WEEKLY RECAP #10: Recent Blockbuster Flops, "Challengers" Trailer & MORE!
6/18/23 -- 6/24/23
The Center Will Not Hold
So, uh… has anybody noticed how many big movies have been flopping recently?
Maybe it wasn’t too evident a few weeks ago, but as of this past weekend, Hollywood just experienced two unexpected bombs back-to-back. Warner Bros.’ The Flash and Pixar’s Elemental both debuted to total weekend grosses not just disappointing, but shockingly disappointing. The Flash, projected to earn $70 million domestically in its opening weekend, only nabbed $55 million, and is now tracking to have a 75% drop in its second domestic weekend. Even still, it barely emerged victorious over Elemental, which only grossed $29.5 million domestically on opening weekend — $10 million short of the lowest projections. Despite the ridiculously overblown levels of hype and promotion that went into marketing The Flash, it’s going to be challenging Black Adam for the DCEU’s least profitable movie, and Elemental is now on track to become Pixar’s lowest grossing movie of all time.
Why did this happen? On the surface level, it does just seem to be a coincidental fate of two movies that audiences were not hyped to see. The Flash was already struggling out the gate to distract people from the Hawaii-sized load of baggage that comes with its star, Ezra Miller, and it didn’t help that the movie is one of the final entries in a cinematic universe that’s already been announced to end fairly soon. Elemental, on the other hand, is the first theatrical release from Pixar since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a two-year stretch in which the animation studio dumped several new releases on Disney+. Many people — including Pete Docter, Pixar’s creative chief officer — believe that this practice has “trained audiences that these films will be available for you on Disney+,” as Docter stated recently All that makes sense, but I believe there’s a larger, more artistically relevant reason for why both of these movies failed to draw the usual droves of families into theaters. It speaks to a broader trend that the film industry has been falling into over the past few years… and it might blow your mind, so bear with me…
The movies looked boring.
Look, I haven’t seen Elemental, and a few reviews I’ve watched have said it’s not bad, so I’m leaving the actual quality of both these movies out of this discussion. (Quite generously, in the case of The Flash.) But let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: both of these movies had some of the most lackluster trailer campaigns I have seen in a long time. You know that feeling you get when you’re in a movie theater, and the trailers are playing, and one of them looks so unbelievably generic that it actually stuns you? The type of trailer that features lines of dialogue so flat and corny that you’re able to predict what they’re about to say? Whenever that happens to me, I’m usually overcome by this stiff, out-of-body sensation, where I find myself wondering how anything this boring could have such a large budget behind it, and start to question if I even like movies anymore. I experienced it with the first Morbius trailer, and earlier this year — I’m sorry to say — I experienced it with both the trailers for The Flash and Elemental. I’m sorry, but every single time I saw a piece of promotional material for these movies, they looked worse and worse. The Flash trailer featured abominable CGI, stomach-churning attempts at humor, and the most pathetically transparent cameos I’ve seen for a superhero movie trailer in years. The Elemental trailer carried nothing specificaly offensive — unless, of course, you consider the plot, which legitimately looked like a PARODY OF A PIXAR MOVIE. “Hmm, what if elements were like people, but they lived in a society just like ours? It could be a metaphor for interracial relations and learning to defy your parent’s expectations! Never mind that Zootopia already did this same interracial commentary much better seven years ago, and every Pixar movie for the last decade has either been a lame sequel or a stale ‘what if ___ had feelings’ premise!” I’m sorry, but Pixar has been phoning it in with a lot of their movies in recent years, and even if Elemental came from a genuine place and has a lot of worthwhile qualities, it doesn’t change the fact that the premise for the movie is depressingly unoriginal for a studio that used to pride itself on original stories.
Pixar, you can’t just keep making the same ‘what if ___ had feelings’ premise and build a lazy little world around it and expect audiences to keep coming back over and over like it’s fresh every time. Consequently, when it comes to overblown, fake-looking superhero movies, The Flash trailers did nothing to set itself apart from the crowd, besides coming across as uniquely transparent in its key-jangling attempts to get people interested. (Lord knows the multiverse concept is hot these days!) And this ties into the larger theme I’m getting at: blockbusters these days are underperforming more and more, and I think it all comes down to audiences growing bored. You can’t just keep feeding people the same slop, especially when that slop is served for the price of $10-$20 and each customer needs to go out of their way to eat it. The MCU was able to consistently make money for many years, but that’s because they were consistently upping the ante, building to a climactic finale. Now that Thanos is gone, what do they have to offer that raises the stakes from there? Apparently, the answer is “the same thing as before, but with worse visuals and characters you care less about.” This is not the answer moviegoers were looking for. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had negative reviews across the board and a HISTORIC second-week drop for Marvel, and while Guardians of the Galaxay Vol. 3 made a profit, it didn’t make as much as its predecessors. And if it wasn’t already clear that the folks running Marvel aren’t too great at reading the room, the opening credits for their newest series Secret Invasion features art made by AI (pictured above). And yep, you guessed it: it’s the shittiest, obviously-AI-made artwork for a professional television series intro ever made.
