movie slides from one time to another, additionally using color (or the lack of it) to indicate which parts are from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and which are not.
The result is a movie that seems to abbreviate everything and never manges to give anything room to breathe, despite being three hours long. My standard belief stands that no movie should be over 2 hours; I’m quite confident that there are better versions of this movie at both 110 minutes and at 4 hourlong episodes.
As such you don’t need to know anything about these people or events to watch the movie, but it certainly helps to know who the guy with the bongos is, because the movie won’t tell you.
Actually, let’s hang on Feynman for a second. One of the funnier aspects of the movie is that basically every character is a real person who was famous in their own right, and they pop in for a scene or two and then vanish. Occasionally, one can’t help but feel like the movie has focused on the least interesting person that was present for the Manhattan Project?
Feynman gets, basically, two scenes. He’s one of the few scientists who we see Oppenheimer personally recruit, and the scene is shot from below, causing Oppenheimer, Groves, and Feynman to loom like statues, as dramatic music plays. We don’t find out this character’s name, or what he does, but the cinematography of the scene makes it clear he’s one of the Great Men. From that point on he’s in the background of nearly all the Los Alamos scenes, although I can’t remember him having an actual line of dialogue other than occasionally playing those bongos.
Then, he pops back in again for the Trinity test for the really-happened-but-heavily-mythologized moment where he realizes he doesn’t need the special filter, he can just watch the explosion through his car windshield. And then he vanishes for the rest of the movie, because unlike, say, Fermi or Teller, he has nothing to do with the later political machinations. But still, you’re left pointing at the TV like DiCaprio in the meme, thinking “that’s Feynman! Show him picking some locks!” And the same with Fermi, and the Chicago Pile being reduced to mere minutes of screen time, or hoping he’d ask “Where is everybody?”
(And, Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, most known in these parts as the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and so presumably the reason he’s not in the later parts of the movie is that Mainer finally rescued him.)
But that’s not the point of the movie, and fair enough. Because the central concern of the film isn’t really the atomic bomb, it’s the vicious grievances of the small and petty, and to illustrate there’s no service great enough that can overcome failing to be The Right Kind of American.
There’s a quote from Werner Von Braun (not appearing in this film) about Oppenheimer that “in England, he’d have been knighted,” but instead he was hounded from any formal government post due to the constellation of long-standing grudges from Strauss and others being allowed to fester in the paranoid excesses of the 1950s. Although, speaking of England choosing who to knight, knowing what happened to Turing at about the same time makes it look like Oppenheimer got off light.
The scenes in the security hearing are excruciating. While the formal subject—the renewal of his security clearance—is technical and seemingly inconsequential, the subtext is that this is determining who gets rewarded for their work, who gets the credit, and most importantly, who gets to decide how to use what they all built. Everyone, and there are many, who ever felt slighted by Oppenheimer’s greatness gets to show up and slide a knife in, a cavalcade of trivialities and paranoia. Even Groves, nearly omnipotent a decade before, proves powerless before the unchained animus of the thin-skinned.
After Oppenheimer’s loss, the movie does its most fascinating and distinctive move, and instead of following the title character into exile, it watches the consequences play out years later for his nemesis. While the focus is on Oppenheimer, the man himself makes no appearance in this phase of the film, as Strauss runs headlong into the bill coming due for a lifetime of treating everyone the way he treated Oppenheimer.
I spent the whole first part of the movie with the nagging feeling that this was all very familiar. That kind of vague, near–deja vu feeling. What is this reminding me of? A Great Man, a Genius, taken down by the petty grievances of Small Men, told mostly in flashback?
About an hour in, it hit me: this is all just Amadeus.
Which illustrates what I think is the core flaw in the movie. It knows Oppenheimer is a genius, but a genius in something neither the audience nor the filmmakers know very much about. There’s no good way for him to Be A Genius on screen in a way the audience will recognize, instead we have lots and lots of scenes where other people talk about what a genius he is, and then Oppenheimer stands dramatically filmed from below, looking off into the middle distance, while dramatic music plays, not entirely unlike the Disney Pocahontas.
