In a week when worldwide box-office takings collapsed, much has been made of the death of cinema. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga joined a flops’ walk of shame recently trodden by Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s The Fall Guy and Ryan Reynolds’s If. And while Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes should break even, it will be the least successful film in that stretched franchise. All hope now rests on Despicable Me 4. Glance ahead to June, July and August, and Hollywood looks as though it will have less of a summer, more of a bummer.
But we’ve been here before, when people first got TV or when the first video game was played, and cinema always survives — even thrives. Hollywood is full of comeback stories, a gloomy second act followed by a glorious third. It’s the plot of Rocky, Top Gun, The Dark Knight, every romantic comedy. Will this year be any different?
In September George Clooney and Brad Pitt star in the action comedy Wolfs, about two lone-wolf “fixers” reluctantly assigned to do the same job. Then comes Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the combustible 2019 behemoth that made more than $1 billion, which will add Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. Come November, cinemas could be full as Paddington in Peru, Gladiator II and the film of the hit musical Wicked all arrive with existing fan bases.
And so the optimism might return. Everybody will call the first half of 2024 a blip and start to plan for 2025, when your local Vue or Odeon will hope Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two can pack out their refurbed auditoriums. It is worth noting too the successes amid this year’s duds: the cerebral sci-fi epic Dune: Part Two, released in February, has passed $700 million in takings, while the sexy tennis arthouse film Challengers has smashed aces all over the world, the Zendaya effect securing $86 million against a budget of $55 million.
Barbie and Oppenheimer were less than a year ago. Remember them? Two very different and weird films joined together in a catchy portmanteau and shared release date that made them a combined $2.42 billion at the box office and officially “saved cinema” last July.
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However — and it is a big however — something has definitely changed. I can sit here and look for buoyancy, cite the films I think will bring punters back to the cinema, but there is a danger I will end up drowning in a storm that started with streaming and picked up pace during the pandemic. Barbenheimer may well be a blip, a miracle of marketing and serendipity. Box-office figures for this month — $205 million down year-on-year in the US — are so atrocious that those autumn films will have to go gangbusters to pull it round.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon bombed last year and you could argue that if Scott fans didn’t flock to a historical epic headlined by the Battle of Waterloo, they won’t rush to see a sequel to a 25-year-old film that no longer features Russell Crowe (instead Paul Mescal will play the lead in Gladiator II). Joker: Folie à Deux, meanwhile, felt like a sure thing, but that was before the excellent Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga made a lot less than its equally excellent predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road. This is an industry that trusts in sequels and relies on the assumed logic that if you create something that was popular a few years ago, it will be popular now. That certainty has vanished.
What Hollywood really needs is a superhero at a time when, sadly, nobody is even watching superhero films. The Marvel bubble, which boosted Hollywood bank accounts to record-busting levels for most of this century, has burst, with comic-book dregs like Madame Web failing to grab the attention as the A-listers Captain America and Iron Man did. This July’s Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine, is not the answer either. First, it is a violent 15, cutting out half the school holiday market. Second, its marketing is odious, with the lead actor, Reynolds, essentially telling the audience the film is stupid — but, hey, can we have your tenner anyway?
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At a time when teenagers — and their parents — think everything can be watched at home, on whatever device, this does not seem like the brightest strategy, but then a cynic might suggest that Hollywood studios want everything online anyway. There’s an argument that they are deliberately killing off cinema to charge for their own streaming services — Disney+, Paramount+, Max — and so cut out the fleapit middle men. In June Pixar’s Inside Out 2 hits cinemas, but what sane family will pay £50-plus for a trip out when it will be on Disney+ a few weeks later? That platform launches a new Star Wars TV show this week, The Acolyte; there has not been a Star Wars film since 2018. Priorities have shifted.
Cinema, therefore, is not dead — it has simply moved. “I love the cinema,” the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt told me in 2021. “But it had its heyday in the 1940s and has been in decline since. With the advent of cinema you could have mourned vaudeville theatre, but it’s worth embracing the future. Throughout time technology has changed the way people express themselves. Will I mourn fewer people going to cinemas? Yes. Do I also think it’s the march of time? Yes.”
And perhaps nothing demonstrates that more than a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie, Axel F, which stars Gordon-Levitt and comes straight to Netflix in July. The film, once again starring Eddie Murphy, is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the titan behind Top Gun: Maverick and the man whose films built multiplexes as we know them in the 1980s. If Bruckheimer believes an audience will be bigger on a small screen than a big one, times really have changed.
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