It's Time To Fire Hollywood

There are movie releases that yell out to the world that moviegoing is alive and well and that if audiences are provided entertaining and compelling content they will get out of their Lazy boy and head on down to their local cinema. The want is there, and the studios are not. Avatar will hit it out of the park and will send up flares stating there is still much life left in the movie-going tradition.

As we move forward during this season of hope, I want to assure you that the light of the movies is not going to diminish. Circuits will evolve, and technology will alter delivery but in the end, movie-going is the natural child of sitting around the campfire and telling stories to each other. Storytelling is hard-coded into these wacky animals known as humans. It is in the top five of what’s great about this species of ours.

What has changed is that Hollywood is capable of carrying forth that tradition. I just don’t think they have the focus, the talent, or the Moxy to perpetuate movie going. I remember ever so fondly of phoning a booker, I would hear the sound of a huge book open up, you could feel the booker going over handwritten entries. Usually, the banter was highly entertaining, and it was drenched in Brooklyn Jewish sardonic humor. It was fun….two people transacting and reaching a proactive outcome.

The studios shut down film office after film office, collapsed the exchanges, and then moved everything to emails. They sucked the humanity and the fun out of business. It became arbitrary, stale, and dry. I was running a film festival and wanted to show Sukiyaki Western Django, which featured Quentin Tarantino and was directed by Takashi Miike. There was only one print in existence.? Someone made a call for me, and a new print was struck. Today that would not happen.

Here is a cold reality, The US box office is up 355% compared to 2021, but still down 41% compared to 2019.? I think the number is closer to 50%. The movie exhibition business industry is well behind the pre-pandemic output from Hollywood during the fondly remembered 2019. That year there were 63 nationwide releases in North America. This year, 2022, the number is just 39, a 38% drop from three years ago.

The audience is there,? but they are being starved. Admissions are 30% behind 2019 levels. The easy access to streaming has blinded the studios, but the truth is that they are kind of bone lazy. NATO is telling the story that the decline is due to COVID, and streamers are releasing products. This product was produced during COVID. Studios usually deal with a six-month to the one-year release schedule. Take a look at 2023, and you will discover that NATO’s pronouncement does not really hold water. That kind of excuse is easy, and consumable but not at all accurate. For example, Stranger Things Season 4 shut down in mid-March 2020 but resumed production in the third week of September 2020. The Tom Hanks movie, News of the World, was shot in 2020 in New Mexico.? Now to give a more global picture, the Screen Actors Guild implemented a safety regime and required a COVID Safety enforced on set. There were numerous production delays.

Production for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever started in June of 2021. It did some nice business. Hollywood knew that there would be a lack of product. Marketing Avatar2 and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a walk in the park. These are cinematic brands that everyone knows, so brand awareness is not an issue…..it's easy. Marketing smaller picture or none tentpole movies is not so easy.? It is challenging work that demands creativity, a work ethic, and diligence, something that in short supply.? Streaming is an easy solution, and due to COVID, we have to admit that Hollywood is a tad gun-shy. Schedules created by the studios are looking to 2023 having substantially more movies coming down the pipe, including three Marvel Studios movies, four DC movies, tentpole favorites “Fast & Furious,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Transformers,”? and” John Wick” franchises. The one that I am excited for is Harrison Ford’s fifth and final bow as Indiana Jones.

If I were to call it, I think Hollywood is suffering from a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to staring off the precipice and seeing a bleak future. I will have to agree with John Fithian. I do think COVID altered output, but not because of a lack of output but a deep and abiding fear that tomorrow is not guaranteed and that you have to be measured. Hollywood is quickly abandoning risk and diverse storytelling, elements of which made it great. It is becoming a shy wallflower when it used to be the belle of the ball.

Just remember the foundation of this business was not in the now smoggy Los Angeles.? It's time to look at both history and a re-invention. Hollywood never was one to admit its origin. It was shaped by the Ealing Comedies of England, the sublime masterworks that come from the French New Wave, The brassiness of the Australians, the action of Hong Kong, and the storytelling of Kurosawa in Japanese.? Hollywood’s singular genius was to assimilate stories and vision and rebrand it as their own. They were bold, shameless, and not afraid.

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.