Recall, if you will, the opening scene of Amadeus. Salieri, Mozart’s colleague, Nemesis, and possible murderer, is in a sanatorium nearing the end of his life. A young priest, who acts as the audience’s surrogate, arrives to take his confession, and by extension, have the movie narrated to him. The priest has no idea who Salieri is, or was, or that he was once one of the most famous composers of Europe, just that he’s an old man with a piano.
Oppenheimer never mangages the simple directness of Salieri playing his own compositions, which neither the audience or the priest recognize, and then painfully playing the opening notes of Serenade №13: A Little Night Music and have the audience and their surrogate instantly recognize it. Just playing Mozart’s actual music covers the majority of what Amadeus is trying to do, and Oppenheimer has nothing like that to fall back on.
Similarly, RDJ is genuinely extraordinary in this, constantly finding new ways to be small, and petty, and fragile, but the script never gives him a scene with the clarity and focus of Salieri leaning back into his chair and hissing with a mixture of exhaustion and defeat, “That was Mozart.”
It is funny that for both Amadeus and Oppenheimer, it’s the actor playing the nemesis who won the Oscar.
The other biggest problem with this movie is it’s lack of an actual point of view. It’s not apolitical so much as anti-political, there’s a big hole in the middle where an opinion should go.
This is par for the course of Nolan movies—this is the man who made the definite “Fascism is good, actually” movie with The Dark Knight, but with the sense that he made it by accident, just by taking Batman more seriously than anyone else, and then failing to notice or care where he landed. There’s an almost pathological refusal to comment on what’s happening, to have an opinion. Part of this is the fact that the majority of this movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and his point of view is, to put it mildly, ambiguous.
The movie knows there’s something interesting about the fact that Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists are Jewish, building the bomb to stop the Nazis. It knows there’s something interesting about the fact he can speak multiple languages but not Yiddish. It knows theres something about the way many of these Great Men were leftist/socialist/communists types in their youth, then put that away to work on the bomb, and then have that come back to haunt them later. But the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with that, so it toys with it and then puts it back on the shelf.
It almost makes contact with the world view that only a WASP can be a real loyal American and that Oppenheimer is questionable from two directions—being both Jewish and a possible communist—but never makes the connection. It gestures at the fact that the jews were being put into camps, but then never addresses that the bomb was only used on the people the americans were putting into camps.
It utterly fails to put the security clearance hearing in any sort of context of the McCarthyism panic of the time, and the fact that a small people were using an atmosphere of paranoia to act on an old grudge and air out their personal animosity. It’s there, buried deep in the mix, but you have to have done the homework first to see it.
Some of this is down to the film’s structure and pace. For example, the fact that Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s seeming rejection of their shared Jewish heritage is actually in the movie, albeit expressed in two single lines of dialogue, 90 minutes apart. The root of their animus is left vague. In reality, wikipedia will give you screen after screen dissecting their mutual dislike; the movie more-or-less summarizes it with the look on RDJ’s face when he realizes that Oppenheimer already knows Albert Einstein.
Mostly though, the movie refuses to comment, Were Oppenheimer and the others going to communist meetings because they were believers, or because that’s where all the hot babes were? It’s ambiguous.
The whole movie is weird and ambiguous and ambivalent, because the real guy was weird and ambiguous and ambivalent. What did Oppenheimer really think about, you know, all that atomic bomb stuff? It’s not clear! And this is where the movie fundamentally makes a decision that I understand, but disagree with. Nolan and company make the call to just lean in to the ambiguity all the way, so not only do we never get a handle on Oppenheimer, we never really get a handle on what anyone else thinks, either.
So we get a scene where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan project scientists are looking at pictures of the wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the camera zooms on in on Cillian Murphy’s face filled with an ambiguous expression. No only does the movie not show the final result of their work, we don’t really see anyone else reacting to it either. And, that’s it, huh? That’s our take on the atomic bombing, the Scarecrow looking a little perturbed?
