Please Stop Talking About Box Office
A rant. A plea. An expiation.
There erupted in the aftermath of last weekend’s underwhelming box office returns what felt like a fairly egregious amount of hand-wringing online. Particularly lamented was the perceived underperformance of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, whose totals came in below projections and thus became this week’s evidence of an industry in crisis. Often this kind of fatalism is reserved for the failure of modestly-budgeted and/or original films, but Furiosa is of course the incredibly expensive fifth film in a franchise that spans decades, and a prequel to the previous wildly successful and Oscar-winning installment, so the narrative had to shift instead and once more from the struggle of the Little Guy in the face of Commercial Behemoths to the death of theatrical moviegoing itself.
There are certainly questions to be asked here. Is one of those questions whether or not the days of the theatrical experience are over? Maybe. Though I would suggest we consider some other factors first.
Furiosa occupies a complicated space in the modern cinematic landscape. Mad Max is tricky to discuss as a franchise because I don’t think the mass audience - certainly none of the under-40s, which is the quadrant that counts most to studio marketing departments - has much serious investment in any of its entries pre-Fury Road. On top of which, that last film was released almost ten years ago. And so is the failure of Furiosa a result of the overall franchise fatigue we’ve started to see? Or is its fate due rather to a lack of, if you’ll pardon the ghastly phrase, IP management over these last 9 years? Or is it somehow both?
Ask ourselves honestly: is Furiosa a character beloved/recognized enough to transcend Charlize Theron’s performance in her original appearance? To merit title placement with the attention of drawing ticket-buyers in large enough numbers to recoup its budget? Do audiences care enough to follow her earlier adventures as portrayed by a different actress (one who may be popular in online circles but who to the aforementioned mass audience probably doesn’t register all that much)?
I can’t speak to the quality of Furiosa because I haven’t seen it. I can only speak to my subjective experience of non-anticipation. I didn’t feel the need for a sequel to Fury Road, and certainly not a prequel - the Mad Max films have, to this point, shared the thinnest of connective material (to their benefit). The trailer also made it seem like more of the same in a way that none of the previous films in the series ever did. The advertising made it feel stale by emphasizing its aesthetic indebtedness to a predecessor that a decade ago did feel fresh and original despite being a sequel and which as a result became that rare event in the modern movie world: a genuine word-of-mouth sensation. Something today’s audience hasn’t seen since….Challengers, a month ago1. Again, I can’t speak to the film itself. But if I felt that way, is it possible others did as well?
Most everything I’ve read about the film has indicated that it’s actually quite good, but let’s not embarrass ourselves by pretending as if that had any impact on a film’s opening. And so the question can’t help but become – are we mourning the days of robust box office in general, or the failure of something that we had emotionally invested in as a hit pre-release and wanted to see succeed? Because while that’s understandable, it also represents an all-too common futile resistance to the uncontrollable forces of people’s taste and the fickle nature of the marketplace. Neither of which we as individuals can ever hope to fully predict or control.
So why do we care? Is it for the same reason that we always care about things that we have no control over? Because it emphasizes our powerlessness, and the last thing we ever want to feel is powerless?
I’m throwing out my considerations not as potential answers because ultimately I have no clue why the movie made the money it did. I am what Socrates would consider a wise man because I acknowledge that I know nothing. And knowing nothing, it feels silly to offer explanations or guesses, as educated as they may or may not be.
There’s another reason why it feels silly to pontificate over this stuff, and it’s one we probably don’t want to recognize: it doesn’t matter. There’s this insidious idea that has taken hold in the last decade or so, propagated by social media and self-righteous movie critics - each of which group has a vested interest in the illusion that their taste and media habits represent some form of activism - and that idea is this: that the audience member has a say in what kind of movies are made. That we vote with our wallets. This is a patently absurd assertion, frankly. Success can absolutely assure, in some cases, more movies made or more work secured, but make no mistake: these are decisions that are made at a level, and according to interests, that are beyond any that the day-to-day person can reasonably effect. Like American electoral democracy, the illusion of choice is granted in order to pacify a populace so that they won’t start asking questions or demanding better for themselves in a real or concrete way. Yet whereas an individual vote can indeed help sway an election, an individual ticket sale is barely a drop in the bucket.
But not only do most of us not have a say in what’s made, most of us don’t truly understand the ins and outs of how or why things are made - and certainly not when or under what conditions they are made. And we really don’t understand the financial intricacies of movie-funding or movie-making. I see people posting and talking about budget vs. gross, failing to even consider the additional costs of marketing and exhibition, not to mention additionally complicating factors such as inflation or variable ticket prices or per-screen average or week-to-week holds. It all leads to the sense that ultimately people follow and chew over and debate box office because it gives them something quantifiable that they can discuss since it’s much harder and trickier (and less rewarded in the media landscape) to discuss the nuances of art and opinion and personal taste (it’s the same reason that we can only talk about our reactions to things in terms of “best” and “worst”). Its movies as sports; box office rankings stand in for daily scores and divisional rankings2.
