Bad Start Of Summer Movies 2024

[Terry Monohan]

My friends and I usually go to our local movie theatre in the Santa Cruz or San Francisco CA area once a week. Have not been to a cinema in the last 90 days. There is nothing I want to see so far at the start of the big 2024 movie summer season.

The only films I liked the trailers on are 'MaXXXine' & 'Kinds Of Kindness' opening in a few weeks. We miss movie hot butter popcorn Dolby Digital surround sound plus curved screens and all the trailers.

Hope things change soon so we can all enjoy the big screen movie theatre experience and get out and turn off the TV streaming syndrome. What used to be a non commercial movie streaming service at home now they charge you extra $$$ for no commercials

My local cinema sits empty with the popcorn getting cold. and candy going stale. The ants are visiting the not used soda machines in the empty lobbies. The studios will soon find many more movie theatres are closing down this Summer when there is not a good product coming out. Why pay a expensive lease when no one comes out to see a movie. Many blame It on the strike?

What used to be a busy time at the cinema is now playing ghost town auditoriums and they are not even showing a good horror summer blockbuster.

Many theatre manager friends I talk to tell me things will get better later this Summer and in the Fall . Lets hope so as my cinema seat sits empty so far this 2024 summer. .

[Mike Blakesley]

This IS a bad summer, and of course the media has already started their chorus of "Theaters are dead!" their favorite song to sing when we have a summer like the current one.

The strikes ARE the problem. There was a production slowdown (or stoppage in many cases) and a lot of movies got delayed. People will go to movies if there are good movies out there, but you yourself said the product is crap right now...and it is.

Things will get better next week when Inside Out 2 comes out, and then there's Despicable Me 4 and the new Deadpool. Not to mention Twisters, Bikeriders, and a few others. The end of the summer should be better than the beginning. Still, I feel for those who have to fill 10 or 20 screens. There just isn't enough good product.

Things will also get WAY better starting this fall and Christmas and into next year. We need a couple big blockbusters to get people out, and then they'll see the trailers for the upcoming good stuff, and things will rebound. I hope not too many casualties pile up along the road to improvement.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Warning! Unstructured rant incoming...

I'm not sure what it is... Am I getting to old for this? I can't be the only one that feels like this plague that has gotten a word, the plague that boils everything down to the lowest common denominator, until all the spice is gone, that plague has long since taken over Hollywood. The plague that has also taken over the Internet: Enshitification. I feel like this "Enshitification" has now coated almost everything Hollywood touches.

I like a lot of the more alternative fare, but I've seen most of the big Hollywood movies at least once at one time or another. Usually, there are always a few movies on my list I'm pretty excited about, but the last movie this year that had that tingle was Dune 2. There's really NOTHING in the pipeline that's getting me all excited... Maybe it is because everything released by Hollywood still looks like a dejavu? It seems since many of the recent franchise was milked so dry, not just the cow, but the entire cow farm imploded in their face. Their solution? Let's start milking those OLD cows, their milk must have aged well over the years...

We already had yet another Ghost Busters movie, another Apes movie, another Kung Fu Panda movie, a new Mad Max movie, heck, even that one movie I was excited about is a sequel of remake (attempt) number 42. Then, what are we in for? Another Deathpool/Wolverine movie, another Alien movie, another Bad Boys movie, a sequel to Inside Out, Exorcist(ish) movie #401, an "A Quiet Place" sequel, a Joker sequel, a Beetlejuice sequel, a Twister sequel and HECK, even a Gladiator II...

I'm at the end of my rope here, it seems those high-paid executives have learned nothing from what happened over the last year. Once everything went back to the current normalized zombie-state, they simply started pulling their old and proven-to-be-a-failure parlor tricks again.