In fairness, the last scene lands on “this was probably bad, actually,” and Gary Oldman shows up (like he did in The Dark Knight) to deliver the closest thing to a point of view that the movie has, which is that Oppenheimer needs to get over himself, a whole lor of people had to work together to unleash what they did.
One gets the feeling that the movie ends on Strauss’ failure mostly because that’s the only storyline that has actual closure, everything else just kinda floats away.
And look, I don’t need every piece of art I consume to share my politics, I don’t need every movie to end with Doctor Who materializing and reciting the Communist Manifesto. I mean, that would be bad ass, but I get it. What bugs me is not when people have opinions I disagree with, it’s when they fail to have one at all. Because this is a movie deeply uninterested in having a broader opinion. There’s a point where a desire for ambiguity stops being an artistic statement in it’s own right, and starts looking like cowardice.
At the end of the day, this is a movie that thinks the atomic bomb was probably bad, but on the other hand, the guy who didn’t like Oppenheimer didn’t get his cabinet post so maybe that’s okay? It feels like nothing so much as a three hour version of that dril tweet about drunk driving.
If you want to spend three hours watching the way Greatness is torn down by Small Men, and about the way horrors of war beget further horrors made by haunted men, I’d advise against this movie and instead a double feature of Amadeus and Godzilla. If nothing else, in both cases the music is better.
-
One of the the things I love about Star Wars so much, especially in the context of the late 70s, is that Luke spends the first act being this kind of character, and then moves past it. One of the reasons Anakin never really works is that he is that kind of character—he’s clearly supposed to function like Michael Corleone, but they failed to hire Al Pacino to play him.
-
The all-time champion of this kind of review, of course, is Mad Max: Fury Road where the most positive and the most negative reviews were both “It’s just one big car chase!”
-
There’s a couple of scenes where you half-expect then to start comparing midichlorian counts.
Let Me Show You How We Did It For The Mouse
I frequently forget that Ryan Gosling got started as a Mouketeer (complementary,) but every now and then he throws the throttle open and demonstrates why everyone from that class of the MMC went on to be super successful.
I think Barbie getting nearly shut-out at the Oscars was garbage, but Gosling’s performance of “Im Just Ken” almost made up for it. Look at all their faces! The way Morgot Robbie can’t keep a straight face from moment one! Greta Gerwig beyond pumped! The singalong! You and all your friends get to put on a big show at the Oscars? That’s a bunch of theatre kids living their best life.
(And, I’m pretty sure this is also the first time one of the Doctors Who has ever been on stage at the Oscars?)
(Also, bonus points to John Cena for realizing that willing to be a little silly is what makes a star into a superstar.)
A construction site! We need that good feminine energy: Barbie (2023)
Most of last year’s big movies “finally” hit streaming at the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them. Spoilers ahoy, but I promise not to give away any jokes, at least other than the one I used in the title.
There’s an almost infinite number of sentences you can start with “What’s really brilliant about Barbie is…” Here’s mine: What’s really brilliant about Barbie is how smart Barbie, the character, is. She’s not a ditz, or uneducated, or even really naïve—she’s an incredibly smart, accomplished person from a totally alien culture. The challenges she faces in “the real world” aren’t those of Buzz Lightyear grappling with existential crisis, they’re an immigrant realizing that the stories she heard back home are all wrong, and adapting.
There’s a difference between “naïve” and “misinformed”, and this movie starts all of its characters—the Barbies, Kens, business people, and students—solidly in the second category. Amongst the many joys of the film is watching all the characters adapt and learn.
