Beverly Hills Cop was the biggest movie of the year at the domestic box office and marked the moment when a generational talent became the most famous person in the world. Hollywood would make nothing but Beverly Hills Cops headlined by nothing but Eddie Murphys and spend all year crashing them into one another like Matchbox cars if ther…
Beverly Hills Cop was the biggest movie of the year at the domestic box office and marked the moment when a generational talent became the most famous person in the world. Hollywood would make nothing but Beverly Hills Cops headlined by nothing but Eddie Murphys and spend all year crashing them into one another like Matchbox cars if there were any way to plan for something like that.
Things like Where the Crawdads Sing and Bullet Train got on base by the skin of their teeth but neither seems like a promising path forward to me. Crawdads drafted behind its source material’s former popularity and prestige so people showed up despite the lousy reviews--it was not supposed to be a Nicholas Sparks movie, but that’s what we got. The 90 million dollar Bullet Train really should have made a bit more money, but more distressingly it’s built out of deadstock parts like Brad Pitt and a hard R rating that seem to be permanently out of manufacture. It’s a whole cast of great actors who will never be Brad Pitt famous--and consequently won’t headline any 90 million dollar non-IP R-rated action movies--because they didn’t have the chance to make movies in the 90s when there was still an incentive to foster a movie star’s career.
I’d bet that Black Phone wound up being way more profitable than Bullet Train, but nobody is worried about Blumhouse or the nifty and modest genre movies they make drying up and blowing away. They aren’t resource-intensive and one hit pays for 20 misses. If you want to make money, you make those. If you want to make Big Tech money, you make some IP pabulum. You only make Bullet Train if you want to be in business with Brad Pitt for the sake of Pitt, and they just don’t make them like him anymore.
Beverly Hills Cop was a 13m movie (38m in today's money) that used the third or fourth star who showed up for the role. You would indeed think that Hollywood would make nothing but such movies but they demonstrably don't. How many mid-budget movies aimed at being entertaining to wide swathes of America do you see right now?
And if Bullet Train was just !!BRAD PITT!! than Babylon would have done 100m, right? The difference is that Bullet Train is a movie that looked entertaining. Virtually nothing from the last few months LOOKS entertaining. Even The Fabelmans' trailer is all about magic of cinema rather than this is an enjoyable, bittersweet coming of age movie. Make movies people want to see. Crawdads is up to 124m worldwide on a 24m budget with no stars whatsoever. Because people wanted to see it.
All interesting thoughts from both y'all. We should definitely write off CRAWDADS as a source-fueled phenomenon. That book was a huge deal, and the pre-release buzz about the author wanted for questioning in Africa probably helped rather than hindered its box office. (I saw the film in a mixed public/press screening and the public folks were absolutely thrilled with it.)
I think James is right here about some of these big movies not seeming very entertaining to audiences. BABYLON and FABELMANS would be tough sells under any circumstances, but I do think the latter would have hooked audiences had they walked through the doors. They just didn't. The HEAVEN'S GATE comparison fascinates me, too. It almost feels like name directors are gobbling up budgets from whatever streaming service is desperate enough to bid for them and then burning them on uncommercial work (e.g. WHITE NOISE, BARDO, BABYLON). Noble but not sustainable.
It's a 2.5 hour film about a Jewish family. I mean, Avalon didn't clean up at the box office either. Brighton Beach Memoirs is more of a comedy than Avalon or Fabelmans but it was not a hit either.
And I say this as someone who has The Fabelmans as my #1 film in 2022 and have urged friends to see it.
Agreed. Of all the prestige-y Hollywood films this season, The Fabelmans was the one I felt most comfortable recommending to regular folks like my family members. But then... how do you sell them on it? I struggled to get them excited. Neither the Spielberg filmmaking origin story nor the drama about a rocky marriage are all that hooky, much as those elements play out together so beautifully in the film. I guess we can just be glad it was made and move on!
