Here's a superhero puzzle even the Batcomputer would struggle to unravel. If you’ve been keeping track of this year’s comic-book blockbusters, you’ll know there’s been one resounding success and one excruciating failure.
Captain America: Civil War, the 13th film from Marvel Studios, was a smash hit adored by fans and critics alike. And Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the second title in the nascent DC Extended Universe, was almost universally reviled, and all but snuffed out that unfolding franchise before it could ignite.
Yet here’s the twist: at the box office, the performances of these films were virtually identical. Both started strong and both saw steep declines in profits in their second week.
The point of this story isn’t that reporting on the respective success and failure of these two films was somehow misinformed or flatly wrong. It’s that the blockbuster business is in such disarray that the old notions of what constitutes a hit and a flop no longer mean anything at all.
You may have noticed it has not exactly shaped up to be a vintage season at the cinema. We have recently seen the release of Independence Day: Resurgence, a sequel to a 20-year-old alien invasion movie after which precisely no one left the auditorium wondering what might happen next.
Coming after that are remakes of Ghostbusters (in East London next week) Ben-Hur, Tarzan and Pete’s Dragon, new Star Trek and Jason Bourne films, a sequel to the horrendous magic heist thriller Now You See Me, and DC’s Suicide Squad.
I’ve have fair to middling hopes for three of these eight. Beyond those, it looks oddly like a list of films that no one wants to see.
To explain exactly why that is requires another case study, and the strange case of Warcraft: The Beginning is ideal. Universal’s would-be fantasy franchise-igniter – adapted from a series of video games by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son and the talented director of Moon and Source Code – had a poor box office showing in both the more traditional UK and US markets.
Warcraft’s failure in these markets could be seen coming from kilometres away. It’s a shapeless fantasy yarn crammed with clichés, set in a superficially flashy CGI world that’s bereft of any human touch.
Again, though, there’s a twist. In China, over the first five days of its release, Warcraft made £110-million (R2-billion): the most successful debut for a foreign film in the country’s history. And its extraordinary success there isn’t despite all the shortcomings listed above; it’s because of them.
(It also fared well in South Africa, taking R3.2-million at the box office from June 10-12).
The new, globalised blockbuster market works for two target audiences.
The first doesn’t really exist any more than, say, the “average reader” exists: it’s a figment of filmmakers’ imaginations, a vaguely defined blob of a person who’s confused by anything but the very broadest of characters and themes.
The second audience consists of the Rottweiler-like fans of the film’s source material – comic book, video game, young adult novel, whatever – who can be relied on to show up out of a mixture of loyalty and curiosity, then rabidly promote and defend it on social media, no matter how dire reviews may be.
Both of these groups are bad news for cinema. Appealing to the notional blobs means ditching wit, nuance and subtext; appeasing the Rottweilers means treating the source material like holy writ.
While Warcraft’s success in China has yet to be properly picked apart by analysts, there’s no question it clicks with both the above-mentioned target audiences from hell.
About half of the Warcraft game’s remaining subscribers are Chinese, giving it a ready-made opening weekend with Rottweilers, while its shallow fantasy world can be understood immediately at face value, meaning zero confusion on the part of any blobs who might drop in.
That’s why the blockbusters of the ’80s often seem so twiddly and idiosyncratic when set alongside their present-day equivalents.
Take Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, which charts a hair-raising course between taboo-busting teen sex comedy and family-friendly science-fiction adventure. On paper, there’s no obvious target audience for it. In practice, that’s precisely why it’s such a dazzling, enduring success.
No wonder carefully crafted family films like Disney’s remake of The Jungle Book and its latest animation, the ingenious Zootropolis, have been doing such good business, even on school nights.
It seems increasingly likely that grown-up cinemagoers are now finding the substance they crave in cleverly made kids’ stuff.
So why don’t studios go further out of their way to court them? Two reasons: new markets are opening up and the old ones are stagnating.
Current box office trends indicate that in 2016, American cinemas will sell fewer tickets overall than any year since the recession-struck early ’90s, and fewer per head of population than in any other year in the past century.
And though it’s hard to say whether it’s cause or effect, the sequel-heavy business model that has reigned supreme for the past two decades – in short, if it works, stick a two on the end and repeat – appears to have run out of steam. A recent spate of commercially promising follow-ups to titles as diverse as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bad Neighbours and Snow White and the Huntsman all severely underperformed in the UK and US alike.
The worst casualty was Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which made just a sniff over a fifth of Alice in Wonderland’s debut back in 2010.
