Another year, another conversation about how much money movies are making. As the last of the big summer movies drop into wide release and the next line-up of festival season award contenders make their debut, we’re still trapped in a cycle of talk about whether these movies are (or aren’t) profitable for the studios that make them. Has anyone else not gotten tired of this? Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping track of box office as a hobby or to gauge the general health of the industry, but the monolithic focus on money versus talking about whether or not you actually like the movies in question, and why, feels like it’s reached a nadir.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s gotten worse than ever in the internet age, especially when many who follow and cover the film industry are now perpetually worried about the potential downfall of theatrical distribution, turning every new release into a referendum on whether The Movies™ are about to die out as an art form. (Or not, as the case may be - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just hit it big at the box office.)
So let’s take a look at why we need to stop worrying about box office numbers and should get back to talking about movies as movies.
Are We Talking About Star Wars Again?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: All of this can be blamed on Star Wars. Well, a lot of it anyway, since the most recent Star Wars trilogy is one of the biggest examples of this box office mindset. Despite each installment of the new trilogy earning at least a billion worldwide, and The Force Awakens in particular crossing the rare $2 billion threshold, the trilogy has an incredibly mixed reception. Obviously opinions vary, but I find The Last Jedi to be the only film of the three to match the highs of the original trilogy, with The Force Awakens being an entertaining if slight entry while The Rise of Skywalker stands as the worst of the whole saga. The movies made a ton of money and are objectively successful on that front, but whether or not they’ll stand the test of time as art objects is an entirely different conversation.
The Force Awakens’ monumental box office impact has had a negative net effect on the industry because it set unrealistic expectations for how future Star Wars films were supposed to perform, when it was a lightning in a bottle moment that could never hope to be replicated. Rogue One, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker having to settle for just one billion each (oh, the horror) was seen as a downturn from TFA, with some bitter Star Wars Legends fans saying it was proof that audiences rejected these new films over the previous Expanded Universe. Solo making close to $400 million worldwide is a respectable number for a Han Solo spin-off film starring a new actor, but the film flopped because Disney colossally overspent on the project, likely in the hopes of generating another billion-dollar grosser when that was never going to happen.
Production and budget knowledge are now so much of the cultural conversation around big blockbusters and Star Wars in particular that it’s become difficult to talk about these movies without bringing them up. The lack of a clear creative vision for many of Lucasfilm’s projects (again, outside of exceptions like TLJ or Andor) can sometimes mean that out-of-movie concerns can be the most interesting thing to talk about. But isn’t that a sad state of affairs? At least with previous Star Wars trilogies, people talked about what they did or didn’t like about the films themselves, and how successful they were on their artistic merits. But nowadays we’re arguing about when Star Wars “fell off” with the general public by analyzing box office numbers, likely because there isn’t much meat left on the bone. But if that’s the case, perhaps we should try focusing on other, more interesting movies. Does all the oxygen really have to be taken up by the most expensive blockbuster entries? Sadly, it seems that more so than ever, the answer is yes.
The Ballooning Blockbuster Problem
One of the biggest reasons why we’re in the movie moment we’re in is because blockbuster films, mostly within the same handful of franchises, have become the largest piece of the box-office pie. Big studio movies have typically always been the highest earners, but in the decades after the collapse of the studio system at the end of the 1960s, films from bold directors and a wide variety of genres could become some of the most remembered and talked about films of a given year. But when modern blockbuster trends such as heavy VFX integration, a focus on serialization, and building massive worlds out of sci-fi, fantasy and superhero properties were cemented with the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999 (thanks, Star Wars!), we also saw a notable shift in the way movies were talked about in popular culture, a shift that happened in tandem with the rise of the internet and the way nerd-friendly IPs took over movie discourse.
Instead of movies from all kinds of genres and directors getting discussed, mass media in the internet age put most of their energy into covering the newest science-fiction, superhero and franchise films at the expense of everything else. Even we at IGN are a part of this, extensively covering Marvel and DC films, Star Wars projects, and other blockbuster properties far more often than anything else. We and everyone else do it because that’s what audiences who click on and read articles about movies generally want to see, and this creates a vicious cycle where conversation about mid-budget or independent films is pretty much only covered either during the festival and award seasons or through niche outlets that cater to a comparatively small readership. This in turn fosters a lack of curiosity from mainstream audiences.
This isn’t the same doomer mindset as box-office hawks who sometimes get too anvilicious by saying every mid-budget or original film flops nowadays (which isn’t true), but a worrying observation that the discourse around movies from both the author and readership side has become too myopic. Every year sees the release of compelling and idiosyncratic films from talented filmmakers, but they usually aren’t coming out as $200 million tent poles for the major studios. They’re the sorts of movies you have to look for, the ones you discover out of film festivals or from smaller distribution labels that are often released in theaters to smaller crowds but more interesting conversations. They’re movies that sometimes require a bit of effort on the audience’s part, but being willing to step out of your comfort zone and approach a new piece of art that challenges and possibly even inspires you can be far more rewarding than yet another serving of the same type of movie you already know you like.
The Test Is Time, Not Money
The highest-grossing films will be just fine. They’ve made their money and done what they needed to for their creators. But a high box-office total does not equal lasting cultural relevance. Without naming names (ahem, the Lion King remake), some of the most profitable films of all time seem to have remarkably short shelf lives. Meanwhile, some of the most acclaimed and beloved films were movies that stumbled out of the gate on opening weekend. Remember how John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner came out on the same day in 1982 and both failed at the box office? Now it’s impossible to find a best science-fiction films of all time list without both of them included. Around the same time, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession was little known upon its initial release in 1981, but is now one of the most beloved and referenced films among horror fans, even influencing 2024’s The First Omen from Arkasha Stevenson.
More recently, much of the discussion around movies like Furiosa are about how it struggled to recoup its costs, to the point that some have said it shouldn’t have even been made in the first place. That’s a frankly ridiculous argument to be making when it’s an excellent film with a fantastic lead performance from Anya Taylor-Joy that deserves to be talked about for its artistic merits instead of whether or not Warners’ investors are happy with its rate of return. Or take Godzilla Minus One, which made a profit, but its worldwide total is maybe 10% of what many Marvel and Star Wars features make. Yet its award-winning achievements in CGI and strong human story will ensure it remains a pivotal part of Godzilla’s long-running cinematic legacy for decades to come, and will probably endure far longer than many of the lucrative but empty legacy sequels and nostalgic cash-ins we’re seeing from nearly every franchise.
What makes all of the money talk about movies even more frustrating is that many on the internet believe they know how money in Hollywood works when they really don’t. Without getting into the opaque nature of cinematic bookkeeping, there are so many other factors such as ticket inflation, the adjustment of back-end deals in the age of the streaming market, pre-selling to international distributors and the increasing importance of global audiences, and blockbusters often dropping like rocks in their second and third weekends, that it’s difficult for even industry veterans to keep track of it all. Seeing a movie shouldn’t be an exercise in accounting. Yes, it can be gratifying for a personal fave to do well at the box office because you know many others are seeing and enjoying the same movie as you. But movies last in the cultural imagination because they spark emotions in their viewers, because there’s something artistically and creatively compelling in them that speaks to audiences years or even decades later.
If you want to make a movie that truly stands the test of time, that artistic spark is far more valuable than a record-breaking opening weekend. If we all kept that in mind when we talked about movies, perhaps the discussion would be far more pleasant instead of punishing.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/lets-stop-worrying-about-the-box-office-and-start-talking-about-the-movies-again