In the center of this, Margot Robbie does one of the most subtle pieces of acting I can remember seeing. At the start of the movie, she looks and moves like a living doll; the way she stands, the way she moves her hands, the way she holds the not-quite-human expressions on her face. But by the end of the movie, she looks like a regular person—a regular person that looks like Margot Robbie, sure, but human. The expressions are natural, her gait has changed, her hands are real hands. But at no point is there a big change; she doesn’t get zapped with a “human ray”, she never shows off the difference by inflating and deflating while Lois Lane is in the other room. She just quietly changes over the course of the movie, subtly so that you never notice the change from scene to scene, but by the end she’s transformed. It’s a remarkable physical performance.
The movie has gotten an… interesting critical reaction.
The modern critical apparatus—pro and “internet”—has a hard time with movies that don’t fit in a comfortable category, and with movies about women. This one was both, and you could tell it really impacted into some weird seams of the structure around how movie reviews even work.
Just about every professional review was postive, some extremely so, and others with a sort of grudging quality where you could tell the writer was grouchy they hadn’t gotten to use the negative review they’d half-finished ahead of time.
Because the cognitive dissonance of “they made a movie about Barbie—Barbie, of all things—and it’s good” was clearly a struggle for many. My favorite way this manifested—and by favorite I mean the sort of laugh to keep you from crying favorite—was when everyone did their top ten best movies of the year lists in December. About half of the ones I read had Barbie on them, the other half not. But every single one that didn’t have Barbie on the list talked about it, pondering if it should have been there, justifying to themselves why it wasn’t. One, which I have lost the tab for and refuse to go digging for, had a long, thoughtful postscript after the end of the top ten list itself about how Barbie had made her cry four different times while watching it, but somehow these other movies were better. She spent more words on Barbie than her ten “best” movies combined. That’s a real calls are coming from inside the house moment, I think, maybe you’re trying to tell yourself something? If nothing else, maybe step back and define your terms: what do you even mean by “best”?
Roger Ebert (hang on, I know he wasn’t around to review this but this is gonna connect, bare with me) has a bit in his 2003 four star Great Movies re-review of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where he talks about how he reacted to it when he saw it the first time in 1968, and says:
Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art.
Barbie feels like a movie that’s going to cause a lot of similar reflections 35 years from now.
That said, my favorite review I read was jwz’s capsule description of watching it with his mother, wherein his mom just can’t engage with the fact that the movie called “Barbie” has the same opinion of Barbies that she does.
On the one hand, you clearly have the set of critics unable to comprehend that a movie based on Barbie could possibly be good, but also it’s hard to have an extended critical discourse about a movie where American Ferrera looks the camera dead in the eye and says the central thesis of the movie out loud.
I was just talking about the modern style to for Tell over Show, and this movie is a perfect example of that done well. We live in an era where subtlety is overrated, sometimes it’s okay to just say what you mean.
And—ha ha ha—everything you’ve read so far I wrote before the Oscar nominations were announced. I don’t have much to add to that particular discourse except to point out that regardless of context, any time a movie gets nominated for Best Picture and not Best Director, something is hinky.
Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed by the Oscars while Gosling was not is, of course, infuriating, but it’s also the new grand champion of “real life comes along after the fact and proves the movie’s point better than the movie ever could. (The previous all-timer was when Debbie Reynolds died the day after Carrie Fisher, so Carrie couldn’t even have her own funeral, which is a fact that should be tacked on to the end of every print of Postcards From The Edge.) The post-credits scene should just be Margot Robbie reading tweets about how Barbie should be grateful for the 8 nominations it got against Oppenheimer’s 12.
One of the other things that makes the movie hard to talk about is that all the movies you want to compare it to are made by and about men, and that feels a little strange.
The movie’s satire and takedown of toxic masculinity is as pointed and full-throated as any I’ve ever seen. It’s a David Fincher movie, but backwards and in high heels. But where Fincher tends to stop at “look at this sad weirdo”, this movie knows the Kens are victims too, and wants things to work out for them too. But, you know, tells a story about toxic men from the perspective of the women, which shouldn’t be rare but there you go.
