Ok I got a doozy for you. 

My boss is always throwing movies out there and he has strange taste. He’s from a different time (late stage boomer) and he’s constantly suggesting these movies from the 80s that are blind spots for me. 

To Live and Die in LA was one (amazing) and Ron Howard’s Night Shift (still haven’t seen it) is another. 

I was a kid in the 80s and so all the serious non-kid friendly movies passed me by. Which means that I basically missed Mickey Rourke’s career. 

To me he’s the guy in Iron Man 2, Sin City and Randy the Ram. Oh and he could have made something as a heavy in the the remake of Get Carter if it had not been a Stallone vehicle. 

So that’s how we end up streaming The Pope of Greenwich Village which is somehow actually streaming on Amazon Prime.

So what is this? It’s Italian Cliches the movie. It’s not quite a parody, at least, no one intended to make a parody. But it’s also not the great crime New York movie it wants to be. It’s like if Martin Scorsese’s second-cousin woke up one day and said, “I could do that.”  

Rourke is a waiter who dresses like a mob boss and has the hottest girlfriend in the world, Darryl Hannah. But he’s also got an ex-wife and crazy debt and a needy kid brother (who is actually his cousin because they’re Italians). 

The cousin (Eric Roberts) gets him fired and then gets him to go along with a burglary that puts them in the cross hairs of the cops and the local mob boss Bed Bug Eddie (Burt Young). 

And you can see where this is going. Except, it never quite gets there and it never says exactly what it wants to say and then it ends on a bizarre turn that doesn’t work at all.

And, and, and I think I kind of love this movie as much because it’s a big misfire.

There is a burglary in this movie that gave me so much respect for directors like Michael Mann who throw heists and burglaries around in their movies all the time. You think it must be easy to direct a scene like that and then you watch this and see how badly it can be directed and you realize how talented some people really are. 

It’s like when people show you shots from weak Spielberg movies and you can see just how much time and effort he puts into everything and how good it all looks even when the movie itself is not a classic.

As for the acting it’s all over the place. 

Roberts turns the dial so far past 10 that the only person who could come close to him for screen ham is Nic Cage.

He also plays the weakest wise guy I have ever seen in a movie. Watching it I said to myself, “oh here’s why DeNiro, Pacino, and Caan all turned this down.”

No one wants to play that weak and I’m betting no one wanted to play opposite someone playing that weak. 

Burt Young and M. Emmet Walsh are safely ensconced in their usual just show up and look like lowlifes phase, Daryl Hannah is in a tragic romance movie, Kenneth McMilan is doing fine work in a movie about an old guy trying to make it and get out with One Last Score and Geraldine Page is playing the coldest, meanest New York mama you have ever seen.

She got 8 minutes of screen time and an Oscar nomination. Just wow. 

You know what this movie is? This is the movie I imagined the character Vincent Chase making as his big first hit movie in the world of Entourage. 

The tag line there was “I am Queens Boulevard.” And even though you didn’t see the movie you knew Chase was in a Mean Streets knock off picture that wasn’t nearly as good as he hoped it would be. 

Mickey Rourke can relate. He’s miles better than the material. But he’s saddled with Eric Roberts (who was almost fired and should have been) and he’s stuck with plot points that never go anywhere and he’s keeps delivering the goods in a movie that just doesn’t respect him. 

Watch him and you won’t wonder why everyone said he wasn’t just the next DeNiro or Pacino but that he was the next Brando! 

That wild ending I was talking about. Well, there was a plan and Rourke is in the middle of walking away as clean as bad kid on Christmas morning and then Roberts shows up and blows it to hell and then the movie just walks away (literally) with all of that. 

It’s this microcosm of what’s wrong with the whole movie in one big dumb scene. 

Have you ever hated a movie you wanted to watch five or six more times? Cause I think that’s where I am tonight.

There are writers who have very specific tics. If you have seen that video of Aaron Sorkin’s work quoting from himself you will know what I mean. 

Stephen King does a specific thing (mostly) as does David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino. 

And then there is Paul Schrader, the man known for The World’s Loneliest Man. Schrader has been doing a specific type of thing since he wrote Taxi Driver. 

I haven’t seen all of them but I have seen most of them and if you have either seen a character writing in a diary or watched a movie with an oppressive narration that examines the dark heart of America you either watched a Paul Schrader movie or someone doing a parody or an homage to a Schrader movie. 

Extra points if the main character sits at a small desk under low light and the voice over tells us what he is writing in a diary. 

