You may not know it yet.
But the movie industry is shifting radically right in front of our eyes.
This recent month has been a particularly shaky chapter in the ongoing seismic shift, as the past, present, and future are, like a big-budget movie, all colliding.
Let’s start with the past.
Black Panther 2 just limped over 400 million domestic this weekend. Next week it’s going to lose all its screens to Avatar 2. Which means it’s not going to earn that much more money. 400 million sounds like a lot… until you point out that the first movie made 700.
There’s a bigger issue here, though. Which is that Marvel Phase 4 was a bust, and BP2 the exclamation point. The quality of the movies in this past phase has gone down dramatically. This isn’t just my opinion. Go check out the ratings for the films over on Rotten Tomatoes. All the recent movies – Black Widow, Dr. Strange 2, Love and Thunder, Eternals – find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings.
While there is no one thing that has caused this, something I suspect is having a bigger influence on the movies than people realize, is the special effects. All of the special effects in these movies look exactly the same. Go watch the trailer for Guardians 3 and then Ant-Man 3, and tell me the movies don’t look exactly the same.
From what I understand – and somebody can correct me if I’m wrong – all the Marvel special effects are done separate from the director’s vision and are created by Marvel’s special effects team.
This means that directors are not getting to direct the most important scenes in their movies. That’s left to the special effects team. And those guys don’t have the level of creative vision that movie directors do. So, naturally, everything looks uninspired and samey.
This is a big deal because Marvel has been the only thing holding up the movie industry. Nobody’s going out to see movies that aren’t Marvel. So if Marvel doesn’t figure how to inject some life back into their films, we’re either going to have a dead industry or a wide open gap for some visionary to come in and fill it with a new direction for theatrical film.
That brings us to the present and the upheaval that’s going on with Marvel’s main competitor, DC.
James Gunn has taken over DC and he just made a huge controversial decision by axing Wonder Woman 3. Let’s take a second to acknowledge just hot brutal this town can be. One second, Patty Jenkins burst onto the scene with the unexpectedly fun Wonder Woman, whose success she uses to nab a Star Wars movie. Then, three years later, she’s been kicked off both the Star Wars and Wonder Woman franchises. That’s how quickly things can change here! You’re never safe!
Back to Gunn, who is making some tough choices due to the fact that DC has been a mess from the start. This whole weird decision to fractionate the franchise and create separate pockets of movies that don’t have anything to do with each other – it was a bizarre strategy. Gunn wants to unify everything and I, along with the rest of the fan base, say “Thank God.”
But now he’s got some tough decisions to make because what do you do with Batman? On the one hand, Reeves’ film did pretty well. On the other, you want to start with a fresh slate. If you bring anything from the past regime into the present, you risk bringing that faulty blueprint with you. You probably need to start from zero. But there’s enough Hollywood politics going on that this decision won’t be easy for Gunn. He doesn’t want to alienate the entire industry. So it’ll be interesting to see what he does.
In my opinion, everything starts with a good Superman movie. If you get that right, you can build off it. Go back to Superman’s roots. Don’t make him dark and mysterious like Batman. Make him like Superman. Fun. Optimistic. Kind. Fights for good. And then create a situation that makes it hard for him to be all those things. That’s Screenwriting 101. And as much as I love JJ Abrams, I’m begging Gunn to axe his Superman project. The last thing we need is some message Superman movie. We need to focus on making a GOOD Superman movie.
That brings us over to a topic I’m uncomfortably familiar with, which is the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars is on the cusp of going through a revolution of its own with the return of Bog Iger as Disney president. We know Iger, like Gunn, is rethinking his company’s strategy. And that could mean finally getting rid of Kathleen Kennedy, the current head of Lucasfilm.
I know this – people can say they love Andor all they want. Nobody’s watching the show. It’s not just absent from the Top 10 streaming shows. It’s absent from the Top 10 ORIGINALS streaming shows. That’s brutal. That means nobody’s watching this thing.
Luna’s ubiquitous expression would come to be known as “The Scowl of Boredom.”
And it’s very damning for Kennedy. Because it shows that she can’t get the fun Star Wars stuff right (Kenobi) and now she can’t get the serious stuff right. She’s never understood Star Wars. And she’s finally on the verge of killing it. The only thing holding up Star Wars at the moment is The Mandalorian. You might even go a step further and say the only thing holding up the franchise is Baby Yoda. That should be terrifying for Star Wars fans. Cause as much I love Baby Yoda, his character doesn’t have the weight to hold up an entire franchise.
Iger probably has a few more important things to take care of before he gets to Star Wars. But when he does, I pray that he cannonballs onto the reset button and gets somebody in there who understands Star Wars and cares only about one thing – making great Star Wars content.
Finally, we have the future. And the future starts next weekend with the release of Avatar 2. We – as in we the industry – need this movie to do gangbusters. Cause, right now, the box office is in flux. It hasn’t proven that it can get back to pre-pandemic numbers. If there ever was a movie that could change that, and also spring us into 2023 with optimism, it’s Avatar 2.
I know I’m going to be there Day 1, first showing, giant tub of popcorn on my belly. Okay, maybe I don’t eat popcorn. But spiritually, I’ll have a giant tub of popcorn. And I’m going to be rooting for this movie to be amazing and bring everyone back to the theater. Because Avatar is bringing something back that we haven’t had for a long time, which is a UNIQUE EVENT.
We get a new Star Wars show every month. We get a new Marvel movie every week. We don’t see these things as special anymore. But Avatar is special. The last one was 13 years ago. Not only that. But Cameron has SLAVED over this thing. Every single frame is going to be perfect.
Do we still need a good script for it all to matter? Yes. But you can’t say Cameron hasn’t done the work. He wrote out 800 pages of notes for the overarching story and disseminated them between a team of five writers who then went off to write the scripts. And, unlike Marvel, and the rest of Hollywood, Cameron didn’t start shooting until the scripts were ready. So whatever story we get, it won’t be through lack of effort.
I also think that if Avatar 2 does well, it will change the industry. Cause Avatar doesn’t fit the current model of making movies. So if it’s good and if it kills at the box office, maybe the industry starts trying to make some new original franchises, and does so by working on them for years as opposed to 18 months. Make the movie great, not decent.
I’m so pumped for this film. I’m bursting at the seams. Just five days left. It’s going to be so cool!