Hollywood, you've deserved to be extinguished by our future AI overlords, due to mental starvation, you've become the place where creativity dies. If the random farts of ChatGPT on LSD smell better than the output of the highest paid "creative industry" in this world, we do have a problem... don't we?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

A lot of this stuff mentioned in this thread is why I retired, besides the fact that I'm 68 years old. Out of all the movies mentioned in these posts only one even somewhat interests me. Besides the fact the local AMC is absolutely awful, there ARE 2 good theaters within 5 miles of me...
Hollywood lost all it's good writers years ago, and there is little to no originality left. Just remakes... Plus streaming is also damaging the exhibition industry considerably. At this point I hope the exhibition industry can even survive...

[James Wyrembelski]

There are and have been plenty of original titles over the past few years and no one goes to see them. Are the big films essentially the same, yep. But people actually show up to those despite complaining "its all the same stuff".

I'd love to not be forced to show "tentpole" titles back to back, but every time I go against the trend it backfires.

Hopefully the tide will indeed turn, but this isn't just a slump....it's pretty terrible overall.....

[Marcel Birgelen]

Mind you: There was a time when not all tentpole movies were remakes, sequels, prequels or "alternate universe" versions...

[Frank Angel]

Marcel, rants need no apologies -- they prove there is still some passion left...unstructured rants, well definitely even better!

A friend of friend mine and his wife who are big fans of the Planet of the Apes franchise, dragged me out to see the latest retread. Given all the incessant $$$ hype Fox poured into it, I thought, really, how bad could it be. Well, worse that one could imagine, and i can imagine some really awful horror shows. I actually liked the initial film with Charlton (Get your damn stinking paws off me you dirty ape) Heston when the original idea was born back in, what, the late 60? And I actually like it. Then when the first modern retread with Jame Franko came along, I went to dee it and I marveled at how incredibly life-like CGI was able to create those apes, especially the baby Caesar -- such a monumental leap since the rubber masks of the first incarnation. I don't know what made me think I could believe any of the hype Fox poured in the ad campaign, but reluctantly I agreed to accompany the couple even though it was playing at the Alamo Draft House, a "theatre" so focused on FOOD, that it doesn't have the word "theatre" or 'cinema' in its title and where the focus is not on the movie, but your effing dinner.

It was the first time I had ever been to this chain because just on principal, I find it supremely wrong to make it seem like the itself movie isn't enough, and in order for you to be able to enjoy a film, understand it, engage with it, you need to stuff your face with food. Here's a concept, instead of little table in front of the seats, the concessions people just strap a big feed bag to your face filled with cheese tacos and hotdogs so you don't even need to lift fork to mouth. But I digress.

So here's this screening of a movie Fox execs are getting erections over thinking it is going to be a their big blockbuster cash cow, and on a Saturday afternoon, in this fairly upscale neighborhood theater, there were no more than 5 other groups, maybe 12 ti 15 people....hardly enough to pay for the electricity to run the projector. I will say that the presentation was 3.5/5 -- Dolby's Atmost sound was very impressive, very robust and hyper directional. The the film? Let's put it this way, you could hear that dog barking all the way to the parking lot. There wasn't a shred of originality or even the charm of the RISE OF movie. When the credit crawl started, the few people in the large practically empty room headed for the door. My friends and I stayed because a friend of ours who we worked with is now the score recording engineer for many of the biggest blockbusters and we stay to see if he worked on this film (the wife is like, "can't you just look it up on IMBD?" And to my friend I am like, "She knows your a sound engineer, right, and she says things like that?) Anyway, point being, while all the technical elements and the presentation elements and the star power (although there was none here because you can't SEE anyone) can be top draw, if you don't have a compelling and unique story, you wind up with an audience that you can count your fingers and the theatre owner and the Fox execs who greenlighted this turkey sit at their desks and weep. Then there's the guy who walked past us sitting watching the credits and he gives us the proverbial Thumbs Down sign. My friend says, "You got THAT right."

As for AI -- it probably could have made a movie that was a lot more interesting than whoever was responsible for this pile of undigested compost. Oh, and to that end, had they let AI "read" this script, it more than likely would have told the Fox aholes, not to make it because it is going to BOMB. And of cost they would have ignored that evaluation and so AI would have launched nuclear weapons at the Fox lots at Century City just like Colossus did in the Forbin Project.