Anyway, Master Gardener is that. One other Schrader thing to note, his characters are always wretched and either irredeemable or as close to irredeemable as possible. 

The guy who wrote Taxi Driver, Hardcore and Raging Bull does not make lighthearted comedies. 

Schrader, like Mamet and Sorkin took to directing. Schrader mostly directed his own scripts but he’s also been a hired gun. 

And here in the sixth decade of his career he’s suddenly made a trilogy of films about his lonely man. 

First Reformed came out in 2017, The Card Counter (which had one of the most shocking moments in film that year) came out in 2021 and this followed in 2022. 

The Card Counter had a line in it that has stuck with me for two years. The main character is talking about abuse, “The body remembers. It stores it all.”

Schrader is that kind of writer. Not everything lands but when he hits you it’s a gut punch. 

Master Gardner has a secret similar to The Card Counter and the aesthetic of most of Schrader’s films. 

If you ever said to yourself that you would like to hear someone talk about the most esoteric elements of gardening for two hours then buddy have I got a flick for you. 

However, spoilers, this might be the first thing of his I’ve seen that suggests redemption is possible. A movie that believes horrific people can change.

Except … I’m not sure the main character of Master Gardner deserves redemption and I’m not sure he’s trying to earn it.

There is a surface level to this but I also felt like there was something else, growing under the soil. 

At the end of Taxi Driver, Robert Deniro’s Travis Bickle, a pathetic psychopath, kills some very bad men and is treated as a hero. He drives off with a girl he likes as the movie comes to a close.

But, if you missed Schrader’s point, he will tell you point blank that what we have seen in the movie is just Bickle’s first killing. The victims of the next one will almost assuredly be innocent people. 

What I’m left thinking about, days after seeing Master Gardner, is not that the protagonist was trying to be a better person but rather that he had a specific plan and executed it.

Is this ending a happy one? Does he ever deserve to be happy? 

This is an intriguing film and a fine thriller. But I am not sure it is the film I initially believed it to be.

Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth is a man who in his old life covered his body in offensive tattoos. But only now, in order to enact a new relationship is he willing to have them removed. 

Are these the actions of a man who is changed by love? 

I am suddenly reminded of The New Testament, You can’t put new wine in an old bottle, the new must be poured into a new vessel. 

And then I found myself thinking about the world where Roth has come from. And, considering this — what kind of person is Sigourney Weaver’s Norma Haverhill? Consider that she not only gave him a job and a place to live but that she also let him (ahem) tend to her garden. 

She certainly saw those tattoos and never once asked him to remove them. 

The friction between them would seem to be over once Edgerton announces his intention to marry Quintessa Swindell’s Maya Core. 

There is a violent episode, once again deftly handled by Roth. 

But I don’t think these three will be happy on the same property for long. 

Everything we see in the film shows us a man who has changed and perhaps been changed by love. 

But are the things we have seen true? 

There may have already been too much discussion of the Bible in this review but I would note that Schrader was raised by strict religious parents. 

So at another point Jesus talks of a farmer who throws out seeds on the ground and some of them are eaten by birds and some grow in shallow ground are destroye, some of them are choked to death by weeds and some are planted in good soil and grow into good plants. 

What I’m trying to say is that this movie supposedly has a happy ending but I don’t believe that Narvel Roth and his new bride are planted in good soil. 

I think they are out here, with us, among the weeds.

My Godzilla kick is going to end here. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s probably exactly what a modern remake of Godzilla should be.

Briefly, Godzilla shows up, starts tearing up Japanese towns, a legion of hapless government employees try to stop him until they eventually are successful.  Spoiler? I guess? 

Shin Godzilla is a response to the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and the failed government oversight/response. 

Part of that shows when every government meeting early in the movie leads to another meeting. The point is driven home when one character asks why so many meetings are needed for a news conference. 

Wicked satire maybe, but not exactly riveting scenes.

Those of you who consider it an article of faith that Godzilla should look like a man in a suit will be pleased and the action/destruction scenes are really good. 

But 

A: I just don’t care about anyone here. 

B. Man in a suit special effects are not my jam. 

The Godzilla nuclear breath looks great here though. 

Finally, as a remake the movie makes us sit through scene after scene of people saying things like, “that destruction was caused by an undersea volcano.”

Hero bureaucrat: “maybe that destruction was caused by a giant, nuclear, undersea creature.” 

Everyone else: “That’s ridiculous.”