It’s worth acknowledging that as a straight cis man who didn’t have Barbies as a central feature of his childhood, I probably responded to different things than maybe the intended core audience. (And, by the way, please someone do a metafictional satire of marketing and gender roles with The Transformers. I’m available to pitch.) But on the other hand maybe not? It’s dangerous to try and attribute any part of a work with shared authorship to a specific contributor, but this movie was written by both Greta Gerwig and her husband, Noah Baumbach, and there were definitely parts where I thought I could hear the voice of a fellow Alan. The Kens are a satire of a very particular Kind of Guy, and I can’t stand those guys either. The joke about “The Godfather” felt like it was written for me, personally. Alan trying to sneak out of Barbieland to get away from the Kens was basically my entire High School experience summed up.
There’s so many little, nice touches. The way that the “real world” is portrayed as realistically as possible, but the inside of the Mattel offices is a realm as strange and alien as Barbieland. The way those realms play as having their own internal rules that are totally different from each other. How casual the people in the know are with beings crossing between those realms, and the way they interact with each other. The fact that there’s a ghost, which is treated as being not supernatural at all, until it is. (In some ways, this is the best Planescape movie we’re ever going to get.) The way the Ken dance fight resolves. The choice of song the Kens use as a serenade. There’s a Doctor Who in it!
And, I don’t want to give anything away, but the thing Barbie says after being scolded by a student? When she’s crying on that bench? That’s the hardest I’ve laughed at a movie in I don’t know how long.
Mostly, though, what I like is how kind this movie is. It’s rare to see a satire that’s actually funny and loves both all of its characters and the thing that its satirizing—in fact, I’m not sure I can think of another one. Galaxy Quest, maybe?
This is a movie that wants everyone in it to do well. It’s a little disappointed in some of them; but no one really gets “a comeuppance” or “punished”, or really even a Second Chance; instead everyone gets an opportunity to do better, and they all take it.
There’s a saying that inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist; and this is a movie made by some very disappointed people. But it’s a movie that spends as much time showing a way forward, as it does attacking the problem.
The resolution manages to simultaneously hit “Immigrant assimilating while still being true to themselves”, “Pinocchio”, and “the end of 2001”, and do it with a joke. Brilliant.
Absolutely the best movie I saw last year.
2023’s strange box office
Weird year for the box office, huh? Back in July, we had that whole rash of articles about the “age of the flopbuster” as movie after movie face-planted. Maybe things hadn’t recovered from the pandemic like people hoped?
And then, you know, Barbenheimer made a bazillion dollars.
And really, nothing hit like it was supposed to all year. People kept throwing out theories. Elemental did badly, and it was “maybe kids are done with animation!” Ant-Man did badly, and it was “Super-Hero fatigue!” Then Spider-Verse made a ton of money disproving both. And Super Mario made a billion dollars. And then Elemental recovered on the long tail and ended up making half a billion? And Guardians 3 did just fine. But Captain Marvel flopped. Harrison Ford came back for one more Indiana Jones and no one cared.
Somewhere around the second weekend of Barbenheimer everyone seemed to throw up their hands as if to say “we don’t even know what’ll make money any more”.
Where does all that leave us? Well, we clearly have a post-pandemic audience that’s willing to show up and watch movies, but sure seems more choosy than they used to be. (Or choosy about different things?)
Here’s my take on some reasons why:
The Pandemic. I know we as a society have decided to act like COVID never happened, but it’s still out there. Folks may not admit it, but it’s still influencing decisions. Sure, it probably wont land you in the hospital, but do you really want to risk your kid missing two weeks of school just so you can see the tenth Fast and the Furious in the theatre? It may not be the key decision input anymore, but that’s enough potential friction to give you pause.
Speaking of the theatre, the actual theater experience sucks most of the time. We all like to wax poetic about the magic of the shared theatre experience, but in actual theaters, not the fancy ones down in LA, that “experience” is kids talking, the guy in front of you on his phone, the couple behind you being confused, gross floors, and half an hour of the worst commercials you’ve ever seen before the picture starts out of focus and too dim.