[Frank Cox]

There are and have been plenty of original titles over the past few years and no one goes to see them.

because they don't get the saturation advertising that Random Sequel Number 42 will get.

People aren't going to plonk down their twenty dollar bill on something that they don't already know about. It used to be that there were a lot of people would go out on Friday night and whatever's playing is what they got to see, but now in the absence of a specific desire to see Movie X they stay home and watch a random movie on Netflix instead.

[Rick Cohen]

The question we should be asking is, why would any consumer of entertainment pay to see a movie in cinemas, if they are already paying $100/month for a combination of Disney+/ABC/Hulu, HBO/Max/WB, Netflix, Amazon/MGM, and Peacock/NBC/Universal? Most homes now have at least one 60" Smart TV with surround sound. Mine is 90".

New movies are now available for free on streaming platforms in 20-60 days, so why pay for overpriced snacks, screaming kids, and other guests talking on their cell phones during the movie? The studios have already determined that streaming is the future of entertainment. Disney spent $180 million on The Acolyte, a tentpole IP which would have been 2-3 films of franchise theatrical releases ten years ago. If studio resources used to be 25% streaming and 75% theatrical pre-pandemic, the scales have flipped to 75% streaming and 25% theatrical post pandemic. There's no indication the pendulum is going to swing back the other way anytime soon, if ever.

[Mark Ogden]

There are and have been plenty of original titles over the past few years and no one goes to see them.

And there has also been Barbie, Oppenheimer, Elemental, Taylor Swift: Eras, Elvis, RRR, Dune, 1917, Birds of Prey, Tenant, Knives Out . . .

While the vast majority of the domestic box-office is franchise driven, these film prove that a paying audience will turn out for something that they haven't seen before. The issue is that studios hate to gamble on originality unless there are huge names behind it (Oppenheimer) or popular pre-existing intellectual property (Barbie). The franchise strategy is going to start biting them on the ass sooner rather than later, as seen by the relative failure of Furiosa, Madame Web, The Marvels, The Flash, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, et.al.

You can only go to the well so many times before the bucket comes up dry.

[James Wyrembelski]

Yes, you will always get a few break outs here and there. The vast majority of original content is DOA. Especially post covid. Let's take a look at some recents:

One Life, Wicked Little Letters, Lisa Frankenstein, Back to Black, Color Purple, Tarot, Licorice Pizza, She Said, Asteroid City, Jesus Revolution, Empire of Light, 65, Air, The Covenant, Big George Foreman, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Polite Society, Gran Turismo, The Hill, Dumb Money, The Creator, Marsh King's Daughter, The Holdovers, Ferrari, Miracle Club, ISS, (should I keep going?)

Were these all completely dead films? No. But they were in and out before anyone noticed really. Some may have even made a little but there is plenty of original content and I hardly listed many of them. The ultimate victim of streaming is the mid level title and now it's begun to go after the bigger fish.

[Paul H. Rayton]

Trade Journal "Variety" had a big article about this situation a few days ago. What brought it up was the new movie "Hit Man", which has all the hallmarks of what would have potentially been a boffo summertime movie -- charismatic (and au courant) male lead [Glen Powell], an interesting and off-beat rom-com story, well-known director [Richard Linklater], under 2 hr. run time, etc. Netflix stole it (too strong? OK, snuck away with it) from the Venice Film Festival back last September for the comparatively paltry sum of $20 million. Now they are briefly claiming it's "in theaters", but in actual point of fact, it's only in a smattering bunch of lesser cinemas, where it'll basically play without any serious ad campaign to support it. So, little support (from Netflix) for the venues playing it, and in a week they'll be running it on their home service, for free (to subscribers), thus demolishing whatever boxoffice potential remained. Good job, Netflix! Head off the competition by snapping up potential "big screen" programming ahead of the regular distributors, the sooner to eviscerate what's left of the cinema theater business.

