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One of the few writers in the business who has even the tiniest bit of courage to tell the truth about anything is Anthony D’Alessandro, who covers box office for Deadline. He knows the limits of what he can and can’t say, which is why he’s never come out and said that One Battle After Another has bombed in the United States, which it has. They will make up some of the loss with international sales, especially in China, and it may edge up to $150-200 million. Maybe.
But, as Steven Gaydos points out, One Battle After Another was not made for profit. It was made to win Oscars and to showcase the new objective of WB to offer original movies with big stars. That worked out well for Sinners, Weapons, and F1, just not so much for One Battle After Another.
Anthony D’Alessandro attempts to explain why Tron Ares “opened soft,” as so many movies do now (except Sinners and Weapons). He writes:
SATURDAY AM: The long-term lasting impact from Covid thwarting moviegoing is easily felt this weekend as two movies, one a $180M sci-fi franchise reboot in Tron: Ares, and the other a star-studded caper with a hunky leading man, Roofman, are coming in under their estimates respectively with $35M-$37M and $8M.
You see plenty of voices inside the bubble who will tell you not to worry about the money or that there is no problem with Hollywood (Richard Rushfield, David Poland, all of the trades) – blame everything but Hollywood. I don’t know, man. I feel like we’re missing the story here. Something is happening. Movie theaters are empty across most of America, even for highly buzzed movies. Tron: Ares only had 30% under 25 showing up to see it.
True, that means they aren’t the type to open on weekends and will get around to seeing it eventually. Not to mention, they watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it — that is true and it won’t change back — but still. Let’s try to go a little deeper.
First off, it’s silly for someone like me to think I can solve the problem. I can’t. However, I can at least identify the problem, and perhaps that can eventually guide people in a better direction. Or maybe not. And honestly, why should I care? This is a business that, after investing 26 years of my life in it, helping studios get nominated and even win Oscars, chewed me up and spit me out. So on the one hand, maybe I should want to see and cheer on its demise, but I don’t for the simple reason that I got to live through an era of Hollywood where movies really did leave a mark.
Probably it’s over. Netflix is the future. People don’t watch movies. They watch Netflix. Or Hulu. Or YouTube or TikTok. It is likely inevitable that movies have become like Bates Motel. They built streaming services, and after 2020, they began to prefer watching things on their own time. The problem, as I see it, is that people don’t watch things much, and if they do, it’s not movies. They’re watching a long-form series on a streaming.
What I see is that culture has accelerated, while Hollywood has remained stagnant. Hollywood has always been ruled by fear, but it’s never been quite this bad. The reason is that those in power prioritized the bottom line. They cared about profit. They sought the most appealing stars and the best writers and directors to create movies that people wanted to see. That is what defines the industry now. They can’t afford to care about profit, the free market, or the bottom line, because then they’d have to care about the people they detest.
The death of Diane Keaton should remind everyone how great it is to have a celebrity whose entire identity wasn’t wrapped up in how much she hates Trump, how political she was, and that she took a side in a pointless tribal war. No, Diane Keaton invited everyone in. That’s what Hollywood used to be like. And it’s why Hollywood used to drive culture, rather than avoiding it, as they do now.
I was watching Crimes of the Heart last night and was reminded that there is no way this film would have been made today and not just because Sissy Spacek’s white Southern lady has an affair with a 15 year-old Black kid, but because there is a line in the movie where Jessica Lange’s character says something funny like “I didn’t even know you were a liberal.” That meant they were perhaps all Republicans, and it didn’t matter because they were trying to stay true to the time and place rather than “correct” the time and the place to make the filmmakers, the stars, and the studio look good.
The Blind Side has been rejected as “racist,” though it is a good and watchable movie. Even now, it has a scene where Sandra Bullock openly admits to hating Democrats, and yet somehow that movie got made, and somehow it made a lot of money.
That was 2009. Then, we had the Obama era that fundamentally transformed Hollywood and the Trump era, which meant Hollywood decided it would no longer care about the rest of America that voted for Trump, because it was too dangerous to care. If you care, you lose your job. That meant Hollywood cut itself off from the middle and working classes, which is nuts. This was always an industry that understood it should entertain all people.
Now, they have decided they are “good” and can therefore stand in judgment of everyone else. It feels out of step and outdated. It is like Bret Easton Ellis said in commenting on One Battle After Another, “There is something stale about it, like a time we left behind, “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing that everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s where we are now.”
