It’s September, and so school is back in, the leaves are just beginning to turn a bit, and it’s a little cool in the mornings when I walk my dog. Summer’s over, my friends. But before we say goodbye to it altogether, what did you do this summer? Go to the beach maybe? Take that big family trip out west? Maybe you spent it putting together that ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle that’s still sitting on the dining room table. Whatever you did, it’s a good bet that you didn’t go to the theater very often.
I know I didn’t, which seems wrong for a movie review guy,
but I come by my lack of movie attendance honestly. Our basement flooded this
summer, and so I spent most of June and July tearing out carpet and drywall,
hanging and sanding sheetrock, and generally hating every second of it. But it
seems like the rest of the country was preoccupied too.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, this Labor Day weekend,
which traditionally marks the end of the summer movie season, was the tail-end
of a historic summer box office downturn. North American movie revenue is down
16% over this last year which is the steepest decline the industry has seen in
decades. According to the movie money tracking site, Box Office Mojo, the
number of actual theater tickets sold is at a 25 year low. August in particular
was a slow month with one industry paper headline calling it “The August Death
March.” This was the first Labor Day weekend in 25 years in which studios
failed to release any new major movie. The movies that were in the theaters
were led by the Ryan Reynolds/Sam Jackson action comedy, The Hitman’s
Bodyguard, but leading a race of dead horses isn’t much of a victory. Hitman’s
Bodyguard made 12 million dollars over the weekend, or roughly the equivalent
of the loose change in Samuel Jackson’s couch after filming a “What’s in your
wallet?” credit card commercial.
It’s been a dismal summer at the movies for sure, but why? We
can place a lot of the blame on the movies themselves. So many of the big
budget tent poles from the last three or four months were sequels, remakes,
reboots, and regurgitated. Who wants to see a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean or
Transformers movie? No one, apparently. Rebooting the Mummy with Tom Cruise?
Nope. Cars 3, Despicable Me 3, Alien #47, and the big screen adaptation of
Baywatch that no one ever asked for? No, no, no, and definitely no. Part of why
hardly anyone went to the movies this summer is that there just wasn’t much to
watch.
There were standouts, of course, a few exceptions.
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is still making money and tickling critics. Wonder
Woman, in addition to being great, was the most financially successful movie of
the summer and the second highest grossing movie of 2017 so far. Guardians of
the Galaxy Vol. 2 did just fine too along with a handful of others.
But overall, the message of summer 2017 to Hollywood studios was not “If you build it, they will come” but rather, “If you keep building and
rebuilding the same stuff over and over again and treating us like we’re
mindless idiots who only love spectacle and repetition, there’s always
Netflix.”
I don’t want Hollywood to fail (although failure is a
central part of its ongoing history and evolution). I love movies and I love
going to the movie theater. I love writing about wonderful movies that succeed
because they’re good. I’m kind of a sucker that way. So listen up, Hollywood.
Give us something new, something moving, something powerful, something worth
seeing. Give me something to see that’s better than refinishing my basement.
Please.
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