How did Hollywood create a box office death cycle?

After days of morning-to-mid-afternoon gloom, Memorial Day bloomed bright and early in Los Angeles — clouds blown, no doubt, by the strong stream of sighs, groans and complaints generated by the weekend’s disappointing box office.

Turns out Hollywood executives believe in magic. They somehow thought that forcing writers and actors to go on strike for six months last year would have no cost to this year’s summer movie season.

That in 2023, with the film industry still recovering from the coronavirus lockdown, it would be perfectly fine to let writing and production grind to a halt again. Especially if it means saving some money in the short term and burning some ill-advised deals while people with multi-million dollar salaries try to figure out what to do about all those streaming services they rushed to create.

Meanwhile, outside the billionaire bubble, delays, especially in big-budget films, have scrambled this summer’s slate and left theaters in the lurch. However, everyone seems shocked. I was shocked, To find that this has real-life implications for ticket sales. This was the lowest Memorial Day box office take in nearly 30 years: What went wrong?

Putting aside the larger philosophical question – if the studios that make movies don’t care if months go by without making movies, why should the general public suddenly move themselves just because there’s a long weekend? One has to wonder about the problem of reasonable expectations.

As in Hollywood they don’t exist.

I don’t know what counting genius thought that The Fall Guy, a beautiful if overly mean-spirited rom-com based on a mildly successful early 1980s TV series, could be considered the kind of Hollywood blockbuster early in the Marvel Universe . It increasingly built its summer ticket sales on it. I also don’t understand the magical thinking that put such extraordinary expectations into the weekend that undergirds “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the prequel to a nearly 10-year-old film and the latest in a 30-year-old series. And “The Garfield Movie,” inspired by the cartoons that appear in the movie Newspapers He achieved the peak of his cinematic popularity 20 years ago.

In theaters, “Furiosa” and “Garfield” are joined by “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which managed to open the May 12 opening weekend thanks to no competition at all, and the animated film “If,” directed by John Krasinski, which seems to be a hit. Well, because no one burdened him with self-destructive high ratings.

Honestly, when I glanced at this weekend’s lineups, I felt like I was experiencing a disruption in time and space — if “Mad Max,” “Garfield,” “Planet of the Apes” and even “The Fall Guy” were still on. Did my life happen? Was there a movie “Billion Dollar Woman” showing somewhere? A large screen titled “Do you like American style?”

I’m nostalgic as the next generation of Boomers/Gen He really wants to live in a multiplex version of Pottersville, where everything is the same as it was, just a little different.

As a reminder, my husband and I chose “Furiosa,” which is how I felt after my appearance; As the Times’s Joshua Rothkopf wrote: “Survival takes away the joy of survival.” (While I’m aware of the consequences of the climate crisis, between Dune: Part II and even parts of The Fall Guy, there’s a lot of sand flying around. But maybe that’s just me.)

Even without the strike, this summer’s box office was bound to be a bit of a letdown — you can’t capture the glorious “movie comeback” lightning bolt of last year’s “Barbenheimer” in a bottle. But by forcing the hits, the studios ensured it would be much worse. As in “setting the industry back at least a full year, reigniting all the issues and obstacles exacerbated by the pandemic” and worse.

Once again, industry observers are bemoaning the rising cost of tickets and concessions, the short time between theatrical release and streaming, the abundance of content offered by streaming services, and the pandemic-enforced habits of just staying home.

Add to this the difficulty of marketing films when traditional format TV ads disappear with linear television, and the move to a personal digital world where the grandeur of filmmaking is compressed into a window on a palm-sized screen that can be easily ignored. Finger swipe.

Is it any wonder we get half an hour of ads before any movie these days? (And even that doesn’t work because the assigned seating makes it too easy for viewers to skip trailers.)

Just knowing what to play when and where has become a chore.

Not long ago, people could open a newspaper like The Times and find movie advertisements, complete with lists of where each movie was shown, along with huge sections of listings. Now, in this do-it-yourself digital age, potential audience members can easily perform a “near me” search, but they need to know what movies actually exist to do so. (And they need to know this quickly, because movies often leave theaters after a few weeks.)

As a member of the entertainment staff at The Times, I would certainly like to see the return of pay-for-listings and advertising, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in the future.

This also doesn’t apply to price cuts at the box office and concession outlets, where a family of four can easily spend more than $100 (although AMC and Regal passes offer regular moviegoers significant savings).

But as Barbenheimer’s film proves, people will get off their couches, find parking, and splurge on popcorn if the movies make it worth it. The only thing the post-hit moment offers is a way to learn how to do it better.

The current downturn among streaming services could provide movies with an opportunity to return to the new and diverse content territory that TV has dominated over the past decade, but only if studios start seizing more opportunities for new and diverse content.

Other films like “Planet of the Apes,” “The Garfield Movie” and the “Mad Max” prequel — even those that premiered at Cannes, to mixed reviews — don’t register as new and diverse content.

This does not apply to “Inside Out 2,” “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “A Quiet Place: Day One,” “Deadpool and Wolverine,” and “Despicable Me 4,” although many expect these films to It will cause more controversy. – Air-conditioned seats with the onset of summer.

Franchise films, long criticized for diminishing artistic returns, have become a box office staple — serialized storytelling, that is, television, for the big screen. As with the old model of television, studios increasingly tie success to a very small viewing window. Opening weekend has become the cinematic equivalent of a pilot, and those films that don’t do well in their first two weekends are often written off as flops, with all the bad press that entails.

Meanwhile, the film industry had almost completely ceded the kinds of stories once told in mid-budget films — which often had smaller opening weekends but greater staying power — to television.

Now, as the beleaguered TV industry figures out a way forward — perhaps by moving to more traditional, long-running sitcom and procedural models — it may be time for the movie industry to produce fewer high-stakes films and more middling blockbusters. Budget movies.

Even with the recent closure of many theaters in Southern California and across the country, there are still plenty of seats to fill. The go-go megaplex boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s created theaters the size of small airports, with theaters sometimes containing more than two dozen screens. In recent years, many of those screens are showing the same four or five films; If one or two of these films don’t find a large audience, that means there are plenty of empty seats that could be filled with less-than-blockbuster films — perhaps made by TV writers, producers and actors now desperately looking for work.

This is certainly a far-fetched thought, but whatever Hollywood chooses to do, the pressure of dragging millions of people into theaters over the course of two or three days to watch one or two films must be alleviated. Sequel, prequel, reboot, or original concept (gasp), not every film has to be forced to gross half a billion dollars, or even half its total budget, in its opening weekend to be considered a success.

The Fall Guy, quickly dubbed a harbinger of doom for this summer’s box office, is closing in on $150 million in global sales, despite its move to streaming. This wasn’t a huge success for a film with a budget of $138 million, but it wasn’t a flop. With its unusual mix of romantic comedy scenes and expensive fight/chase scenes, the issue may be more with the film than with the movie’s viewing condition. Setting him up as a trial balloon for the summer of 2024 has done him no favors; Those who didn’t see it almost immediately after its opening were subjected to newspaper headlines declaring not only its failure, but also the gloom it would cast over the future of movies forever.

That’s a lot to bear for Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

Six months of strikes would cost studios, theater owners and advertisers a lot of money — and there was no way around that, regardless of the Assn. Motion picture and television producers had to say that during negotiations. If studio executives are willing to lose their share of this money for a chance to reset the industry, they might as well reset it. But expecting the first Mad Max and a Garfield sequel to somehow save the day is a much bigger failure than The Fall Guy.