Yeah, the best I could do was say it was a warm, humanistic movie about the ups and downs of a family's relationships with each other. I hope maybe it gets a Best Picture nom and a re-release that will maybe pad its BO totals (a bit anyway).
aside from the Hanukkah scenes at the beginning and the anti-semitic bullying at the high school, and Judd Hirsch's entire scene.... ok, it's pretty jewish, I guess. but doesn't every movie about a quirky family have some details that people will find foreign? it's not something I thought about at all while watching it.
I'd honestly compare it to something like The Ice Storm, which was pretty highly acclaimed and popular in an art-house sense, and (according to wikipedia) only grossed $8m?? in '97! so is it really doing so bad?
My minor, MINOR source of encouragement is it's now up to $12.6M after a terrible opening. My initial fear was it would be She Said (horrible opening, absolutely nothing after either). But it has inched up a TINY bit, which means some of us are convincing at least a few people to see it.
When I was reading James’s Heaven’s Gate comparison it struck me as unexpected, inevitable, and spot-on. I don’t think people expected a straight-A student like Chazelle to turn in such an assaultive piece of work, and consequently he seems to have burned a lot of goodwill in addition to a mountain of cash. I’m a pretty big fan, but his next movie will probably be somewhat deformed by the reception this one got.
It’s really too bad that Fabelmans was hard to market. The trailer made it look like a crass parade of Spielbergian tics rather than the mature apotheosis of them. People will see it eventually, and they’ll love it, and this Spielberg kid is gonna be just fine, but I’m nervous that there are now several generations of directors underneath him who aren’t going to get the opportunities to make movies like that anymore because audiences just don’t show up for them. Hollywood used to be a place for transforming money into prestige which you could then use to get more money. Now the money is the prestige and the cohort of executives running the place don’t seem to enjoy movies at all.
Right, but the thing to worry about is that Crawdads scored big at the box office and STILL doesn’t have any movie stars in it. Did it really generate any momentum outside of itself? Is it Daisy Edgar-Jones’s A River Runs Through It moment, or is it a financially successful one-off that mined some coin out of some popular source material before evaporating from the popular consciousness?
I’m not saying Bullet Train’s receipts are attributable solely to Pitt--he’s surprisingly inconsistent as a pure box office draw, all-told--but rather that Bullet Train (or Babylon, or Ad Astra) exists in the first place because of his well-earned cachet, which is an increasingly rare commodity in film.
You’re 100% right that people saw it because it looked fun, but it troubles me that despite best practices being followed by all involved and a killer trailer it only managed 100 million domestic. It’s a break-even proposition that will be marginally profitable after the last bean is counted, which is not really what Hollywood does anymore.
I think the prevailing theme here is the collapse of the star system. A movie like Ticket To Paradise certainly benefited from old stars likes Clooney/Roberts-- god knows, it had nothing much to offer besides that-- but Daisy Edgar-Jones isn't a bankable star (or even known by many people who saw Crawdads, I bet) and even Pitt's success is movie-dependent. Few are going to see a film like Babylon on faith, but they'll turn out for Bullet Train because it looks like a bunch of badasses fighting on a fast-moving train.
Clooney is also the most obvious analogue to Pitt as someone who can get a movie with a decent budget made (or at least up until recently could) based far more on Clout than on consistent box office.
I do think that we're not in some sort of 'never again' movie star scenario though - it'll work differently than it has in the past but fully believe there is a generational switchover which will eventually lead us to a whole lot of new gen. top draws.
Side thought - do we consider Daniel Craig to be a Pitt-level star at this point? With all that Bond boost, he certainly helped make the first Knives Out a big success.
Re: stars, I would be interested to see one of the Stranger Things kids headline a major studio release to see if their Netflix popularity carries over. David Harbour did all right with the admittedly high concept Violent Night.
