Hollywood has run out of magic tricks to conceal the fact that its raging didacticism isn’t entertaining.
The summer movie season, the biggest and most important for the industry, was an unmitigated disaster. The least attended, after adjusting for inflation, of any summertime period since 1981. That’s nearly 45 years ago.
The United States in 1981 also had roughly 110 million fewer people living in it. And there were fewer people at the movies this summer than that year. This is a five-alarm fire for Hollywood, no matter what they say about box office records of reaching certain hurdles of box office revenue year in and year out.
This October saw just $445 million in total box office. The last pre-COVID October saw roughly $1 billion in ticket sales. What’s behind all this, and what can be done to fix it?
Well, one of the big problems is that Hollywood made itself into a political activist organization. Stars, personalities and creative talent have spent much of the past decade telling more than half the country that they hate them and despise their way of life. That doesn’t help. They’ve prioritized subject matter with miniscule appeal instead of the broad, successful comedies and dramas of the past.
The COVID lockdowns supported by the industry also decimated moviegoing. Audiences stayed home, waiting for streaming services, instead of buying tickets to go to the theater. Then, in the aftermath, the industry chasing short-term streaming service gains, shortened the window between theatrical releases hitting, say, Disney+.
That’s all created incentives for people to simply wait a few weeks or a month for a non-event movie to hit the internet. So films are losing money at the box office, then hitting streaming where the return on investment is substantially worse for studios. It’s a mess.
One of the biggest factors? Quality has inarguably dropped.
Marvel Studios, one of the most reliable factories of mid-level entertainment, abandoned its formulas in favor of hitting specific quotients and targets based on political priorities. It backfired, spectacularly. Bomb after bomb followed their about face. Disney animation and Pixar churned out low-quality progressive slop, undermining their hard-won reputations. Now, outside of sequels, most audiences have stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I’m seeing a little bit of this from the inside of late. It’s clear that Hollywood is essentially one giant herd mentality with a hive mind, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphors. Everyone is afraid to step outside of the ever-shrinking box, so it’s becoming increasingly impossible to simply tell a straightforward story capable of entertaining anyone.
Fan service in sequels and familiar beats in remakes is all they had left to offer, and that well has apparently run dry. Fortunately, the collapse of Hollywood and the rise of AI is going to create a fantastic opportunity for UATV and Arkhaven, so if you’re not already on board with both, this is the time, because the ride is just getting rolling.
