With the end of the year upon us, it makes sense to start thinking about movie endings. Not just the actual endings to movies — though this year certainly gave us a few notable climactic final scenes, from John Wick 4 to Oppenheimer to Barbie to Beau is Afraid, and some notably bathetic ones — but also a general sense that some of the biggest trends we’ve seen in recent years might be coming to an end. Is that a good thing? Or is this a Careful What We Wish For situation? As our movie critics sat down to ponder their favorite films of the year, they couldn’t escape the question: If 2023 marks the end of so many things, what’s next?
Year in Culture
Bilge Ebiri: This year saw several major superhero movies go bust (and as of this writing, we don’t know if Aquaman will be another one). It saw Disney deliver one bona fide animated flop (Wish) and another that exists in the liminal space between flop and hit (Elemental). We also saw Netflix starting to pull back on the mountains of money it throws toward film productions. Many of us have been anticipating (maybe even hoping for) the end of the franchise era. But now that it might be happening, what lies on the other side?
Alison Willmore: That’s been on my mind a lot this year. Superhero exhaustion has never felt more palpable than when confronted with the double feature of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels, two $200 million movies that felt pathetically small in their style and ambitions — and not in an intentional, superpowered way. This year gave us Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which I adored, but as much as it was a reminder of how good these movies can be as sweeping, funny-sad-thrilling entertainments, it may be the dying gasp of the old MCU.
Our biggest franchises are showing their age — even my beloved Mission: Impossible turned out a fun but lesser installment that couldn’t draw the same crowds. But the question of what comes next is not terribly reassuring. I think about Barbie, which I didn’t love but was a real movie under that patented pink chassis. Then I think that the studios are going to run with the lesson that they should make more toy-line adaptations and not that they should hire more interesting directors, give them resources, and turn them loose.
Disney, obviously, isn’t going away, despite its current floundering. Neither are superhero movies — hell, Guardians writer-director James Gunn has headed to DC to attempt to save that caped cinematic universe. But what we’re seeing right now does feel like the inevitable consequence of trying to hang the future of movies on brands, executives, and algorithms instead of talent. While that may be an obvious thing to point out, it’s not one that I see many companies trying to address. Then again, Bilge, audiences flocked to Oppenheimer, a movie that defied all the doomer logic I’ve just outlined. Is that an anomaly or a possible glimpse of a more promising future?
BE: Oppenheimer and Barbie both defied all my expectations (and probably their respective studios’ as well), and it seems pretty clear that neither movie would have made the money it did without the other. So in some senses, we have to write that off as an anomaly. But the alarming thing for the film industry the past couple of years has been that many of its successes have felt like anomalies. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, was in no way a certain win, but it took off. (It helped that it was great.) Even Avatar: The Way of Water didn’t feel like a guaranteed hit, and I’m like the big James Cameron Apologist. The franchise era was a period of trying to turn anomalies into sure things, and it worked for a while.
At the same time, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, in theaters right now, is doing terrific business. The Holdovers, one of my favorite films of the year, is a success, although I’m not crazy about the fact that it went to digital after a six-week theatrical window. There were a lot of these bright spots this year. Though it’s still hard to tell what’s a success and what’s a dud: Is Killers of the Flower Moon a hit? With a $200 million price tag, it’s certainly not making its money back just through its theatrical release. But was it ever meant to?
We’re doing that thing — and I know I say this every year — where we’re obsessing over box office. I love the fact that Passages was a hit. I love the fact that The Holdovers was a hit. I love the fact that Oppenheimer was a hit. I hate the fact that I have to love these facts. In some ways, that’s been the most toxic part of the franchise era: that it’s turned us all into armchair box-office analysts. I have to worry about whether the good movies I like by real artists are doing well because that part of the industry is forever perched on the edge of an all-consuming volcano. Maybe the question we should be asking is this: If this is indeed the end of superheroes, the end of big surefire franchises, the end of executives and algorithms (though I’d guess they’ll end us before we can end them) — what kind of world do we want to see on the other side, and how realistic is that world?
AW: I’m at peace with the idea that monoculture is just about gone — at the movies and everywhere else. It’s a lot harder to care about the biggest blockbusters anyway when they’re fan-service–y Super Mario movies and increasingly dire live-action remakes of the animated classics Disney has forgotten how to make. I’d rather live in a world where niche audiences flock to better, more interesting films with actual souls, even if that means the conversations about them will be quieter and unfold over a longer period of time. I’ve loved how long Passages has lingered in the cultural conversation! It’s a feature you can’t help but dwell on, and as the chaotic Tomas, tormenting his two lovers, Franz Rogowski gives a performance that’s lodged in my head all year — I’ve talked about the film and character again and again with different people as they’ve gotten to see it over the past few months.
I irritated Netflix by writing about how filled with dread I get when it picks up an indie I like, but the truth is that I don’t think streaming alone enables that kind of staying power. There’s a reason the company seems to be leaning toward producing smaller, more disposable originals that lean into what viewers already like — people have a different relationship with the movies they have to seek out. And among the things I hope people seek out this year, if they haven’t already had the pleasure: A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, a movie with an incredible lead performance from Teyana Taylor. The Outwaters, an ultralow-budget horror movie that will either blow minds or leave its viewers furious. Gareth Edwards’s startlingly good and generally ignored The Creator. BlackBerry, which is somewhere between a satirical version of the corporate invention movies that were all over the place this year and a poignant depiction of being provincial guys who somehow capture an industry for a heady stretch of time.
