Tales from the Box Office

I keep up with the box office and movie industry.  I feel it gives a good pulse of society and culture.  I like to play arm chair movie manager just as much as the next guy, which seems to be a lot because people often write about the movie industry. 

The Atlantic has a piece about the horrible box officeincome of the summer, especially the last month, and while The Atlantic writer gets close, she misses two major things that show her leftist bent.  Misunderstandings like this are why the industry is losing money to places like Netflix. 

The first reason why the summer receipts are so bad is not so much betting on a few properties and putting lots of money into pushing certain movies, but rather the calendar itself has changed.  And of course we can always play the “maybe it would have been a better idea to put money behind the marketing of Captain Underpants rather than the Mummy”, I don’t think this is the real reason.  Rather, the changing calendar has changed the Summer Blockbuster window itself.  Take a look at the big money movies this year.  You won’t find an August opening movie until #22.  Yes, they are mostly still out, but in years gone by you would have found more higher on the list because August was still blockbuster season.  Why the change?  School.  Most kids are back in school by the second week of August now.  The time for movie theater trips is over.  Friday night football is usually going before September.  This is no longer movie time, but school time.  If you look at the list again you will find many pre-Memorial day releases.  Guardians of the Galaxy at #3, Logan at #6, and Fate of the Furious at #7 are both prior.  School is basically over for many by May.  They may be attending still, but meaningful school is over.  So movie time it is.  That gives them time to be out and well-reviewed by the time Memorial Day hits keeping financial returns strong.  Those movies also are all sequels so the movie goer is already invested.  No need to wait to release if the people are already waiting for you.  For movies appealing to younger children one can be released even earlier.  See Beauty and the Beast #1 and Lego Batman #8. 

And yes if you look at this by opening weekend alone it does not change much.  Still no August releases until #20.  Dark Tower was probably a bad movie and would have had massive drop off, but I bet its opening would have been better if it had been released in July.  The same is probably true for the Hitman’s Bodyguard, which is a typical summer movie fare, but only garnered 21 million opening weekend thanks to it being after summer was over because school had started back. Its nice performance on Labor Day weekend shows that it suffered, not from story, but from the fact August people don't see as movie time anymore.  

The other major omission from the Atlantic is the content of the movies that seem to make the most money.  Hollywood really does hate its main audience.  Just like political pundits cannot figure out how Trump won most of the country, they can’t figure out what makes a movie most of the country wants to see.  The top of the box office list is dominated by super heroes, which fundamentally are a good v evil tale.  The heroes are from the 40’s and 50’s and so are also fundamentally about American ideals including traditional morality.  That is half of the top 5.  In fact, every super hero movie released by Marvel or DC is in the top 10 including a Lego Batman movie.  The top spot is taken by an age old fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, which also then reflects good old morals such as not judging a book by the cover and such things that we used to want to teach our kids.  It did add in a few seconds of agenda pushing, but it was so in the background no one cared.  Dunkirk as well is about WWII where good fought evil and is about heroism in leaving no man behind.  Despicalbe Me 3 is a franchise for kids, and The Fate of the Furious is something like the 8^th or 9^th entry into its franchise and features the biggest box office name in the business today Dwayne the Rock Johnson. 

The only exception to the traditional morality and tales is at #10 in Get Out.  Now Get Out was universally loved by the Hollywood critics probably causing an uptick in its sales numbers.  And I do mean universally.  The only critic to be negative about the movie was Armond White, and he was lambasted on Twitter for failing to fall down in love of this movie.  The movie is about racism set in a horror movie genre using the suburbs as the backdrop.  The all white people are really racist, even the liberals, is not a theme that most people want to see even if it is done in a unique horror movie style.  Now it did make a lot of money, but it will fall out of the top 10 soon.  The movie will probably end up behind Boss Baby, another cartoon, and probably behind Pirates of the Caribbean too.  But the remake of “It” is clearly going to end up in the top 10 after the 3^rd biggest opening weekend of the year in September.  This will knock all exceptions out of the top 10. 

Now look at the list of movies that littered the flop category.  It is littered with two types of movies.  Liberal garbage, which comes in two types: movies that preach liberalism (see Fifty Shades Darker, Emoji Movie, and the Shack) and movies that are starred in by those who spout liberalism so much they are hated by most people (ex. Snatched).  Detroit might be the best example here.  A limited opening garnered it critical praise for its police brutality and civil rights themes.  It then went into over 3,000 theaters, and still made less than 20 million dollars.  And the other type of movie is the movie with good source material that was changed, ignored, or tampered with to remove its traditional message that made them classics in the first place.  Now in this group I do place those remake of 80’s and 90’s cultural icons that were redone in such a way to show contempt and hatred for them.  CHiP’s and Baywatch are perfect examples.  I watched CHiP’s, but not Baywatch as a kid.  Regardless of whether or not you liked those shows, they were successful.  Remaking them into pathetic comedies that neither does justice to nor celebrates the source material is bound to fail.  If you hate something, don’t try to write a movie for it.  Many Hollywood people today hate American anything from its past, so expect it to fail.  Also King Arthur falls here.  The heroic Arthur restoring order, setting up the Round Table, and searching for the Holy Grail is not in this movie, and the movie failed miserably. 

You could probably add a third category of just awful story telling.  The Circle would fit that.  This movie ended in such an awful and unintelligible fashion that you felt ripped off from what up until that point had been a pretty good movie.  I still get mad just thinking about all the foreshadowing that was flushed down the toilet for an ending that I still don’t think I get.  I actually watched the bonus features on that DVD to see what happened, and apparently the people talked about all of this emotion building in their main character that I never even came close to seeing and in the end she didn't act on any of it anyway.  The movie they were communicating was completely different from what came across on screen.  No one wants to see such bad movies. 

What is the lesson?  The lesson is the culture makers in this country are redefining morality.  They are committed to it.  Most of the country would prefer it not changed, but most don’t fight it.  They probably don’t have the answer which is found only in Christ.  Lots of people follow traditional morality without a reason why.  The next generation is being shaped now by these culture makers.  They are going to be okay with all the moral non-sense.  They just won’t know how to tell a decent story and will have no idea what entertainment actually is.