The 2019 domestic box office has gotten a whole lot of people in the American film industry down in a funk and why wouldn't it? Granted, 2019 isn't the worst year ever, in fact, looking at its current $5.619 billion yearly gross, the only prior year of domestic box office that was doing better at the same point was 2018. However, a string of box office failures have left studio executives and box office analysts shaken, as films ranging from Alita: Battle Angel to Godzilla: King of the Monsters to The Secret Life of Pets 2 have all come far under expectations. Even Disney isn't impervious from this, as their Dumbo remake managed to be a box office bomb with only a $114.4 million domestic haul.
The two biggest box office underperformers that have really gotten people shaken have been Booksmart and Late Night, specifically in making people wonder if audiences will show up for anything theatrically that isn't a superhero movie. It's not exactly an outlandish concern and it's one that's been expressed by many high-profile figures in the industry, including in a New York Times profile interviewing those figures, such as Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo, about the future of theatrical cinema. It's a piece full of pessimism about where theatrical cinema is going in the future, but in this writers opinion, it feels like a misplaced sentiment for a multitude of reasons.
First off, allow me to come to the defense of two movies whose box office performances seem to have sent people spiraling on the viability of non-blockbuster movies getting theatrical releases. First off, for Booksmart, yes, a theater count upwards of 2,500 locations and a Memorial Day release date was totally meant to help the film launch into the stratosphere as a major sleeper hit, but that doesn't mean that's the only viable outcome for the title. For a $10 million budgeted R-rated comedy starring teenage characters (always a tough subgenre to crack), directed by a first-time filmmaker and not based on popular source material, Booksmart has done perfectly fine. The fact that it's had its per-theater average increase for five consecutive weekends in a row suggests this title has strong word-of-mouth under its sails that'll help it stay afloat long after it leaves theaters.
As for Late Night, this was, like Booksmart, an attempt by a smaller studio (for Booksmart, Annapurna, for Late Night, Amazon Studios) to launch a major sleeper hit with a title whose budget was small enough to ensure it didn't need to do Endgame level numbers to crack a profit. Granted, Late Night's current $13 million domestic box office haul isn't great any way you slice it, especially since it had two more well-known performers headlining it, but it's still the second-biggest movie of 2019 to start out in limited release. Not an ideal box office performance? A hearty certainly. Not a crash-and-burn box office performance? An even heartier certainly.
Of course, it isn't just Booksmart and Late Night driving up pessimism over audiences not going to see non-blockbuster fare theatrically, but frankly, I think that pessimism is misplaced. Anytime audiences show up for a non-blockbuster film in droves, major American movie studios shrug it off as a fluke, just like they do with films starring non-white, female or queer protagonists. Throughout history, major American movie studios have always had trouble dealing with anything that deviated from what they deemed to be the norm and that problem has only been exacerbated by being own by major conglomerates who would rather studios produce only gigantic Endgame-sized box office juggernauts instead of appreciating the smaller but still lucrative mid-budget non-blockbuster hits that have emerged in recent years.
Remember how just two years ago Murder on the Orient Express, a mystery thriller taking place solely in a train, made a robust $350+ million worldwide? Or how about when Baby Driver made $107.8 million two summers ago, above the domestic haul of that wretched Tom Cruise Mummy movie that cost five times as much to make as Baby Driver? Did Crazy Rich Asians doing nearly six times its $30 million budget domestically just eleven months ago pass everyone by? How about all those documentaries that have managed to become massive sleeper hits over the last 15 months? Just like Hollywood tended to do in the past whenever more diverse movies or films with female directors managed to success, such successes are deemed a fluke and now we're off to do another ill-fated attempt to make a Marvel Cinematic Universe knock-off.
The Summer 2019 slate hasn't been down because people have abandoned movie theaters, they're down because the massive American movie studios that control the majority of theatrical American films have been delivering a steady slate of derivative junk that all blend together. Studios like Paramount Pictures, Sony/Columbia, Lionsgate and even the last few films of the pre-Disney 20th Century Fox slate have sunk millions in the last few years into copying the blockbuster formula of Disney films (a formula that, to be fair, has produced a number of movies that I don't just like but outright love) while largely avoiding making movies that Disney doesn't make, like thrillers, crime dramas, neo-noirs or countless other genres of cinema that don't full under the banner of tentpole entertainment. It's a move that's led a the lack of mid-budget titles being made by these same studios over the 2010s, which is a whole other perplexing development driven more by the greed of studios rather than audiences growing tired of those types of films.