These weren’t all hits — I’m not sure if any of them were, even adjusted for scale — but I’m ready to free myself from fretting about the economic viability of my favorite medium. I will say that streaming did give us a stretch of time when it seemed like our favorite filmmakers could snag budgets for projects no reasonable studio would say “yes” to, an era that also seems to be coming to an end, Apple TV+’s Killers of the Flower Moon aside. Bilge, is that something you’re going to mourn?
BE: It was always pretty clear that the streaming gravy train was going to break down eventually. I do wonder if it has completely. As we’ve mentioned, Napoleon, also produced by Apple TV+, is currently in theaters making plenty of money. It is still my hope that Apple’s more theater-friendly approach to releasing these films will prove more effective than Netflix’s, which was (at least most of the time) to treat cinemas as a kind of phantom limb they wished would go away. But, yes, it’s probably just a matter of time before it all goes away. It’s what happened with Netflix and animation a few years ago, where the streamer poured money into a number of really ambitious projects from very notable animation directors. Even then, filmmakers told me they knew it wasn’t going to last, but they still regarded it as a small golden age for animation. Why not take advantage of it?
I would love to see a world in which the industry stops putting all its eggs in one basket. It’s obviously unhealthy for these projects to get bigger and bigger until the fate of the entire industry winds up hinging on their success. This is not a new phenomenon. Years ago, in his film diary for the year 1990, the director John Boorman talked about how a big dream fantasy project he had set up at a studio was waiting to see how Spielberg’s Hook opened to get green-lit. (Hook opened big, but Boorman’s project never got made, sadly.) But we all know that it’s gotten out of control, and now we’re feeling the effects of what happens when a few huge titles fail and not enough huge titles do well.
Like you, however, I’ve been encouraged by the way many smaller films seem to be hanging around. I was pleased to see the ongoing buzz around Anatomy of a Fall. I’ve heard so many people talking about Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, which haven’t been in theaters long enough for us to tell if they’ve had actual staying power. And I remain optimistic about the prospects of yet-to-open films like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses and Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days and Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land — the last a big, violent, powerful historical epic that in any healthy film industry would be a genuine hit.
One of the things I think of when I look at my Best of 2023 list is how auteur-heavy it is. There are a lot of films directed by people who’ve been making movies for 25 to 30 years or more: Nolan, Payne, Mann, Wenders, Ira Sachs, Wes Anderson. Some of that’s just my (ossified, reactionary, vulgar, horrible) taste. But some of it speaks to the fact that as the world of non-franchise filmmaking has contracted, the people who seem to be able to get their films off the ground are those with proven track records. I’m sure it’s not easy for them, either. Michael Mann has been trying to make Ferrari for longer than Christopher Nolan has been making movies. But it’s almost impossible for talented newcomers, or people who have made a couple of interesting films but haven’t necessarily fully broken through yet. And we definitely feel the weight of expectations come awards season, when so many of these pictures wind up in the awards hunt — not because the filmmakers really want to win awards but because Oscar potential has become such a key metric for whether non-franchise movies can get financing in the first place.
AW: Breaking through now does seem so much harder, and not just for directors. I wrote a piece about Timothée Chalamet — soon to be seen in Wonka, the movie that Warner Bros. keeps trying to pretend is not a musical — that was really a reflection on what it means to be one of Hollywood’s anointed next-generation talents at a time when the list of names of who the country considers to be a movie star is getting borderline geriatric. There are plenty of rising actors, and this fall’s possible award contenders have skewed amusingly hunky thanks to that heartbreaking turn from Charles Melton in May December, as well as Rogowski’s; Paul Mescal in All of Us Strangers; the muscled-up trio of Zac Efron, Harris Dickinson, and Jeremy Allen White in The Iron Claw; and Jacob Elordi in both Priscilla and Saltburn. But it’s hard to imagine any of these guys developing into a star on the level of fellow contender Leonardo DiCaprio. The kind of career he has just doesn’t seem available anymore.
Will anyone coming up be able to have Nolan’s career? It seems unlikely when the main way for a lauded, ascending filmmaker to get to make something big is to sign on to make a Barbie, like Greta Gerwig, or a Mufasa: The Lion King, coming from Barry Jenkins in 2024. It doesn’t feel like an accident that my favorite movie of this year, Kelly Reichardt’s fantastic Showing Up, was in part about this very thing. In it, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, who has a job as an administrative assistant at the Oregon arts college she went to and makes her art in her spare time. Showing Up is about many things, including feeling like you never have enough time to do the work you really love because you have to earn a living (and also because you procrastinate). But more than anything, it’s about accepting that work can have meaning, to you and to other people, even if it never becomes massively popular. Lizzy’s art, these idiosyncratic little clay sculptures of women, make for an easy parallel to Reichardt’s own films, which are delicate and understated and only seen by a relatively small audience. Reichardt, who famously has a day job teaching herself, is unlikely to ever get handed $100 million to pursue her dream project. That doesn’t mean the work she turns out is any less wonderful — though I wish it were a little easier for her to continue making it.
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