On the other hand, you know what everyone did while they were stuck at home for that first year of COVID? Upgrade their home theatre rig. I didn’t spend a whole lot of money, but the rig in my living room is better than every mall theatre I went to in the 90s, and I can put the volume where I want it, stop the show when the kids need to go to the bathroom, and my snacks are better, and my chairs are more comfortable.
Finally, and I think this is the key one—The value proposition has gotten out of wack in a way I don’t think the industry has reckoned with. Let me put my cards down on the table here: I think I saw just about every movie released theatrically in the US between about 1997 and maybe 2005. I’m pro–movie theatre. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but also that was absolutely the cheapest way to spend 2-3 hours. Tickets were five bucks, you could basically fund a whole day on a $20 bill if you were deliberate about it.
But now, taking a family of four to a movie is in the $60-70 range. And, thats a whole different category. That’s what a new video game costs. That’s what I paid for the new Zelda, which the whole family is still playing and enjoying six months later, hundreds of hours in. Thats Mario Kart with all the DLC, which we’ve also got about a million hours in. You’re telling me that I should pay the same amount of money that got me all that for one viewing of The Flash? Absolutely Not. I just told the kids we weren’t going to buy the new Mario before christmas, but I’m supposed to blow that on… well, literally anything that only takes up two hours?
And looking at that from the other direction, I’m paying twelve bucks a month for Paramount +, for mostly Star Trek–related reasons. But that also has the first six Mission: Impossible movies on it right now. Twelve bucks, you could cram ‘em all in a long weekend if you were serious about it. And that’s not really even a streaming thing, you could have netted six not-so-new release movies for that back in the Blockbuster days too. And like I said, I have some really nice speakers and a 4k projector, those movies look great in my living room. You’re trying to tell me that the new one is so much better that I need to pay five times what watching all the other movies cost me, just to see it now? As opposed to waiting a couple of months?
And I think that’s the key I’m driving towards here: movies in the theatre have found themselves with a premium price without offering a premium product.
So what’s premium even mean in this context? Clicking back and forth between Box Office Mojo’s domestic grosses for 2023 and 2019, this year didn’t end up being that much worse, it just wasn’t the movies people were betting on that made money.
There’s a line I can’t remember the source of that goes something to the effect of “hollywood doesn’t have a superhero movie problem, it has a ‘worse copy of movies we’ve already seen’ problem.” Which dovetails nicely with John Scalzi’s twitter quip about The Flash bombing: “…the fact is we’re in the “Paint Your Wagon” phase of the superhero film era, in which the genre is played out, the tropes are tired and everyone’s waiting for what the next economic engine of movies will be.”
Of course, when we say “Superhero”, we mostly mean Marvel Studios, since the recent DC movies have never been that good or successful. And Marvel did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, which is gave everyone an off ramp. For a decade they had everyone in a groove to go see two or three movies a year and keep up on what those Avengers and their buddies were up to. Sure, people would skip one or two here or there, a Thor, an Ant-Man, but everyone would click back in for one of the big team up movies. And then they made Endgame, and said “you’re good, story is over, you can stop now!” And so people did! The movie they did right after Endgame needed to be absolutely the best movie they had ever done, and instead it was Black Widow. Which was fine, but didn’t convince anyone they needed to keep watching.
And I’d extend all this out to not just Superheros, but also “superhero adjacent” moves, your Fast and Furious, Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones. Basically all the “big noise” action blockbusters. I mean, what’s different about this one versus the other half-dozen I’ve already seen?
(Indiana Jones is kind of funny for other reasons, because I think Disney dramatically underestimated how much the general audience knew or cared about Spielburg. His name on those movies mattered! The guy who made “The Wolverine” is fine and all, but I’m gonna watch that one at home. I’m pretty sure if Steve had directed it instead of going off to do West Side Story it would have made a zillion dollars.)
