Hollywood’s Box Office Conundrum

Are They Losing Touch with a More Sophisticated and Savvy Audience?

The summer movie season has begun. This marks the time where Hollywood is supposed to make its money back from all of the blockbuster films they plan on rolling out for the season. But if what we are seeing is an early indicator of what the season will bring, well, Hollywood is in a world of hurt. Is what we are seeing a “one-off” or has Hollywood has reached a saturation point within its products. There have been so many major films that have failed to live up to the analytical financial projections they implore. It’s not just one or two films that have been missing the target projections, it’s a lot of them that have totally not even come close to the territory and have missed the target completely.

Recent films like Dark Phoenix, Shaft, Men In Black: International, Godzilla: King of The Monsters, and The Secret Life of Pets 2 have not been succeeding at the box office. These films are, for the most part, classified as franchise films. They are supposed to have a built-in core audience who will always attend the showing of these films. Analysts will base their projections on these core fans live by the numbers for that film’s projected weekend box office numbers. But that isn’t happening, much like the poll numbers during the 2016 presidential campaign where Hillary Clinton was projected to take it all. No, we’re not getting it.

Dark Phoenix, the X-Men film, took in approximately $33 million dollars, a staggeringly low number for an X-Men film. If you are to believe the rumors, it was plagued with delays and reshoots and a revamped script that was needed to revamp the ending because it was alleged that the ending was similar to another film. This was also the second telling of the Dark Phoenix character that many fans still recalled as being more gratifying than this version. But let’s dig deep into this version of The x-Men. There have been two versions of characters in The X-Men universe in the 19 year run of the franchise. Unlike the Avengers where they have been consistent with the character development, The X-Men changed all of the characters with the exception of Logan/Wolverine.

The newer/younger version of the X-Men had not earned the or perhaps wasn’t embraced with acceptance to an audience looking for some familiarity with the characters. Gone were Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, a lean, statuette, and calculating nemesis who was much smarter than everyone gave her credit. She was replaced by Jennifer Lawrence, a much more rounded figure who’s color had shifted from dark blue to sea blue and whose character was more motherly than vindictive. The only good character that came out of these revamped X-Men was Even Peters as Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past. In Dark Phoenix, he was rarely used.

But why are all of these films failing? Some could point to the fact that they have been infected with a virus of social justice warrior malaise. Ghostbusters 2016, as it is most identified to distinguish itself from the original Ghostbusters, was the film that had the all-female cast in the lead role. Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon re-imagined the characters. These were established comedic talents and I watched these talents go through a horrific script that they tried to defend. As I watched it, I gave them 15 minutes in hopes of seeing the comedy becoming active. That 15 minutes past and no comedy evolved. What surprised me the most was seeing the Bill Murray character get killed in their version of Ghostbuster 2016.

The film was not well received and was eviscerated and excoriated for depicting Chris Hemsworth as a dumber than dumb human version of a sex Popsicle. The aftermath was met with lines being drawn on one side defending the film against so-called misogynists, trolls, man-babies, and haters and on the opposite side of people who just didn’t find the film entertaining or remotely funny. The director of the film, Paul Feig, chose to go down the path an attack the fans, a practice an option that other directors and film companies have chosen to take with other high profile films that have been lackluster at the box office.

Rian Johnson went after the fan base after ill-received comments were made from fans following the showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Ron Howard went after fans following the dismal return on Solo: A Star Wars Story after it failed to live up to expectations. The Solo film had its troubles in the beginning plus it was difficult to see another actor play the role because we already had seen a younger Han Solo, the real Han Solo, at the very beginning of the Star Wars franchise. So the investment with a new Solo character coupled with the bad story premise did not go over favorably with the fans. And then came Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel made money but the money made and who contributed to the coffers is a question mark. Captain Marvel also started off with controversy following remarks made by its star, Brie Larson, surrounding the film, A Wrinkle in Time, and whether 40-year-old white dudes should be reviewing it. Captain Marvel was not a good film but the controversy that was created put Disney in a bad light. Captain Marvel was shoehorned between Disney’s most profitable franchise, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Before Captain Marvel’s release, it was being hammered by down votes on the film aggregate website, Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes suspended the ‘not wanting to see’ feature and revised its policy based on the negative feedback it was getting. The negative feedback was attributed to trolls and the narrative had been established even though no trolling had been taken place.

As each new film kept being pumped out, a new trend was being taken notice in the form of identity politics, SJW, virtue signaling, etc. If you haven’t heard the phrase, ‘get woke and go broke’, it is based on the ideology that if a film is pandering to the social justice crowd, your film will not do well. Dark Phoenix had Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Mystique, made the statement that maybe X-Men should be called X-Women, a cringe-worthy moment. It didn’t help the fact that a Marvel producer, Victoria Alonso, made the statement, “It’s funny that people call it the X-Men. There’s a lot of female superheroes in that X-Men group, so I think it’s outdated.” The Batwoman trailer on YouTube has 75,000 likes to 390,000 dislikes from 5,5 million views following several cringe-worthy comments from Ruby Rose, it's the lead star, as she continues to appropriate Batman’s costume and belongings and becomes a squatter on his property.

Shaft, the iconic detective from the ’70s, made its second sequel incarnation over the weekend with a take of $8.3 million dollars, a haul that was severely much lower than analysts had predicted. Normally, this film should have generated around $22 million dollars in a much different climate. But Shaft fell prey to virtue signaling and compromising its core principles. It’s not about punches to the gut anymore, it’s about feelings. Feelings won’t stop a .45 slug coming your way. The OG Shaft has a grandson whose values are nowhere remotely plausible in the real world. It is purely Hollywood fiction. The OG Shaft dealt with racism and injustice while this Shaft deals with lattes and Lululemon’s.

Films are no longer relegated to the mainstream media for review. There are now more outlets and individuals with independent voices on different social platforms giving a more in-depth and critical analysis of films. There are some who even go into full breakdown analysis of the box office revenue and what it means. Mainstream media has started to lose its importance when it comes to being the only source for film reviews. Some of these mainstream media types have gone on record as to schilling for the major studios in order to maintain a good favor status so that they can still receive many of the perks and gifts from being a part of a much larger conspiracy.

The smaller film review bloggers like Grace Randolph, Anna from That Star Wars Girl, Jeremy from Geeks and Gamers, Eric from YoungRippa59, Gary from Nerdrotics, and MechaRandom42 are the new independent voices that do not follow the party lines. Some of them are the most in-depth well-spoken commentators to the film industry and to comic books that will not just follow some cardboard cutout talking points from some studio. For some reason, they believe that their voices have value and won’t be compromised. Hmm, imagine that.

So what is the solution to this problem? Maybe the answer lies in the history of these films. Surely, we can’t remain still without moving forward. At the same time, we can’t force an agenda down peoples throats. Right now, it’s all faddish behavior. Like all fads, they eventually will die out said the bell bottom pants to the hammer pants. Let’s go back to being entertained, to watching movies for the escapism not to being forced fed someone’s ideology. We got enough of that from the last election, from fake news and now it’s all about to start up again. Hollywood needs to stop second-guessing its audience while relying on outdated notions of what the viewing public will accept. Hire better writers who have more life experience. The original Star Trek never talked about inclusiveness, they did it organically. Please, can we put that word and diversity on the back burner and just watch the original Star Trek show us how it's done. Live long and prosper.