But none of it matters. Yes, the amount of money that any movie has to make in theaters to be considered successful is absurd and unsustainable, and when they continue to fail to hit those benchmarks we will still get blamed for it. But we have no control over any of it, and it only partly accounts for what gets made. And it also bears only the slightest influence on history. There are successful movies that become part of the culture. There are unsuccessful movies that become part of the culture. There are unsuccessful movies that become vapor and disappear into obscurity forever. There are successful movies that become vapor and disappear into obscurity forever. There are unsuccessful movies that unfairly disappear. There are unsuccessful movies that disappear fairly.
We have embraced the notion of the audience as consumer and have conflated the activity of experiencing a work of art with the financial transaction of purchasing access to it. That’s dangerous. But we have also gone a step further and developed not only a belief in the idea that we have a say in what gets made, but the expectation that we do. And that’s been disastrous because what it has done is fostered this notion of art and entertainment as an on-demand service. We tell ourselves that we’re voting with our dollars, and that in so doing we have had a say in future development decisions. But what we’re voting for has already been made, and barring a surprise over-performance it’s most likely that any franchise plans have been put in place long before we take our seats. Hollywood can be fickle, and they have shown in recent history that they have no qualms about removing movies from the schedule even after they have been completed. But it’s also a lumbering, slow-moving dinosaur that is loathe to make large-scale changes until it’s already too late.
For those who develop a rooting interest in box office, the truth that they try to avoid is the same as that which the studios have been trying to fight and avoid since they realized they could make money off of these things: each movie is an untested product, and you will never be able to predict with any certainty what audiences are going to pay to see. You will also likely fail to take into account the myriad other factors that go into what gets made and what doesn’t. Hollywood is not a pure financial meritocracy. Is it coincidence that Girls Trip and Crazy Rich Asians are the two recent runaway hits whose sequels seem to have been most notably stuck in perpetual “development hell?”3
It would be great if multibillion dollar corporate conglomerates made more smaller movies for less money. It would also be great if everyone decided tomorrow to log off of social media forever. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the bottle. Things don’t move backwards, and they don’t change for the better until or unless something forces them to. The great American filmmaking renaissance of the 70s happened because studios briefly admitted that they didn’t have the answers and turned the keys over to filmmakers and producers who did. But that was also when the people who ran the studios cared, on some level, about movies, even when the people who owned them didn’t. It also lasted for a much shorter period than we remember it did; as soon as the upstarts became financially viable, the studios stepped back in and ruined everything.
Are we on the precipice of something coming that will have similar ramifications? I don’t know, but I do know it’s a very different media world than it was then and so the result wouldn’t look the way we would necessarily expect. Moviemaking has changed. Movie viewing has changed. Mid-budget movies won’t save theaters because there are too many people who no longer want to go to theaters to see them. And honestly? I get it. Going to the movies is expensive, it’s a hassle, and the audience and experience is probably going to be subpar. I love all of that about it because it’s part of the experience. But I think enough people are happy to have moved on, and so I don’t know if moviegoing as I know it will ever come back. Not for the smaller movies, at least.
Another question we may not want to fully grapple with: has the theater experience become something that needs to be destroyed for the sake of movies as an art form to endure?
For most of movie history, box office grosses were trade information. The public didn’t know or care. It really wasn’t until the era of the blockbusters, when movies started making unforeseen-for-that-time money that box office became news. The rise of the franchise really exacerbated this in the 80s once the era of the fanbase came into being and we started building sub-industries around things that could make movies a cultural arena for easily digestible discussion - things like bo office reporting and awards prognostication. Box office became another bit of trivia to memorize, another way of commodifying the process. I’m just as guilty of perpetuating this as anyone (I’m nothing if not open an embracing of my own hypocrisies). I studied box office charts growing up, I’ve rooted for my favorites to climb the charts, and I play the Box Office Game daily. But if my performance in that game gets worse the closer we get to present day it’s because in part I have become disinterested in following the ins and outs of a film’s monetary performance. It has no impact on my life. It’s not fuel for or even a gateway to any kind of debate about artistic merits: it is speculation. And it has frankly become intertwined for me with the overall sense of a culture that no longer looks up to or wants to be the artists, but who wants to be the suits. God help us all.
-cs
This, however, hardly to a degree that exhibitors and theater owners no longer need to sweat.
I sometimes wonder if the reason people get so up-in-arms about streamers like Netflix not releasing viewing numbers is because it robs them of the data points they need to create these false horse-races. Of course people also want the illusion of power, or some sense of cosmic justice - they want explanations for why Show A got cancelled, or why Movie B never got a sequel greenlit, not considering that the answers to these questions are the same they have ever been (rich people use the information they need to create evidence for the reason they do or do not want to do things).
It is not.