Movie money is relative.
The Marvels is the biggest flop in the history of the MCU. But it had the same budget as Killers of the Flower Moon and made twice the box office. At least so far, Killers could get a rerelease in theaters to coincide with an Oscar push.
However, spare me the argument that Apple didn’t make KOTFM in order to make box office and instead spent $200 million to make a movie in order to bring in new subscribers to AppleTV+. That may be true but it’s also just an excuse.
Those of you arguing that Hollywood should abandon superheroes and other franchises and instead spend all their money on great talent and original voices (yes, I too would like to return to the 1970s) will have to reckon with the fact that KOTFM didn’t make its money back and that The Creator (haven’t seen it but have been told that it was a great original science fiction film) bombed.
Should the studios give Martin Scorsese (America’s greatest living director) money to make whatever he wants for as long as he wants? Emphatically, as a movie lover, my answer is yes.
Given that Hollywood is a business and the goal is to make as much money as possible will they?
As I shake my Magic 8 Ball (The Magic 8 Ball movie is coming soon to a theater new you) I find that the situation is unclear.
It’s also worth noting that both KOTFM and The Marvels (along with Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Fast X) are big box office hits if their production budgets are $50 million instead of $200 to $300 million. If your movie is considered either a bomb or a “disappointment” if it makes half a billion dollar in revenue in theaters maybe the answer is don’t make that movie.
That was a very long way for me to go to say that if I ran Disney, Universal, Warner Brothers or Sony I would still make superhero movies. I personally don’t think the well has run dry. But I would shoot for two of them a year, the budget for most of them (outside of what I hope will be a huge tentpole event) would be in the $50 to $100 million range.
Here’s Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav in November of last year explaining what the company strategy for greenlighting movies will be going forward.
“We’re going to have a real focus on franchises,” he said. “We haven’t had a Superman movie in 13 years,” Zaslav said in November of last year. “We haven’t had a Harry Potter movie in 15 years.”
Lets ignore the fact that those dates were wrong and speak to Zaslav’s point, which is the audience wants more of the franchises they love.
Now look at that Top 20 one more time:
- 1 Barbie $1,441,761,333
- 2 The Super Mario Bros. Movie $1,361,990,276
- 3 Oppenheimer $950,191,715
- 4 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 $845,555,777
- 5 Fast X $704,709,660
- 6 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $690,516,673
- 7 The Little Mermaid $569,626,289
- 8 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One $567,535,383
- 9 Elemental $495,851,987
- 10 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $476,071,180
- 11 John Wick: Chapter 4 $440,146,694
- 12 Transformers: Rise of the Beasts $438,966,392
- 13 Meg 2: The Trench $395,000,317
- 14 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny $383,963,057
- 15 Creed III $275,248,615
- 16 Five Nights at Freddy’s $271,913,275
- 17 The Flash $270,633,313
- 18 The Nun II $268,067,073
- 19 Sound of Freedom $247,801,879
- 20 Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour $246,365,022
I mean, given the actual numbers it is hard to argue with Zaslav’s logic here. Just take a look at the top 10 worldwide box office from 2022.
- 1 Avatar: The Way of Water
- 2 Top Gun: Maverick
- 3 Jurassic World Dominion
- 4 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
- 5 Minions: The Rise of Gru
- 6 Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
- 7 The Batman
- 8 Thor: Love and Thunder
- 9 Water Gate Bridge
- 10 Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Every one of those movies is a sequel. For those of us who never heard of it, Water Gate Bridge is a movie that was released in China and it is a sequel. For the rest of the list? Sequels, sequels everywhere.
The two films of that year championed by the cinema lovers I know were Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water.
Both sequels. And Avatar is the second part of a planned tetralogy. Also, I know no one ever asks movie directors about anything other than superhero films but I would dearly love to hear how Avatar (which has it’s own Theme Park Ride) is not a theme park movie.
And one final time, we’re just talking about money here. Any movie studio ought to be about more than money. You need to get up in the morning and do more than just think of ways to make more money, especially if you are the captain of a group of creative professionals who really do (or really should) make art for a living.
I’m gonna pull one more anecdote from William Goldman, the screenwriter behind Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men and The Princess Bride. Goldman was complaining (in the 1980s) about all the sequels and franchise films being made by Hollywood. It didn’t used to be this way, he said. I’m paraphrasing but essentially: An executive back then turned to him and said well we’re making this movie and it’s for this audience and we’re making this movie for these folks and then we have these two movies.
And these two films I have hope for.
Goldman’s conclusion (again in the dang 1980s) was that Hollywood studios weren’t even making those two quality films anymore. The whole thing had been swallowed up by franchises and sequels.
Which is my way of saying that all of us believe Hollywood could get it right if they just made the movies we want them to make.
Anyway, I think that wraps this up. Let me finish this off by taking a page out of one the greatest movies ever made and a giant box office bomb: The Shawshank Redemption.
I hope that those of you reading this all get to run a movie studio some day. I hope that when you do you make a bunch of really unique films that strive to be more than paint-by-numbers copies of movies that came before them. I hope that Hollywood makes crime movies, rom-coms and comedies again. And when they do I hope audiences show up in a theater for them.
I hope.
Dark Highways 
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