That is what I thought when I looked at these two social media posts about Saturday Night Live.
I don’t watch SNL anymore, and haven’t for a very long time, but I wondered if they made fun of Katie Porter, who has been in the news this past week. Of course not. I wonder if any of the Left comedians will. It’s all over the internet and the funniest viral clip of the week, and yet, it remains untouched by SNL.
Videos of Katie Porter have gone viral, and there was news that she was abusive to her ex-husband; she dumped a pot of hot mashed potatoes on his head (allegedly). All of this is funny.
The Saturday Night Live of old would have opened with this. It would have been hilarious, and everyone would have shared it all over the internet. So why didn’t they? Because they are all working for the Democrats to some extent, and thus, they won’t target a Democrat in a way that might harm them.
So instead, people on social media used AI to create the parody that SNL was too afraid to do:
The entire independent ecosystem that has blossomed in the way of Hollywood cutting itself off and sanitizing its output was talking about Katie Porter. This is why culture has moved on.
What they care about isn’t ratings or box office. They care about whether or not they look good. They have a media mirror that flatters and praises them when they align with the doctrine, but also harshly criticizes them when they don’t. It’s always surprising when they do come out and admit a movie did poorly:
They’re comfortable being honest about Tron: Ares because there is nothing to lose in criticizing a movie with Jared Leto as the star. For one thing, he’s not had the best press of late, but for another thing — he’s a white guy.
This movie can fail, and that isn’t a problem for Hollywood. If One Battle After Another failed, that would be a catastrophe of epic proportions, so it can’t fail; no one can say it failed; no one is allowed to call it a failure; it must win Oscars; it must be spun as a positive. That’s the game.
What everyone wants to see is a culture that aligns with reality, not one that reflects their own perception of life from within their own bubble. This guy puts it pretty well in this video:
I don’t agree that they pretend to care. I think they really do care, but I think their sphere of perception is greatly limited by the tiny sliver of information they get every day. Where Diane Keaton seemed to understand her role as an entertainer because she knew that politics could be alienating to some people, Jane Fonda, Angelina Jolie, Rosie O’Donnell, and others find it necessary to broadcast just how out of touch they are.
I understand that many people reading this site, and those who exist inside the bubble, probably agree with them, but I can promise you that there is an entire sphere of reality outside of this where someone like Jane Fonda sounds like a Doomsday prepper.
What they don’t seem to understand is that they are not the oppressed side. They are the side that still has much of the power in this country. If they don’t like what Trump is doing, then the way out of that is to boost better candidates and make a pitch to the people.
However, that isn’t how it has gone. It’s been the “let them eat cake” for 15, 20 years, and then call them “racists” for voting them out, for not watching their movies and TV shows. Talk to anyone out there in the world about Hollywood, and they will tell you exactly the same thing.
Back in 2019, look at how many movies Hollywood made and how much money they made:
2020 was a disaster for Hollywood. It wasn’t just COVID; it was the Great Awokening that destroyed Big Hollywood’s brand. They blamed the fans, and they wokified their movies to make themselves seem like better people. They’ve never returned to the 2019 levels, and if the trend continues, they never will.
A soft opening for Tron: Ares is not that surprising to me, as — no offense — I don’t see how anyone expects the people they cast to draw in audiences. Again, no offense, but you can’t go wrong with hot movie stars, and not to put too fine a point on it, but this movie’s advertising doesn’t exactly scream hot movie stars.
I might watch it when it’s available on streaming, and I’m sure many people feel the same way. However, the trailer lacks any interesting, sexy, or fun elements. It looks like a grim and scoldy slog.
Let’s check in with Nerdrotic to see what he thought (Disney stopped advertising on this site a long time ago, so I am allowed to criticize them):
This is your warning, Hollywood. It’s time to join the real world and remember that your job is to entertain, not fix or lecture, nor defend your status inside utopia, but simply to try to entertain. You have to get rid of your mandates, your sensitivity readers, your intimacy coordinators, and your activists, and just try to make great stuff because if you don’t, AI really will swallow you whole.
The year is not over yet. We still have Avatar: Fire and Ash and The Housemaid, not to mention Wicked for Good, so maybe it won’t end in total disaster. Perhaps it will be a better year than it appears to be at the moment. Money isn’t everything, but it is necessary if you want to be the driver of culture. Money means people are paying attention, and people are tuning in.
