Why the New Studio Math — and the New Indie Cred — Won’t Let ‘Beau Is Afraid’ Be a Bomb
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In movies, the word “bomb” has always meant two things, generally at the same time. The first and most important definition of bomb is that a movie has lost a disastrous amount of money. Movies, in general, can’t afford to do that — they’re too expensive to produce. Bombs happen, but as a business model they’re not sustainable. A movie that bombs commercially has never been something to write off as a trivial matter.
The second definition of bomb, which is linked to the first (though not automatically), is that a film is spectacularly bad. It is, of course, not axiomatic that a movie that bombs commercially has failed as a work of art. There are movies we think of as classics that crashed and burned at the box office — like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Blade Runner” or “Intolerance” or “The Long Goodbye.” It’s become almost trendy to rescue certain films from the scandal of their box-office infamy. The mother of all those rescue jobs is “Heaven’s Gate,” the grandly picturesque 219-minute Marxist art Western that effectively put a stake through the heart of the New Hollywood, helping to take United Artists down along with it — though it’s a film that numerous observers have re-evaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece. I can’t agree on that one; to me, “Heaven’s Gate” remains a visually stately but indulgent wallow. Nevertheless, it’s always worth standing up for the principle that a box-office fiasco isn’t necessarily a bad film.
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But let’s get real: It usually is. Movie history is dotted with legendary titles that fulfill the double definition of bomb, illustrating the synergy of those definitions. Movies that lose a colossal amount of money tend to do so because they deserved to lose a colossal amount of money. They were spectacles of incompetence, hubris, poor judgment, or some combination of the above. I’m talking about movies like “Doctor Dolittle,” “Hudson Hawk,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “1941,” “At Long Last Love,” “John Carter,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Howard the Duck,” “Cats,” “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” “Speed Racer,” “Ishtar,” “Shanghai Surprise,” “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” “Last Action Hero,” “Cutthroat Island,” and “Town & Country.” Simply put: These are movies that audiences turned up their collective noses at, and in each case the result was a major lesson in how a movie can go outrageously wrong.
“Beau Is Afraid,” the new film directed by Ari Aster (“Hereditary,” “Midsommar”), is a highly conceptual, down-the-rabbit-hole, inside-the-head-of-the-filmmaker passion project that swings for the fences (at the risk of striking out). It is already an intensely divisive movie. It has its proud advocates, who think it’s a bold achievement. It also has many detractors, who believe it’s an obnoxious dud. I’m closer to Team Dud, though I agree with every word of Peter Debruge’s eloquent mixed review. To me, the movie is a three-hour masochistic mother-from-hell joke in which the castrating matriarch (think “Psycho” meets “Portnoy’s Complaint”) turns out to have been right, so that the lumpish hero, played in a one-note performance by Joaquin Phoenix (he gawks…for three hours), ends up deserving everything that happens to him.
Yet the point of this column isn’t that I think that “Beau Is Afraid” deserves to tank at the box office — though given the middling numbers it’s running up in wide release this weekend, that could well end up happening. My point is that the whole formula for branding a movie a “bomb” has been turned upside down in the age of streaming, Film Twitter, and the fading indie blockbuster. “Beau Is Afraid,” as backed by its distributor, A24, cost $35 million to make; that places it at the top of the heap for independent productions. But even if the film has a disappointing performance, the result won’t feel like what it would have 30 years ago.
Box office failure used to carry a whiff of shame. Just look at Quentin Tarantino’s recent comments about how the commercial failure of “Grindhouse,” in 2007, shook his confidence. As a big fan of both halves of “Grindhouse” (“Planet Terror” is a deliciously deadpan re-creation of schlock ’80s filmmaking; “Death Proof” is, to me, one of QT’s most mystical and rewarding films, a film that grows with repeat viewings), I’ve always felt that it’s one of those movies that “deserved” to do better, and that the basic flaw in the concept was simply asking people in an attention deficit era to sit through a double feature. Nevertheless, the film’s lackluster returns forced Tarantino to take stock, and that’s usually a smart thing for a filmmaker to do.
For big movie studios, failure is still failure. But the streaming companies, led by Netflix and including burgeoning studios like Apple, don’t treat huge budgets the way the studios used to. They have a subscription-based model, so the question of whether a thriller that Netflix spent $100 million on is going to “make its money back” is sort of irrelevant and outdated; it may be impossible to answer.
A24, of course, is not a streaming company. It’s a smart and even visionary theatrical-distribution company, with an edgy wide-ranging aesthetic that represents a brand, the same way that Miramax did in the ’90s. A company as bold and committed as A24 is part of what’s keeping movies alive. But even though A24’s films play in theaters, the company’s investment in Ari Aster (it distributed both his previous films), to the point that it now backs an idiosyncratic-bordering-on-avant-garde project like “Beau Is Afraid,” takes a page from the streaming world. Obviously, A24 wants the film to succeed, yet even if it underperforms the company may on some level have gotten its money’s worth. It has bolstered its brand identity. A24 has now defined itself, around the world, as the company that fearlessly backs a film like “Beau Is Afraid.”
All of that is shored up by the new way that a film’s critical response can merge with its box-office numbers, even if the film bombs. In the old days (e.g., the 2000s of “Grindhouse”), there was no honor in failure. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaborated on a high-flying double B-movie, but its lackluster performance spooked Tarantino, the most powerful filmmaker of his generation. I don’t think that’s going to happen with “Beau Is Afraid,” because film culture is now so fragmented, with certain niches claiming hipster bragging rights, that if the movie bombs, that very fact will be taken as a signifier of its daring, its quirky too-good-for-the-masses quality. If only a small number of people want to see it, that will ultimately be read as an expression of its cred.
“Beau Is Afraid” incarnates the paradox of a new era. That the movie is such a private yet epic surrealist mind-fuck is its key selling point. “You’ve seen Ari Aster’s horror movies! Now travel into the confessional recesses of his brain!” In today’s popular culture war, with corporate homogenization on the one side and independent daring on the other, Aster has become the poster boy for daring, and “Beau Is Afraid” is the billboard of his creative chutzpah. If it succeeds, that will prove, in the way that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did, that a new generation of moviegoers may be the most adventurous in…well, a generation. But if it tanks, that will prove that a movie company was willing to back a vision too daunting and eccentric for mainstream consumption. It will prove that even a movie bombing out can be cool.
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