It’s like watching a vampire movie set in the modern day where no one has ever seen or heard of a vampire. 

Plausible? Maybe. 

But should you even try it? Maybe not.

The Holdovers is perfect at all the things that can either make or break a period dramedy. 

First, the cast inhabits every character. Paul Giamatti is great, as always, but he’s also the only guy in Hollywood who could make you care about a grumpy, lonely, mean professor at an elite boarding school. 

Giamatti has done it all in his singular acting career including being the lead in a hit rom com, investing the founding father John Adams with fire and humanity and being the face of a cable network (Showtime) with Billions. 

Giamatti’s Paul Hunham is up there with his greatest roles. 

Hunham is lonely, sad and despairing at the future of America. He is, of course, a teacher. 

In 1970 he is ordered to remain at the school over Christmas break so that he can watch the students who will not be going home for the holidays. It’s clear that he would have been there anyway, the movie gives Hunham no family. Hunham isn’t broken up about his aloneness, he has his books and he has his apartment on campus and what else does a man of his intellect need? 

Over the course of two weeks Hunham forges a bond with one of his students, Angus, played by newcomer Dominic Sessa and the school’s grieving head cook, Mary Lamb, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. 

Lamb lost her son in Vietnam and the war and the draft hangs over everyone and integral to the plot. Angus is an angry kid who faces military academy and the draft if he gets thrown out of another school. 

The ultimate source of his anger and fear and explored along with Lamb’s grief and Hunham’s decisions to wall himself away in a boarding school. 

The movie is funny but never sacrifices the realism of its characters for a joke. It feels like we just settled in to watch these lives for a few days and then we are sent on our way. 

There is high drama, to be sure, and fun but it all feels grounded and realistic. There is the whiff of a romance for Hunham and the movie handles it so well I found myself just nodding in agreement. When it’s resolved I said to myself, ‘yes, this is what it would be like, exactly right.’

Or consider that one supporting character is having what he calls a battle of wills with his father. Near the end of the movie we see who won, and we can guess why, but it is a reward for those of you who are paying attention. The movie does not call anymore attention to it than is necessary. 

There is, ultimately, a crossroads for the main characters and a satisfying conclusion to the story. I felt a little better about the world when it was over and whether it’s 1970 or 2023 that really is saying something. 

This is one of the best movies of the year.

Godzilla Minus One is so good it made me cry. Ok, that’s not all that hard so let’s try this. 

It’s so good that it redeems the idea of Godzilla movies for me. Most Godzilla movies are silly and cheap and dumb … but they don’t have to be. 

Anyway, I am not the biggest fan of the franchise. The first one is a classic, and it is impossible to argue with a movie that so completely nails the national identity of a country in the aftermath of a lost war and the invention of the nuclear bomb. It was as perfect metaphor for the atomic age as Frankenstein was for science replacing God in Mary Shelley’s era. 

But mostly, when I turned on Godzilla movies on television I didn’t last long. They were slow, silly and just not something I could sit through. 

I will watch nearly every episode of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, most any superhero thing right now regardless of production values and quality because we all have our things. 

But Godzilla is not mine. 

And then we get a flick like Godzilla Minus Zero and it just upends everything. Here’s what it does:

1) It makes you care about a collection of WW2 veterans who are trying to rebuild their lives and their country. 

2) It gives them realistic motivations and behaviors and makes them so compelling that you actually care if they live or die when Godzilla comes around. 

3) It also looks right (not great or immaculate or movie perfect) but it looks like a Godzilla movie should look. Hard to explain but it’s true. 

4) And every time Godzilla shows up it’s scary and fun. 

There is not one human being I have ever cared about in a Godzilla movie until this one. 

There were moments in Kong Skull Island (part of the American Monsterverse series that includes Godzilla) that landed well but it never completely overcame its video game like structure.

Godzilla himself and the disaster special FX are all believable even if none of it looks exactly real.

And the sound guys on this deserve giant bonuses. The old girl sounds great. 

IMDB says: Instead of creating a new roar, the crew simply played the original Godzilla roar over loud speakers and recorded the audio.

Seriously, give those guys and girls giant bonuses. 

I’m already tired of the trope of making a film look like the era of films it is emulating. But this looks like it came out of the 1950s and also looks amazing. 

Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki with astonishing heart and scary power. 

I’m still in shock, I think. How did this guy make a movie this good?

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. 

Ed. Note: This is the second column in this series. Part 1 is here.