Harbour in Violent Night is an interesting case. He clearly has the attention and loyalty of his audience and he was able to leverage it to bring extra eyes to a Blumhouse-style potboiler. I bet Jon Hamm
Beverly Hills Cop was the biggest movie of the year at the domestic box office and marked the moment when a generational talent became the most famous person in the world. Hollywood would make nothing but Beverly Hills Cops headlined by nothing but Eddie Murphys and spend all year crashing them into one another like Matchbox cars if there were any way to plan for something like that.
Things like Where the Crawdads Sing and Bullet Train got on base by the skin of their teeth but neither seems like a promising path forward to me. Crawdads drafted behind its source material’s former popularity and prestige so people showed up despite the lousy reviews--it was not supposed to be a Nicholas Sparks movie, but that’s what we got. The 90 million dollar Bullet Train really should have made a bit more money, but more distressingly it’s built out of deadstock parts like Brad Pitt and a hard R rating that seem to be permanently out of manufacture. It’s a whole cast of great actors who will never be Brad Pitt famous--and consequently won’t headline any 90 million dollar non-IP R-rated action movies--because they didn’t have the chance to make movies in the 90s when there was still an incentive to foster a movie star’s career.
I’d bet that Black Phone wound up being way more profitable than Bullet Train, but nobody is worried about Blumhouse or the nifty and modest genre movies they make drying up and blowing away. They aren’t resource-intensive and one hit pays for 20 misses. If you want to make money, you make those. If you want to make Big Tech money, you make some IP pabulum. You only make Bullet Train if you want to be in business with Brad Pitt for the sake of Pitt, and they just don’t make them like him anymore.
Beverly Hills Cop was a 13m movie (38m in today's money) that used the third or fourth star who showed up for the role. You would indeed think that Hollywood would make nothing but such movies but they demonstrably don't. How many mid-budget movies aimed at being entertaining to wide swathes of America do you see right now?
And if Bullet Train was just !!BRAD PITT!! than Babylon would have done 100m, right? The difference is that Bullet Train is a movie that looked entertaining. Virtually nothing from the last few months LOOKS entertaining. Even The Fabelmans' trailer is all about magic of cinema rather than this is an enjoyable, bittersweet coming of age movie. Make movies people want to see. Crawdads is up to 124m worldwide on a 24m budget with no stars whatsoever. Because people wanted to see it.
All interesting thoughts from both y'all. We should definitely write off CRAWDADS as a source-fueled phenomenon. That book was a huge deal, and the pre-release buzz about the author wanted for questioning in Africa probably helped rather than hindered its box office. (I saw the film in a mixed public/press screening and the public folks were absolutely thrilled with it.)
I think James is right here about some of these big movies not seeming very entertaining to audiences. BABYLON and FABELMANS would be tough sells under any circumstances, but I do think the latter would have hooked audiences had they walked through the doors. They just didn't. The HEAVEN'S GATE comparison fascinates me, too. It almost feels like name directors are gobbling up budgets from whatever streaming service is desperate enough to bid for them and then burning them on uncommercial work (e.g. WHITE NOISE, BARDO, BABYLON). Noble but not sustainable.
is Fabelmans a tough sell? I can think of many successful films in it's category. or are you making a comparison to Major Studio Productions?
It's a 2.5 hour film about a Jewish family. I mean, Avalon didn't clean up at the box office either. Brighton Beach Memoirs is more of a comedy than Avalon or Fabelmans but it was not a hit either.
And I say this as someone who has The Fabelmans as my #1 film in 2022 and have urged friends to see it.
Agreed. Of all the prestige-y Hollywood films this season, The Fabelmans was the one I felt most comfortable recommending to regular folks like my family members. But then... how do you sell them on it? I struggled to get them excited. Neither the Spielberg filmmaking origin story nor the drama about a rocky marriage are all that hooky, much as those elements play out together so beautifully in the film. I guess we can just be glad it was made and move on!