It's laughable to hear a studio like Columbia Pictures or Disney (the latter slashing 20th Century Fox's annual slate down to just five to six movies) wring its hands over the financial viability of making mid-budget movies when they're owned by such massive conglomerates that could withstand the financial losses of a thousand Heaven's Gate-level failures. You'd hope such financial stability would at least lead to creative risk-taking, but the opposite has transpired. These studios tend to be as risk-averse as possible, with Disney, for instance, dissolving the Fox 2000 studio responsible for an array of low-budget and mid-budget box office hits emphasizing the perspectives of marginalized communities solely because their output didn't match the large-scale franchise mentality that drives Disney, and by proxy, those Fox movie studios they purchased, to its core.
Such a mentality has spread across Hollywood, a town whose major studios were already trying to play things as safe as possible long before the age of Disney mega-blockbusters emerged. With everyone wanting to be Disney, you suddenly get film slates like the one hindering the Summer 2019 box office, just a bunch of wannabe tentpoles that exist out of obligation to mimic the Mouse House rather than any creative reason to exist. Worse still, the failure of these big-budget movies lead prolific and influential people in the industry to wonder if general audiences even go to movie theaters anymore. Of course, there are plenty of counterarguments to the latter concept, like the previously mentioned box office hits from the last two years or even other box office hits from 2019! Just look at Rocketman or this past weekends Yesterday, both of which are thriving in this domestic box office. That's heartening to see and a great sign of how people will show up to something that has more to offer beyond just adding a two to the title of a previously beloved blockbuster. There's also the fact that the people who actually help run theatrical showings of films, a group left out of that aforementioned New York Times piece, don't see much doom and gloom in their profession.
An excellent IndieWire piece by Erik Kohn explores the perspective of an assortment of individuals running indie movie studios, film festivals and non-profit movie houses dedicated to small-scale cinema of all shapes and sizes from all over the planet. This may be one of the best pieces of movie-related writing I've consumed in a blue moon, it's just an utterly fascinating read from top to bottom. I especially love the worldliness that comes right off the page in a number of these interviews, folks like Ted Mundroff, for instance, look at the big picture and see a box office slump as something the industry has been before and always get out of. Recurring discussions of how film festivals shown arthouse fare still draw a mighty big crowd resonated on a personal level with me, because as someone who attended a nearly sold-out showing of American Movie just last month at the Oak Cliff Film Festival in Dallas, Texas, I can also attest to the fact that people will come out to a film festival to see non-blockbuster fare on the big screen.
There's plenty of actual issues facing modern cinema, including a still dire lack of diversity in behind-the-camera and on-screen talent and a myriad of disturbing trends among American movie studios, including rampant consolidation that puts a whole lot of creative power in just a few hands and those same studios all trying to make their slates adhere to one mold. But one of those issues really isn't getting people to go out and see movies on the big screen. Instead of throwing in the towel already on a fight that isn't even going on, figures like the one profiled in the New York Times, as well as the far more powerful American movie studio heads, should realize how much of a demand there still is for theatrical cinema storytelling and create challenging interesting storytelling to satisfy it.
Hell, the demand for this kind of storytelling can even be seen in the fact that two of the most talked-about pop culture properties of the summer are the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and Ava DuVernay's When They See Us. Neither series carries a post-credit stinger for sequels to come nor even attempts to minimize the bleak nature of their respective stories, but they've both struck a chord with audiences because of just how well-told they are as well as how their period-era tales resonate with events in the modern world. People enjoy that kind of boundary-pushing storytelling just as much as they enjoy theatrical moviegoing. Sure, we all enjoy our blockbuster fare, especially when it's as well-made as Avengers: Endgame or Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but that shouldn't be the only type of films major Hollywood studios make, especially when their excuse for not making a greater array of cinema is worry over a nonexistent threat to theatrical cinema.
Theatrical cinema is alive and well in large part due to the exhibitors chronicled in that Eric Kohn IndieWire piece. And something tells me they'll keep on helping to keep the artform of theatrical cinema alive for all types of movies even if major American movie studios continue to decide it's only good for blockbuster cinema.
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