Before we declare what we should and should not do about superhero movies as the fictional head of a movie studio we need to bluntly talk about why so many superhero movies got made over the past 15 years. 

Don’t overthink it. Hollywood made 6 to 10 superhero movies each year for the past 15 years because they could count on most of them being huge hits. 

Screenwriting legend William Goldman once put it very succinctly, “Movies are a gold-rush business.”

Up until Endgame, and for a few years now after Endgame, The Marvel Cinematic Universe films could be counted on to make back three and four times their budgets. Endgame made 3 billion dollars. The first Captain Marvel movie (which came to theaters shortly before and was tied into Endgame) made a billion dollars. 

The DC movies have not been as financially successful but they made plenty of money. Aquaman — Aquaman! — made a billion dollars.

No one made superhero movies because they wanted to annoy cinephiles or because they wanted to make your movie directing grandpap sad. They made them because they make money. 

Sooooo, what happens if they aren’t making all that much money anymore?   

We already have our answer. Here’s what Disney CEO Bob Iger said in July about The MCU. 

“There have been some disappointments. We would have liked some of our more recent releases to perform better,” Iger said. “It’s reflective not as a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond — in terms of their time and their focus — way beyond where they had been.”

Iger doesn’t say all of this is his fault cause he ordered all the television shows and movies in order to shore up his Disney+ streaming service … but it is. But please feel free to insert that gif of the hot dog guy shouting, “we are all looking for who could have done this,” here. 

“Marvel’s a great example of that,” Iger said. “They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention. That is, I think, more of the cause than anything.”

The MCU will release only one movie next year. It’s Deadpool 3 which features the Merc with a Mouth versus The Wolverine. 

In my mind, this one is the real test of “superhero fatigue.” If it bombs or underperforms that’s a good indication that audiences are not interested anymore. 

I’ll tell you one other thing that I can’t stop thinking about because of the way my brain works. John Siracusa talking about Nintendo on the Accidental Tech Podcast. This was in the years after the Wii console was released and before the Nintendo Switch came out in 2017. 

Nintendo was in the wilderness and everyone who knew anything about gaming was essentially saying the company should abandon its console business and license out its characters to other game makers and make money that way. 

Siracusa argued that the solution was really simple, Nintendo just needed to make a new console that everybody loved and would buy.  

That sounds really easy right? Just make something people love and watch the money train roll into the station.

Except, that’s exactly what happened. Nintendo made the Switch, it was a huge hit and they have been golden for a decade. 

I would submit that the solution for “superhero fatigue” is exactly the same. 

You will probably find no mention of superhero fatigue in articles or reviews discussing Spider-man Across the Spiderverse.  

Why? Cause it was a huge hit and nearly everybody who saw it loved it. See how that works?

James Gunn, the now head of DC movies, had same answer in April of this year.

“I think it doesn’t have anything to do with superheroes,” Gunn said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “It has to do with the kind of stories that get to be told, and if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character.”  

“We love Superman. We love Batman. We love Iron Man. Because they’re these incredible characters that we have in our hearts. And if it becomes just a bunch of nonsense on-screen, it gets really boring. But I get fatigued by most spectacle films, by the grind of not having an emotionally grounded story. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they’re superhero movies or not,” he said.  “If you don’t have a story at the base of it, just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are, no matter how clever the designs and the VFX are, it just gets fatiguing, and I think that’s very, very real.”

See, the answer is to just make great superhero films. Easy peasy. 

Obviously, making movies is a huge collaborative endeavor and it can be impossible to tell: 

A Whether the movie you made is good 

B. Even if the movie is great if the marketing and audience interest will be there when the movie comes out. 

Also, it’s pretty telling that no one ever talks about horror movie fatigue. I never see animated movie fatigue when one of those bombs. Right now, as I type this there is one superhero movie playing at the theater in my town. Here’s what else is showing: Wish (animated movie) Napoleon (historical biopic) Thanksgiving (horror) The Hunger Games (I dunno, teen action/drama?) Trolls Band Together (animation) and Five Nights at Freddy’s (horror). 

You might argue that I’m cherry picking a weekend and maybe I am. But let’s look at any given year as a whole. Google tells me 450 movies are released in a year but I’m going to discount that because I’m certain that a large number of those are indie films that only play in Los Angeles or New York. Or maybe they are streaming only movies that don’t count for our purposes. 

So, in terms of how many movies get released in a year let’s just argue that two new movies usually get released each week of the year and round it to 100 new movies at theaters. It’s probably a little more than that but for the sake of argument lets go with that number. 

