The film industry has been facing down some quite incredible odds for quite a few years now. This was likely sparked due to the country-wide quarantine set four years ago, which caused a lot of financial strain on people all around. Things have cleared up significantly since then, but Hollywood is still in a rut that they can’t seem to get out of.
2023 was an interesting year for movies. There were some massive hits, such as the Barbenheimer craze, which placed Barbie in the top 20 highest-grossing films of all time, and brought Oppenheimer close to a billion dollars in revenue.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie was also a huge hit earlier in the year, also raking in well over a billion dollars in ticket sales. Yet there was also a series of devastating flops, particularly those produced by Disney.
Two Marvel/Disney productions, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels took in less than the projected (initial estimate) gross, while the latter grossed 206 million on a budget of about 210 million, and was labeled the first box-office bomb of the MCU, needing an estimated 700 million to break even (become profitable).
Similarly, four films produced by DC (Shazam: Fury of the Gods, Blue Beetle, The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) underperformed to varying degrees, due in part to the prolonged end of the DCEU, but they lost Warner Bros. money nonetheless.
A third hotly-anticipated Disney/Lucasfilm produced project, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was another box-office disappointment, which reportedly lost Disney almost 150 million dollars. Considering that the other installments in the franchise have been incredibly profitable films, it remains a question mark (sort of) how it bombed.
All of these films have some things in common. Several of them were Disney-produced, which is a whole debacle in itself. More of them were comic book/superhero films, which could be attributed to the recent (a film Twitter coined term) “superhero fatigue”, which has greatly diminished the amount of money that genre of films are making.
And all of the aforementioned box-office disappointments were sequels to existing properties. Another, less obvious, answer is that all of these films had budgets of 200 million dollars or more. Oftentimes, marketing isn’t included in the reported budgets, so many of these films could have larger budgets than the public sees.
For example, Oppenheimer was a huge hit last year. The film is still being played in theaters in select areas, so the gross is still growing (albeit slowly). The reported budget was $100 million. Now take into consideration all of the things that were done with the picture: it was shot on IMAX 70mm film (many films nowadays are shot digitally), had an incredibly stacked cast (including Robert Downey Jr., who is one of the most expensive working actors today), required the building of a town as one of the primary sets, used a combination of miniatures and practical effects, and little-to-no CGI, all for $100 million, which is a rather paltry number for blockbusters of the past fifteen years.
Dial of Destiny was the most expensive American film produced last year which cost almost $350 million. There is a lot of CGI in the film (which is necessary to de-age Harrison Ford, who is in his eighties), not to mention extensive action sequences.
Whether or not a film deserves its budget (writer’s note: Dial of Destiny remains a pretty underrated film and is not as bad as people claim it is, though the flaws lie in the script rather than the effects.) isn’t really the problem. The problem is that when a film has a budget of $350 million, it needs to at the very least double that gross in order to make the studio money.
For another example, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) is reported to be the most expensive film ever produced, with a budget of more than $400 million. Yet that film grossed more than $2 billion in the worldwide box office, and currently stands as the highest grossing film in the domestic market ($930 million in America alone). While that film was not a guaranteed success, it was the first Star Wars film in a decade and had rather solid marketing to boot.
Dial of Destiny’s predecessor, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), was produced on an estimated budget of $185 million, and grossed nearly $800 million, becoming the second highest grossing film of that year. Several folks on the internet have discussed the reasons behind the failure of Dial, and while it could be attributed to a multitude of factors, a large one seems to be that budgets are inflating and not all films can gross the same amount.
Cinephiles on the internet will say that the easy answer is merely making films that cost less money. Blumhouse, the production company behind the films of Jordan Peele, Eli Roth, Mike Flanagan, and James Wan, is notable for their productions with budgets under 100 million. While many of their films have been hit or miss, many of them have been profitable because they need less money to break even and make money for the company.
The fact is, there’s no easy answer. There’s been box-office flops since the beginning of movies, and that’s never stopped the film industry from becoming one of the most profitable industries in the world. Companies are going to continue doing what they can to put money in the bank, but recent box office returns could mean the end of the big-budget blockbuster and the return of lower-budget filmmaking. Whether this is a detriment or a gift is completely up in the air. But there could be a lesson to be learned here, that studios could acknowledge and maybe suffer fewer losses.
