RUN-OF-SHOW
By: Eddy Von Mueller
Creative Director
It’s Doomsday for the movie business. Again.
Fun fact: I’m a film historian by training. Specifically, when I’m not fighting crime or making moving pictures with the Merry Band of Misfits that is Atlanta Video, I research and write about the evolution of the entertainment industry. Studying the history of the screen trade is a lot like studying the history of religion, really. Lots of thrilling stories, charismatic figures garnering fanatic cult followings - and the Apocalypse is always right around the corner.
Chicken Littles have been crowing about the sky falling on cinema for decades. Radio seemed poised to terminally rain on Hollywood’s parade in the 1920s. TV was going to deliver the coup-de-grace in the late ‘40s. Cable was to be the killer in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Nemesis List goes on and on. For what has proved one of the sturdiest and most resilient pillars of popular culture, the movie business has always had a singularly strong sense of its own fragility, like a health nut who’s never smoked, avoids fatty foods, and jogs themselves silly and who nevertheless sits up nights convinced they have some fatal disease no one has detected yet.
This time around, the death knell is being sounded by the admittedly underwhelming box office performance this past weekend of Furiosa (the fifth film in the Aussie Apocalyopse franchise George Miller launched with Mad Max in 1979), and Garfield (the sixth feature-length treatment of lovably irascible – and surely by now at least prediabetic – housecat created by cartoonist Jim Davis in 1976). Outlets from Variety to the BB-bloody-C have breathlessly reporting that the two much anticipated and extensively advertised films all but tied, Furiosa taking in $32 million over the long Memorial Day weekend, narrowly edging out the Fat Cat’s $31.1. “dismal” showing is being held up by many a pundit and prophet that, once more, the End is Nigh for theatrical cinema.
Don’t get me wrong: the soft landing of these films is not good news. Scores of very talented craftspeople and artists worked very hard on their production (animation and a stunt-heavy epic shot mostly in a remote location are both particularly grueling in their own ways). Box office numbers remain a disproportionately important yardstick in how the Biz assesses the value of its products. It’s also a tough break for folks working on the front lines of the exhibition and marketing sectors. The knock-on effects of a films underperformance can be, in aggregate, immense.
That said, I think many of the authors of these post-mortems of the Memorial Day debacle, and the premature eulogies for cinema are missing (if I can be pardoned for a truly unpardonable turn of phrase) the Big Picture. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, or even a Sherlock Hound, Sherlock Gnomes, Dorlock Homes, or Sherlock, Jr., but even a chump like me can spot the pattern when both the heavyweight contenders for a prime spot on the release calendar are installments in franchises over 40 years old.
A lot has changed since Memorial Day became a Thing for the film business back in the late 1970s. The cost of mainstream, “tentpole” pictures has skyrighted. Furiosa cost a staggering 168 million (by comparison, Mad Max, the inaugural film in the series, cost around $300,000) Garfield was a relative bargain at only $60 million. Seeing movies, too, has become pricey. In 1983, when Return of the Jedi was the first Star Wars picture to get a wide release on Memorial Day weekend (Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back were both released for Memorial Day - in 1977 and 1980, respectively - but took months to reach smaller markets), the average cost of a ticket was $3.15. The average today is around 12 bucks.
The major studios have clung to a blockbuster business model that relies on massive opening weekend returns, even as long-term structural trends have the costs of production and advertising steadily up even as other trends have tended to push attendance down. The industry has also been slow to adapt to fundamental changes in how the audience experiences time.
Summer didn’t used to be the prime time to go to the movies. Back in the day, when film exhibition was a highly localized phenomenon and Hollywood enjoyed what amounted to a monopoly on-screen entertainment, people went to the movies more or less year ‘round - “more” is they had more nickels to spend and more theaters nearby and “less” if they didn’t and lived in a town like the one my folks grew up in, where my enterprising grandfather showed rented B-pictures on weekends on the back wall of a converted warehouse and which had vastly more chickens and hogs than people.
They also occasionally held turkey shoots in the “theater.” With live ammo. It was a different time.
In any event, with the exception of the occasional holiday movie released to coincide with Christmas or Easter or - more rarely - Halloween, there was a fairly steady flow of content. Films made their way slowly across the country, from First-Run houses in major markets to little single-screen, mom-and-pop operations in the sticks. Films also tended not to be “held over,” unless local consumers demanded it. When the appetite of a given theater’s constituency for a given title had been sated, the print moved on to another theater in another town. Movies were very rarely opened “wide” until the 1970s – not coincidentally, the same period during which holiday weekends like Memorial Day became important, production costs began their inexorable climb to the stratosphere, and sequels and franchise pictures began to command more and more investment and attention.
The net effect is that the splashiest, costliest and most heavily ballyhooed films hope to draw a lot of people with a lot of disposable income to a lot of theaters all at the same time to see something inevitably a lot like something they’ve seen before.
For most of us, the experience of the movies has once again become a highly localized phenomenon, something we can do frequently, casually and close to home. Most neighborhood cinemas are long gone, of course. Very few of us may live near a traditional brick-and-mortar theater, but most of us have multiplexes on our desks and in our pockets.
The ease-of-access offered by contemporary streaming technologies represents not only a dramatic shift in spatial paradigms, but a fundamental reordering of time. Queing up for the opening night of a long-anticipated sequel (I actually camped out for a few movies when I was a stripling, dozing on the sidewalk outside the theater to get the best shot at the good seats) is less of an imperative, when I know theatrical windows are shrinking and I can get it in a few weeks at home.
And consumers had begun doing that grim calculus before Covid.
In all likelihood, the release window looked like a solid bet for the studios. And it is true that Garfield and Furiosa probably made more over the holiday weekend than they would have than if they had been released at another time. But only a sucker would pin their hopes on - and scaling your expectations to - a $60-plus million Memorial Day in an age of cinema that is not just 24/7 but 365.
These two films will both probably prove profitable in the long run. The Ten-Year Ultimate (some inside baseball we’ll save for a future Run-Of-Show) matters way more than the opening weekend. Current rumors of the movie business’ Death are as greatly exaggerated as ever, but the days of relying on Memorial Day to deliver box office magic may indeed be numbered.