The movies are back?
Interpreting this week's surprisingly-positive box office report.
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Deadpool & Wolverine repeated at number one at the box office over the weekend — no surprises there — putting it over a billion dollars in domestic box office and setting it on a path to pass Joker as the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever. Pardon me for withholding my cheers for the Cards Against Humanity superhero movie, even if it had some cleverly-constructed jokes at the expense of the other Disney division its existence was meant to dissolve. (Disney also threw itself a pep rally this past week, complete with their own version of lifetime achievement awards, one of which it gave to Miley Cyrus).
The actual good news here was that the number two movie, It Ends With Us, starring Deadpool’s wife, Blake Lively (I doubt that factored much into its success but stranger things have happened) cost $25 million to make and ended up grossing $50 million in North America plus $30 million overseas.
Which is pretty damned good for a movie that wasn’t a sequel, reboot, or remake, and sold itself based on the star and the popularity of the book on which it was based. (I haven’t read any Colleen Hoover myself, but word on the street is that she might be an industry plant, that industry being Big Marine-Grade Polymer). I didn’t see it myself because I felt like the trailer gave everything away, but it’s nice to see it thriving nonetheless.
I know books are technically just another form of “IP,” but there’s something refreshingly old fashioned about people seeing a mid-budgeted movie aimed at adults because they’d read the book. Puck News called it “this summer’s least surprising surprise hit” (also noting that it was “the first time since the summer of 1990 that the top two movies have featured a husband and wife — Back then, it was Demi Moore in Ghost and Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2”).
Anyway, IP though they may technically be, books have a much better track record of being good things to build movies around, as opposed to toys, cereals, boardgames, videogames, or God forbid, the concept of emojis (yes, my son discovered that one the other day). It’s frankly a miracle that we haven’t seen the release of an NFT based movie (I know for a fact that there have been meetings).
Speaking of videogame movies, there was also Borderlands this weekend, which managed only $8.8 million, on dismal reviews and a D+ Cinemascore. That one cost $115 million to make plus another $30 million in marketing, though Variety also notes that international presales covered 60% of the budget. GRRR, STONKS!
I never played the game and the movie was getting savaged (aside from looking noisy and obnoxious), so I didn’t bother. I don’t want to dunk on Eli Roth too hard for making it (I haven’t liked much of his for a while, but he’s always seemed like a nice-enough guy and a genuine movie lover, and besides, we’ll always have Cabin Fever), but it is perhaps somewhat notable that the industry at large took a bath throwing $100+ million and every actor they had (Cate Blanchett, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis) at a videogame project and then sold 500% more tickets to an old school chick lit adaptation.
Hopefully there’s a lesson there! Namely, that people who don’t go to the movies often might go if you actually give them something to see besides discount IP slurry #27. Let’s hope someone learns that lesson before the theater-going experience becomes too degraded to save.
On that note…
Longlegs
I went to the theaters myself over the weekend. The plan was to check out Didi, so I bought my ticket for the Sunday matinee. Only to realize that it wasn’t playing in Fresno until this Thursday, so my Fandango app had defaulted to a Thursday showtime (the first one available) and I didn’t notice in time. Nor did the ticket taker at the theater. It wasn’t until I arrived at the empty auditorium, soda and popcorn in hand, that I realized my mistake.
Having grated and smuggled in a whole little ziplock bag of Parmesan cheese (yes, I did this, and I would do it again, it goes great on buttered popcorn and I may someday add truffle salt to the equation) I wasn’t just going to take my popcorn and soda out to the car to eat in 105 degree weather. The closest showtime to the one I thought I was there for happened to be Longlegs, so I saw that instead.
For the first half of it, I wondered if we were living through a golden age of horror movies. Writer/director Osgood Perkins does an incredible job setting the mood, with Maika Monroe playing a maybe-psychic FBI agent trying to solve a series of interconnected husband-kills-whole-family murders. Blair Underwood is in there too, with that velvet-lined rock tumbler of a voice that sounds so good no matter what he’s saying.
Then the movie lays its cards on the table and those cards are basically all of the classic horror movie things: demonic possession, creepy dolls, catatonic moms, numerology. C’mon, that’s the best you could do?
Points for having Nic Cage playing a Satanic version of Dr. Rockzo from Metalocalypse, but that makes the movie sound more fun than it actually is. And at the end of the day I can’t fully sanction a movie this goofy taking itself this seriously. Cuckoo was better, in my opinion, getting exactly the correct level of goofy even if lots of other parts of it were a mess. In both cases, you can easily imagine the one idea that spawned the whole movie. Longlegs: What if a glam rock singer was an actual minion of Satan? Cuckoo: What if horror bad guy like cuckoo bird?
Advantage: Cuckoo.
I’m also happy to report that Regal Cinemas (not all of us are lucky enough to live near a Drafthouse or AMC) are now turning the house lights down to 50% for at least half of the trailers. They had been leaving them on full blast for basically every other movie I saw for the last year, making the trailers impossible to see and pointless. Sadly this time there was also a weird digital chirping noise that was audible at every quiet point in the movie, which turned out to becoming from the fire alarm
Less than ideal. I was too worried about missing the movie to tell anyone about it before the screening, so I just lived with it. And anyway, who is there to tell about these things nowadays? This is the kind of thing that happens when movie theaters have six people total working and five of them are manning concessions. I’m just thankful they haven’t figured out how to outsource it to an AI chat bot (yet).
David Zaslav Schadenfreude Week
David Zaslav, the Warner CEO basically everyone hates for reasons too numerous to recap here (he turned HBO into Max, among other things) has now presided over a company that is taking a $9.1 billion write-down, as of six days ago. This is a guy who made almost $50 million last year, and $247 million in 2021.