Movies Are Dead! Wait, They’re Back! The Delusional Phase of Hollywood’s Frantic Summer
Will the real movie business please stand up?
Just when it couldn’t seem to look any worse in May, the U.S. cinema sector sprung back to life in June — a mood swing worthy of the film leading the comeback.
“The essence of what ‘Inside Out [2]’ is about is what the industry was going through: anxiety and depression, followed by glee and happiness and all that,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore as he led a panel last Friday at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium in Los Angeles.
Dergarabedian began the discussion with slides comparing the pessimistic headlines that greeted the poorly performing films of the previous month, including “The Fall Guy” and “Furiosa,” followed by the ecstatic reception that greeted the box-office strength of “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” and “Inside Out 2.”
Then Dergarabedian and his panelists took turns taking the media to task for perpetuating a distortion that he characterized as “unique to our industry, that the perception of the health of this industry can turn on a dime.”
Representing the exhibitor side of the film business, Nikkole Denson-Randolph, senior VP of content strategy and inclusive programming at AMC Theatres, suggested the press was trying to drum up a dramatic narrative by underplaying the industry’s resilience. “We’re going to have bad weeks but we’re always going to come out on top,” she said.
Alluding to the fact that the panel was rosily titled “The Good News About Theatrical Distribution,” Scott Forman, executive VP and general sales manager at Warner Bros. Pictures, joked, “I think if the symposium was two weeks ago, this panel would have been canceled.”
Citing her many years in the business, Lisa Bunnell, president of distribution at Focus Features, told Dergarabedian she has grown so accustomed to the constant existential ups and down of moviedom that she likened it to manic depression and the classic R.E.M. song, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” (R.E.M. is a fitting comparison — the night before “Inside Out 2” hit theaters and broke records, the band came out of retirement for a triumphant performance of “Losing My Religion” at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Ceremony.)
After watching the box office yo-yo over the past few months, maybe industry execs are entitled to a little public self-congratulation and mocking of trade-news criticism. There’s more than a grain of truth to the latter; surely more than a few of the premature obituaries written for the movie business in the weeks prior could have pointed out the near certitude that “Inside Out 2” would be a hit, as well as “Despicable Me 4” and “Deadpool and Wolverine” next month.
But while we’re diagnosing media myopia and overly bearish box-office appraisals, let’s also call out the irrational exuberance that was on full display on that UCLA stage.
Apparently the depressive period is followed by a manic phase in which the patient suffers from the delusion that because the box office is on an upswing after a downswing, that means the upswing will be a permanent state of affairs. It’s not unlike the wishful thinking many indulged in last year after the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon occurred, as if the industry’s ability to crank out a few big hits would suddenly mean more hits would automatically keep coming.
Spoiler alert: They didn’t.
No one believes the studios have lost their touch; the problem is that touch doesn’t come with the regularity it once did. Theatrical distribution is clearly in secular decline, a sobering reality no one on the panel acknowledged.
And the alternative of streaming as a distribution model? Never came up in the discussion once.
To the contrary, time and again the panelists framed the industry’s struggles strictly in terms of needing to regain equilibrium, particularly with regard to the volume of titles in theaters after the setbacks of COVID and the strikes.
It was a striking framing, as the message seemed to be that we just need to get the old system back to what it once was — not that the industry needs to adjust to a new normal as it will never go back to the way it it used to be. For me, that crossed the fine line between expressing confidence for an industry in a public forum and whistling past the graveyard.
Let's check back just a few weeks from now with executives from the companies represented on this panel, whether Warners, which probably has quite a turkey on its hands with the distribution of Kevin Costner’s Western opus "Horizon: An American Saga"; AMC, which saw its meme-tainted stock sliding even as "Inside Out 2" was soaring; or Focus Features, none of whose films this year had surpassed $10 million domestically until the opening of "The Bikeriders" last weekend.
The roller-coaster ride that is the box office is going to keep going up and down this year. The industry would be wise to temper expectations for the bumpy road ahead.
