Michael Cieply: Great Movie Weekend. What Else Have You Got?

Michael Cieply
·3 min read

It was a magnificent movie weekend. Barbie, Oppenheimer, Sound of Freedom. All hits, a blowout!

So what else have you got?

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The question sounds obnoxious, like its near-cousin, the always infuriating: “What have you done for me lately?”

But it’s an honest query, and an important one for a strike-bound, streaming-bent, pandemic-emergent industry that is still in need of revival.

The record-breaking weekend is a wonderful tonic, a welcome reminder that the audience, given half a chance, is still willing. But one weekend, even with the anticipated hold-over business from its hits, doesn’t mean a return to health.

That requires yet more watchable movies, lots of them, preferably offered in quick succession, while the viewers are showing an appetite. And those won’t be easy to come by in a Hollywood that has been shut down by dual strikes — raising the prospect of potential scheduling delays — and is already operating with perhaps a third fewer than the 900-plus theatrical films it released before the pandemic.

An old show business maxim says that “hits beget hits.” Tantalized by a film one week, a viewer is more likely to come back next week for something else. Before social media, the dynamic was driven by what producers and executives used to call “the wheel of movies” — just the right trailers attached to just the right hits, all of which kept the turnstiles turning.

Granted, there was a counter-theory. Some executives persistently argued that fewer films, and less competition, would mean more ticket sales for the lucky possessors of a major studio distribution slot. I can remember one competition-averse executive telling me — off the record, unfortunately — that his large studio had just acquired and closed a pesky, too-prolific indie distributor, because, in his words, “it was our turn to take one down.”

But those big guys were wrong, just as they were wrong about Betamax killing the movies. As we’ve learned in the backwash of the pandemic, fewer films means fewer ticket sales, and the audience, once turned off, takes an awful lot of wooing.

So with viewers looking in on Barbie, Oppenheimer, and, yes, Sound of Freedom, what can they hope to see next?

Strictly by the numbers, not nearly enough.

Relying on the fairly reliable Box Office Mojo counts, there appear to have been about 50 films in the theatrical marketplace each weekend this summer — a number that dropped by about half when the current hits sucked up screens last weekend.

Assuming that the choices re-inflate to about 50 in August, the available pictures will still number about half the late-summer count in 2018 and 2019.

Worse, the “wheel of movies” is missing its sturdiest spokes: tantalizing events like the trio that got things moving this weekend.

This isn’t to say that nothing can hit in the next month. It is foolhardy to judge the prospects of pictures you haven’t seen. But the scheduled wide releases between now and late August — Haunted Mansion? Gran Turismo? Blue Beetle? — are entirely different from the movies we just watched, and can’t count on Barbenheimer for momentum.

For long-term perspective, compare the present to 1999, when Week 25 in the movie calendar, the equivalent of last weekend, was dominated by Eyes Wide Shut and American Pie — like this year, one serious picture, one comic.

Each of the next five weekends found an average of 65 films in release, about one-third more than we’ll see this August. And on the “wheel” were a series of memorable pictures: Bowfinger, Mickey Blue Eyes, Runaway Bride, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Sixth Sense, The Iron Giant. Not all were major hits. But each did its bit to keep the audience involved.

That’s what a healthy business looks like. Great weekend notwithstanding, we’re not there yet.

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