Yeah, the best I could do was say it was a warm, humanistic movie about the ups and downs of a family's relationships with each other. I hope maybe it gets a Best Picture nom and a re-release that will maybe pad its BO totals (a bit anyway).
aside from the Hanukkah scenes at the beginning and the anti-semitic bullying at the high school, and Judd Hirsch's entire scene.... ok, it's pretty jewish, I guess. but doesn't every movie about a quirky family have some details that people will find foreign? it's not something I thought about at all while watching it.
I'd honestly compare it to something like The Ice Storm, which was pretty highly acclaimed and popular in an art-house sense, and (according to wikipedia) only grossed $8m?? in '97! so is it really doing so bad?
My minor, MINOR source of encouragement is it's now up to $12.6M after a terrible opening. My initial fear was it would be She Said (horrible opening, absolutely nothing after either). But it has inched up a TINY bit, which means some of us are convincing at least a few people to see it.
When I was reading James’s Heaven’s Gate comparison it struck me as unexpected, inevitable, and spot-on. I don’t think people expected a straight-A student like Chazelle to turn in such an assaultive piece of work, and consequently he seems to have burned a lot of goodwill in addition to a mountain of cash. I’m a pretty big fan, but his next movie will probably be somewhat deformed by the reception this one got.
It’s really too bad that Fabelmans was hard to market. The trailer made it look like a crass parade of Spielbergian tics rather than the mature apotheosis of them. People will see it eventually, and they’ll love it, and this Spielberg kid is gonna be just fine, but I’m nervous that there are now several generations of directors underneath him who aren’t going to get the opportunities to make movies like that anymore because audiences just don’t show up for them. Hollywood used to be a place for transforming money into prestige which you could then use to get more money. Now the money is the prestige and the cohort of executives running the place don’t seem to enjoy movies at all.
Right, but the thing to worry about is that Crawdads scored big at the box office and STILL doesn’t have any movie stars in it. Did it really generate any momentum outside of itself? Is it Daisy Edgar-Jones’s A River Runs Through It moment, or is it a financially successful one-off that mined some coin out of some popular source material before evaporating from the popular consciousness?
I’m not saying Bullet Train’s receipts are attributable solely to Pitt--he’s surprisingly inconsistent as a pure box office draw, all-told--but rather that Bullet Train (or Babylon, or Ad Astra) exists in the first place because of his well-earned cachet, which is an increasingly rare commodity in film.
You’re 100% right that people saw it because it looked fun, but it troubles me that despite best practices being followed by all involved and a killer trailer it only managed 100 million domestic. It’s a break-even proposition that will be marginally profitable after the last bean is counted, which is not really what Hollywood does anymore.
I think the prevailing theme here is the collapse of the star system. A movie like Ticket To Paradise certainly benefited from old stars likes Clooney/Roberts-- god knows, it had nothing much to offer besides that-- but Daisy Edgar-Jones isn't a bankable star (or even known by many people who saw Crawdads, I bet) and even Pitt's success is movie-dependent. Few are going to see a film like Babylon on faith, but they'll turn out for Bullet Train because it looks like a bunch of badasses fighting on a fast-moving train.
Clooney is also the most obvious analogue to Pitt as someone who can get a movie with a decent budget made (or at least up until recently could) based far more on Clout than on consistent box office.
I do think that we're not in some sort of 'never again' movie star scenario though - it'll work differently than it has in the past but fully believe there is a generational switchover which will eventually lead us to a whole lot of new gen. top draws.
Side thought - do we consider Daniel Craig to be a Pitt-level star at this point? With all that Bond boost, he certainly helped make the first Knives Out a big success.
Re: stars, I would be interested to see one of the Stranger Things kids headline a major studio release to see if their Netflix popularity carries over. David Harbour did all right with the admittedly high concept Violent Night.
Harbour in Violent Night is an interesting case. He clearly has the attention and loyalty of his audience and he was able to leverage it to bring extra eyes to a Blumhouse-style potboiler. I bet Jon Hamm