Hollywood’s movie factories run on conventional wisdom — entrenched notions, based on experience, about what types of films are likely to pop at the global box office.
This year, audiences turned many of those so-called rules on their heads.
Superheroes have long been seen as the most reliable way to fill seats. But characters like Captain Marvel, the Flash, Ant-Man, Shazam and Blue Beetle failed to excite moviegoers. Over the weekend, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which cost more than $200 million to make and tens of millions more to market, arrived to a disastrous $28 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada. Overseas moviegoers chipped in another $80 million.
In the meantime, the biggest movie of the year at the box office, Barbie, with $1.44 billion in worldwide ticket sales, was directed by a woman, based on a very female toy and spray-painted pink — ingredients that most studios have long seen as limiting audience appeal. An old movie-industry maxim holds that women will go to a “guy” movie but not vice versa.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie collected $1.36 billion, a second-place result that also stunned Hollywood; studios have a troubled history with game adaptations. Oppenheimer, a three-hour period drama about a physicist, rounded out the top three, taking in $952 million and contradicting the prevailing belief that, in the streaming era, films for grown-ups are not viable in theatres.
Sound of Freedom, a crime drama that cost $15 million to make, catered to the far right, an audience largely ignored by Hollywood, and generated $248 million in ticket sales, on a par with The Eras Tour, which targeted Taylor Swift fans and also cost about $15 million.
In a big break from Hollywood norms, Swift cut out the middle company (a studio) and made a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theatre operator. Sophisticated dramas with modest budgets and aimed at older audiences have been showing signs of life after two years in the box office ICU.
©2023 The New York Times News Service
First Published: Dec 25 2023 | 11:38 PM IST