It took a long while, but people are starting to vote with their wallets. In a time where people need more of a reason than ever to see movies in theaters, studios need to understand that following the usual, tired formula is actually the riskiest strategy to consider right now. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell people that Tom Cruise thought your movie was sick — if the trailer sucks and we’ve seen the premise a million times before, enthusiasm is not going to increase. Let writers and directors be weird. Please.
“Challenger? I hardly know her!”
Everyone on Gen Z Twitter will remember where they were when the trailer for the latest Luca Guadagnino feature, Challengers, dropped. Sure, you could pay attention to the story (a high-stakes love triangle between a former tennis star, her husband, and her former boyfriend) or the music choice in the trailer (an epic trailer remix of “S & M” by Rhianna????), but naturally, what most young people are going feral over is the first half of the trailer, centered around a scene where stars Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor have a Cruel Intentions-style kissing scene in a hotel room. You can’t really blame the marketing department for focusing on that when the trailer had as much views on Twitter in one day as the Barbie trailer did in over a month. I personally was a little surprised by the presentation and general feel of the trailer, as Guadagnino’s previous films (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria, Bones and All) have an ethereal, brushstroke feel to them — perhaps the opposite of the intense, poppy energy that this first look presents. However, as a fan of his work, I’m down to see it regardless.
Warner vs. Turner
Continuing the theme of “out-of-touch CEOs needing to trust creative directors more,” here’s something definitely not alarming at ALL that happened this week: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson had an emergency meeting with David Zaslav due to his layoffs of top figures at Turner Classic Movies, a pay-TV channel that is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. TCM is known for broadcasting lineups of classic movies with unique intros and outros, as well as original documentaries, shows and video essays. Scorsese, who uses TCM frequently, said the following: “It gives me something to turn to, to bounce off of, to rest in, to reinvigorate my thinking — just glancing at some image or combination of images at a certain moment. It’s more like a presence in the room, a reminder of film history as a living, ongoing entity.” TCM’s programming and festivals are favorites among countless A-list members of the film industry, and erasing it would undeniably be a massive loss for cinematic history. As a scathing IndieWire report on the matter highlights, the recent claim from Warner execs to value their filmmakers and bridge the lost connection between directors like Christopher Nolan (lmao) rings hollow when reckless cost-cutting decisions like this are being made. Thankfully, the Mount Rushmore of directors swept in and presumably beat the pimp shit out of Zaslav on Wednesday, because Spielberg, Scorsese and PTA seem optimistic after brief talks with him. “We are heartened and encouraged by the conversations we’ve had thus far,” their statement reads, “and we are committed to working together to ensure the continuation of this cultural touchstone that we all treasure.” Whether it be through persuasive negotiation or violently whacking Zaslav with a crowbar until he concedes to their demands, I support any move to help preserve cinematic history. Go team!
“The Hierarchy in the Letterboxd Universe is about to change.”
ATTENTION! There’s been a shakeup at Letterboxd, and your favorite film may or may not be affected! Recently, in order to “better reflect the Letterboxd community’s global consensus for each film,” the Top 250 Narrative Feature list on the movie-review site has been shifted a bit by updates in their weighted-ratings calculations. This is most likely due to a common occurrence where, upon the debut of a new movie with loads of critical buzz, said movie will immediately be innudated with 4.5 and 5 star ratings and shoot to the top of the All-Time list, meaning a movie that’s been out for several weeks is now placed above movies like The Godfather and Ikiru. (Most people are speculating that this recent move was prompted by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse taking the #1 spot upon its release several weeks ago.) Now, I’m of the opinion that there isn’t a single “Top ___ of All Time” list that will fully please anybody. Whether the creators base it on their own niche taste or try to include entries that will please everybody, there are so many different perspectives on art that aggregating all of them into a ranked list does nothing but spark a discussion about the things left out. However, if you’re a normal person and simply want to hear the biggest shakeups caused by this list update, here are the highlights:
The new Top 10 is as follows: 1) Harakiri; 2) Come and See; 3) 12 Angry Men; 4) Seven Samurai; 5) The Godfather Part II; 6) Parasite; 7) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; 8) The Godfather; 9) High and Low; 10) The Shawshank Redemption
Everything Everywhere All at Once, which debuted into the #1 spot and then only dropped down lower into the Top 20, has now dropped further down to #74.
A fair amount of highly-rated music documentaries have dropped significantly in the list, with many people speculating that the higher reviews were the result of stans who upvoted their respective documentaries through misleading means.
The Letterboxd Top 250 List is now catching heat for more closely resembling the IMDb Top 250, as many of the quirkier list-toppers that were unique to Letterboxd’s user base are now replaced with more traditional, “film bro” associated staples.
There have also been a fair amount of accusations of xenophobia, as a lot of movies from the global south have fallen in the ranked list as well.
It does indeed seem as if the attempt to make the list “more accurate” has removed a fair amount of the charm that Letterboxd’s old Top 250 list held. While I maintain that these lists don’t mean much, I will say that looking at different websites’ “Top ___ of All Time” lists can indeed be of use for determining the general taste of critics on those sites. Even if the new list is technically fairer, I do not blame many users for missing that nerdier, less-Americanized Top 250.