But on the other hand, the three highest grossing movies that weren’t Barbenheimer were Super Mario Bros, Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, so clearly superheros and animation are still popular, just the right superheros and animation. Dragging the superhero-movies-are-musicals metaphor to the limit, there were plenty of successful musicals after Paint your Wagon, but they were the ones that did something interesting or different. They stopped being automatically required viewing.
At this point, I feel like we gotta talk about budgets for a second, only only for a second because it is not that interesting. If you don’t care about this, I’ll meet down on the other side of the horizontal line.
Because the thing is, most of those movies that, ahem, “underperformed” cost a ton. The new M:I movie payed the salaries for everyone working on it through the whole COVID lockdown, so they get a pass. (Nice work, Tom Cruise!). Everyone else, though, what are you even doing? If you spend so much money making a movie that you need to be one of the highest grossing films of all time just to break even, maybe that’s the problem right there? Dial of Destiny cost 300 million dollars. Last Crusade cost forty eight. Adjusted for inflation, thats (checks wolfram alpha) …$116 million? Okay, that amount of inflation surprised me too, but the point stands: is Dial three times as much movie as Last Crusade? Don’t bother answering that, no it is not, and thats even before pointing out the cheap one was the one with Sean friggin’ Connery.
This where everyone brings up Sound of Freedom. Let’s just go ahead and ignore, well, literally everything else about the movie and just point out that it made just slightly more money than the new Indiana Jones movie, but also only cost, what, 14 million bucks? Less than five percent of what Indy cost?
There’s another much repeated bon mot I can’t seem to find an origin for that goes something along the lines of “They used to used to make ten movies hoping one would be successful enough to pay for the other nine, but then decided to just make the one that makes money, which worked great until it didn’t.” And look, pulpy little 14 million dollar action movies are exactly the kind of movie they’re talking about there. Sometimes they hit a chord! Next time you’re tempted to make a sequel to a Spielburg/Lucas movie without them, maybe just scrap that movie and make twenty one little movies instead.
—
So, okay. What’s the point, what can we learn from this strange year in a strange decade? Well, people like movies. They like going to see movies. But they aren’t going to pay to see a worse version of something they can already watch at home on their giant surround-sound-equipped TV for “free”. Or risk getting sick for the privilege.
Looking at the movies that did well this year, it was the movies that had something to say, that had a take, movies that had ambitions beyond being “the next one.”
Hand more beloved brand names to indie film directors and let them do whatever they want. Or, make a movie based on something kids love that doesn’t already have a movie. Or make a biography about how sad it is that the guy who invented the atomic bomb lost his security clearance because iron man hated him. That one feels less applicable, but you never know. If you can build a whole social event around an inexplicable double-feature, so much the better.
And, look, basically none of this is new. The pandemic hyper-charged a whole bunch of trends, but I feel like I could have written a version of this after Thanksgiving weekend for any year in the past decade.
That’s not the point. This is:
My favorite movie of the year was Asteroid City. That was only allegedly released into theatres. It made, statistically speaking, no money. Those kinds of movies never do! They make it up on the long tail.
I like superhero/action movies movies as much as the next dork who knew who “Rocket Racoon” was before 2014, but I’m not about to pretend they’re high art or anything. They’re junk food, sometimes well made very entertaining junk food, but lets not kid ourselves about the rest of this complete breakfast.
“Actually good” movies (as opposed to “fun and loud”) don’t do well in the theatre, they do well on home video.
Go back and look at that 2019 list I linked above. On my monitor, the list cuts off at number fifteen before you have to scroll, and every one of those fifteen movies is garbage. Fun garbage, in most cases! On average, well made, popular, very enjoyable. (Well, mostly, Rise of Skywalker is the worst movie I’ve ever paid to see.)
Thats what was so weird about Barbenheimer, and Spider-Verse, and 2023’s box office. For once, objectively actually good movies made all the money.
Go watch Asteroid City at home, that’s what I’m saying.