All eyes in Hollywood will be on the forthcoming reboot of Ghostbusters. The original film has a rabid fan base of men, so by casting all-female leads in the sequel it saddles itself with the single biggest Rottweiler problem in Hollywood. — The Daily Telegraph
Time to blow up the blockbuster
Captain America: Civil War, the 13th film from Marvel Studios, was a smash hit adored by fans and critics alike. And Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the second title in the nascent DC Extended Universe, was almost universally reviled, and all but snuffed out that unfolding franchise before it could ignite.
Yet here’s the twist: at the box office, the performances of these films were virtually identical. Both started strong and both saw steep declines in profits in their second week.
The point of this story isn’t that reporting on the respective success and failure of these two films was somehow misinformed or flatly wrong. It’s that the blockbuster business is in such disarray that the old notions of what constitutes a hit and a flop no longer mean anything at all.
You may have noticed it has not exactly shaped up to be a vintage season at the cinema. We have recently seen the release of Independence Day: Resurgence, a sequel to a 20-year-old alien invasion movie after which precisely no one left the auditorium wondering what might happen next.
Coming after that are remakes of Ghostbusters (in East London next week) Ben-Hur, Tarzan and Pete’s Dragon, new Star Trek and Jason Bourne films, a sequel to the horrendous magic heist thriller Now You See Me, and DC’s Suicide Squad.
I’ve have fair to middling hopes for three of these eight. Beyond those, it looks oddly like a list of films that no one wants to see.
To explain exactly why that is requires another case study, and the strange case of Warcraft: The Beginning is ideal. Universal’s would-be fantasy franchise-igniter – adapted from a series of video games by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son and the talented director of Moon and Source Code – had a poor box office showing in both the more traditional UK and US markets.
Warcraft’s failure in these markets could be seen coming from kilometres away. It’s a shapeless fantasy yarn crammed with clichés, set in a superficially flashy CGI world that’s bereft of any human touch.
Again, though, there’s a twist. In China, over the first five days of its release, Warcraft made £110-million (R2-billion): the most successful debut for a foreign film in the country’s history. And its extraordinary success there isn’t despite all the shortcomings listed above; it’s because of them.
(It also fared well in South Africa, taking R3.2-million at the box office from June 10-12).
The new, globalised blockbuster market works for two target audiences.
The first doesn’t really exist any more than, say, the “average reader” exists: it’s a figment of filmmakers’ imaginations, a vaguely defined blob of a person who’s confused by anything but the very broadest of characters and themes.
The second audience consists of the Rottweiler-like fans of the film’s source material – comic book, video game, young adult novel, whatever – who can be relied on to show up out of a mixture of loyalty and curiosity, then rabidly promote and defend it on social media, no matter how dire reviews may be.
Both of these groups are bad news for cinema. Appealing to the notional blobs means ditching wit, nuance and subtext; appeasing the Rottweilers means treating the source material like holy writ.
While Warcraft’s success in China has yet to be properly picked apart by analysts, there’s no question it clicks with both the above-mentioned target audiences from hell.
About half of the Warcraft game’s remaining subscribers are Chinese, giving it a ready-made opening weekend with Rottweilers, while its shallow fantasy world can be understood immediately at face value, meaning zero confusion on the part of any blobs who might drop in.
That’s why the blockbusters of the ’80s often seem so twiddly and idiosyncratic when set alongside their present-day equivalents.
Take Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, which charts a hair-raising course between taboo-busting teen sex comedy and family-friendly science-fiction adventure. On paper, there’s no obvious target audience for it. In practice, that’s precisely why it’s such a dazzling, enduring success.
No wonder carefully crafted family films like Disney’s remake of The Jungle Book and its latest animation, the ingenious Zootropolis, have been doing such good business, even on school nights.
It seems increasingly likely that grown-up cinemagoers are now finding the substance they crave in cleverly made kids’ stuff.
So why don’t studios go further out of their way to court them? Two reasons: new markets are opening up and the old ones are stagnating.
Current box office trends indicate that in 2016, American cinemas will sell fewer tickets overall than any year since the recession-struck early ’90s, and fewer per head of population than in any other year in the past century.
And though it’s hard to say whether it’s cause or effect, the sequel-heavy business model that has reigned supreme for the past two decades – in short, if it works, stick a two on the end and repeat – appears to have run out of steam. A recent spate of commercially promising follow-ups to titles as diverse as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bad Neighbours and Snow White and the Huntsman all severely underperformed in the UK and US alike.
The worst casualty was Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which made just a sniff over a fifth of Alice in Wonderland’s debut back in 2010.
All eyes in Hollywood will be on the forthcoming reboot of Ghostbusters. The original film has a rabid fan base of men, so by casting all-female leads in the sequel it saddles itself with the single biggest Rottweiler problem in Hollywood. — The Daily Telegraph
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