Now, how many of those were superhero movies? The answer is 10. 

Is that a glut? Is the market oversaturated because superhero fans had 10 choices in 365 days? 

Or are there just a bunch of folks who want to, for whatever reason, insist on superhero fatigue? 

There’s a collection of critics and writers who simply do not like superhero films and are frustrated that the biggest movies of the year for the past 15 years have usually been in that genre.  

To them I say that same thing my mom used to say whenever I complained about dinner: “Life is tough.”

In my fictional studio we still make superhero movies. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. But, until the bottom really falls out that still seems like a money-making decision to me.

Just take a look at the Top 10 movies so far this year:

• Barbie $1,441,761,333
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie $1,361,990,276
• Oppenheimer $950,191,715
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 $845,555,777
• Fast X $704,709,660
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $690,516,673
• The Little Mermaid $569,626,289
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One $567,535,383
• Elemental $495,851,987
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $476,071,180

Even in a year where audiences have more superhero movies and television than they have ever had three cape and cowl flicks made it into the Top 10.

Now, if I made three superhero movies in my fictional studio next year would the budget for those movies be $200 million a pop?

Ummmm:  

Coming tomorrow: Is it a bomb or a budget problem? 

This column is about money and Hollywood, but please do not mistake a discussion about studio decisions for a discussion about what “should” be made. 

I think the biggest thing I want to impart here before we get started, is that you as an artist, a writer, a director or a creative person should absolutely not think this way. A great film, or book, or television show, is worth a million times more than whatever lucre it generates. Even an album that is initially considered a failure can launch a thousand bands and change a thousand lives. 

And we don’t know, have no way of knowing, if the ripples we create in the water cause a flood downstream.   

The people who call films or television shows, or novels or comic books “content,” are the enemy. They are the people Mel Brooks was speaking to shortly after a screening of The Elephant Man when the studio executives wanted director David Lynch to start making cuts. 

“We screened the film for you to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture,” Brooks said. “Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives.” 

Brooks’ autobiography, “All About Me,” has several little anecdotes like that. He screened Blazing Saddles for studio executives and the head of the studio pulled him aside and basically told him to cut every offensive scene out of the movie. Brooks, who later laughingly said if he did that the movie would be 14 minutes long, told the exec he would make all the changes and then ignored it completely. 

When the movie came out, and was a huge hit, he never again heard boo from the studio. 

But, if you are a studio chief, the one with the power to actually make things happen, the question you face every year is not about changing the content of the things that were already shot, it’s deciding what to make in the first place. 

If you have a billion dollars in the budget to make movies next year what would you greenlight? 

Here’s the top 20 movies by worldwide box office 2023 according to Box Office Mojo.

• Barbie $1,441,761,333
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie $1,361,990,276
• Oppenheimer $950,191,715
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 $845,555,777
• Fast X $704,709,660
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $690,516,673
• The Little Mermaid $569,626,289
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One $567,535,383
• Elemental $495,851,987
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $476,071,180
• John Wick: Chapter 4 $440,146,694
• Transformers: Rise of the Beasts $438,966,392
• Meg 2: The Trench $395,000,317
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny $383,963,057
• Creed III $275,248,615
• Five Nights at Freddy’s $271,913,275
• The Flash $270,633,313
• The Nun II $268,067,073
• Sound of Freedom $247,801,879
• Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour $246,365,022

The obvious caveats are that the year is not over and the numbers may change somewhat between now and December 31. But, I think the list is instructive enough at this point that we can discuss it.

Let’s go with the easy ones first. If you are the studio lucky enough to be in business with Greta Gerwig, the director of Barbie, or Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, you probably hand them whatever amount of money they want and let them do whatever they want. 

Isn’t that the easiest answer? 

“Hi, the movie you just made for us made a billion dollars please make another one.”

Of course, when you are dealing with studio executives the most obvious answer is not always the one you suspect. In my mind, Barbie was a hit because Gerwig made an impressive film and the marketing hit the right tone and it, and Oppenheimer became a moviegoing phenomenon on the same weekend.

People went to see them as a double bill! I’m not sure that is particular synergy can be cloned and recreated on demand. Nor, I’m sorry to say, does this mean that the movie-going audience is starved for original creative works for adults. 

You can certainly find people online cheerleading for this, and I wish them well and I do believe studios need to take a few more chances each year. They also should identify several writers and directors and just let them roam free. 

Of course, that strategy probably ends with a fiasco of the level of Heavens Gate. But we will get a load of interesting movies in the meantime. 

However, at least some executives somewhere think they know the key ingredient for success. They know, in their executive hearts what the masses want. 

And it’s a toy movie franchise. 

So, yes, I would greenlight whatever Gerwig wants to do next. Yes, I would also greenlight a Barbie sequel (with or without Gerwig but hopefully with) but no, I do not think the success of Barbie means that what the world is craving a cinematic universe featuring the trials and tribulations of Polly Pocket, Boglins and (I kid you not) Chatty Cathy and Betsy Wetsy.

It’s this kind of thinking that leads you to release Haunted Mansion in July instead of October. 

We’re going to do part two of this tomorrow. 

But in the meantime look at that Top 20 and ask yourself what types of movies would you greenlight? The top 3 so far this year are not sequels, so does that mean it’s time for more original movies from top talent? Or is the argument that the top three are not sequels deceiving. After all, while Barbie and Super Mario are not sequels they are based on existing properties that have worldwide recognition.

Do you find five directors who are as talented as Gerwig and Nolan, hand them $100 million and say, “Do what you want, just make it great?” 

Or do you say to Christopher Nolan, ‘Please pick any videogame you would like and our $100 million and make us a movie.”

No one will do that but I would dearly love to be in the room when they try.

Also, don’t sleep on horror movies. Will your horror movie make $500,000 million or more at the box office? Probably not. But if you make something of the caliber of Five Nights at Freddy’s (budget $20 mil) or The Nun 2 (budget $40 mil) and then make $200 or $300 million back you can probably sleep easy at night. 

All things being equal, knowing what we can know from the numbers, is it time for more superheroes, a videogame/toy line cinematic universe or something else?    

I have so many problems with this movie as a writer and a person who grew up on American television and films.

This movie has no structure. This movie has no plot. This movie barely has fully realized characters. It’s one of the few nails I’ve ever seen that refuses to be hammered down. 

And yet, it’s glorious. 

A flick that starts with a crime story but is never all that interested in the crime story. It sketches out a romance and then just decides we have had enough of those two characters and follows a different couple to the end. 

Also, the story and characters are not much more than sketches, fragments or dreams of night life in a city. A close up view of a few people but no macguffin, no real drama and no need for any of that. 

I don’t think I have ever seen a movie just fundamentally reject the very concept of being a movie before but this one does. 

And yet, it’s a wonderul hang out. I instantly fell in love with Faye Wong who just takes over the proceedings and steals every moment. 

Like I said, there was a crime movie that could have existed here. And then there was a romantic comedy. Near the end, it veers deep into romcom territory but that’s a little like saying you got 9 friends together and announced you were a baseball team. 

But if a team never takes the field is it really a team? Is it a movie if it rejects nearly every storytelling requirement you think you know? 

If I’m standing in a storm and refuse a raincoat will I come out dry? 

Writer/director Kar-Wai Wong dances in between the rain drops until we get to the credits.

A study of two people in pain. 

The movie shows us Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan who are neighbors. Both are married to other people and as we slowly learn both have been (mostly) abandoned by their respective spouses. 

The chemistry between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung is off the charts. Visually, it’s a stunning flick. Claustrophobic and colorful with scenes that vibrate with lust and longing. 

There is just a bit of humor. What Mr. Chan’s friend does with his last $2 made me chuckle. 

But the movie sums itself up with this piece of dialogue: 

Chow Mo-wan: I sometimes wonder what I’d be if I hadn’t married. Have you ever thought of that?
Su Li-zhen Chan: Maybe happier.

Those of you looking for something like Lost in Translation or Past Lives will be happy with this. 

I ended up here because I wanted to watch more Tony Leung films. He’s in Hard Boiled, one of the greatest action movies ever made and one of my personal faves and he turned up in Shang-Chi. 

And he’s got a magnetic presence and the acting chops to play everything from a wounded lover to an action hero. 

But having seen this now I want to track down all of Director Wong Kar-wai’s films. And I want to watch this again without the stress of making sure I’m not missing anything. 

For those of us who love the arts there are few things better than discovering a new thing. When you get around to a band that was popular decades before you were born and now you get the joy of listening to every album, finding the new things to love. 

And with movies it is the same with directors, screenwriters and actors and actresses. So I’m looking forward to tracking more of Kar-wai’s work down. 

Anyway, In The Mood For Love drops the viewer into deep water and you will either sink or swim. As the kids say, you will vibe with this or you won’t.