Article source URL: https://variety.com/2024/film/column...ticle-comments


Would ‘Hit Man’ Be a Hit in Theaters? Netflix Doesn’t Want You to Know

The entertaining and highly acclaimed Glen Powell thriller is the latest potential hit movie that Netflix has taken off the table.
[illustration]

By: Owen Gleiberman
"Variety"; published June 2, 2024


Next week, on June 7, the entertaining and highly acclaimed geek-goes-undercover-as-contract-killer screwball romantic thriller “Hit Man,” starring It Dude of the moment Glen Powell, drops on Netflix. But this weekend, in case you hadn’t noticed, the movie opened “in theaters.” How many theaters? If you use your hands and feet to count, you’ll have most of them covered.

Netflix, the company that did for streaming what McDonald’s did for fast food (made it everyone’s new normal), always likes to make a big show of when it’s playing a movie “in theaters.” It has long amused me to see entertainment journalists get suckered into this public-relations gambit, for the simple reason that so many of them live in New York and L.A., where the tiny number of theaters occasionally playing a Netflix movie tend to be. A film opens five blocks from your house, and you think, “Yes, there it is! In theaters.”

But seriously, you could fit the number of people who will see “Hit Man” in theaters onto the head of a pin. It’s a Netflix movie, and it has been ever since Netflix bought it at the Venice Film Festival last September for $20 million. I can’t say how many people will watch “Hit Man” on Netflix, and maybe that number will be huge. Or maybe, as is often the case, we won’t know. (Netflix is a cagey monolith when it comes to revealing viewership numbers.) But here’s something you can take to the bank: When “Hit Man” starts streaming next weekend, the buzz that surrounds it, the avid hum of what we used to call “the conversation,” is going to be…zero. Nada. Crickets. It’s going to be a movie falling in the forest and not making a sound.

Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix and its paradigm-setting leader, likes to think of his company as the future. And perhaps it is. But when it comes to movies, or at least the kind of high-profile quality movies that used to be the engine of what we once called, you know, movies, I think of Netflix as the Bermuda Triangle. It’s the ocean of product where films go to disappear.
If “Hit Man” were being released by a conventional studio (if that even exists anymore), and if it were opening next weekend on 2,000 screens, would it be a hit? Who knows? Yet with everything that “Hit Man” has going for it (the freshly minted stardom of Glen Powell, a rash of great reviews, the fact that the movie — though I liked it a notch less than most critics — is Richard Linklater’s diverting and original rendition of a romantic-comedy ride), it’s no stretch to say that it would likely be a solid mid-level performer. I’d wager it could have made a domestic total of $30 to $40 million.

That may not sound like much at a moment when the bottom seems to be falling out of the theatrical motion-picture business. According to the logic of the box office, what Hollywood doesn’t need right now is a quirky philosophical indie rom-com that takes in $35 million. It needs home runs, megahits, stratospheric blockbusters. And yes, it certainly does. But I’d also argue that it’s that thinking — four decades’ worth of it — that’s part of what has made the prospect of a mid-level hit seem so trivial-to-the-point-of-irrelevance. As the film industry, faced with its looming existential crisis, begins to rethink how it does business, one factor that might enter its thinking would be to reconsider the value of hits that are singles and doubles: modestly budgeted entertainments that find their niche. That’s a lot of what movies were, before JawsStarWarsGhostbustersDieHardTerminatorBatmanMar vel. We shouldn’t be dismissing movies that are good enough to win an audience but not big enough to break the bank.

Ted Sarandos doesn’t dismiss them. On the contrary, he keeps buying them. And in doing so, he keeps taking them off the table. Are those two things deliberately connected? For Sarandos, “Hit Man” playing on Netflix is a victory. But for the film industry at large, it’s a defeat. I now have an entire roster of films that have streamed on Netflix, or will in the near future, that could potentially have been theatrical hits. Movies like the fantastic high-finance sexual-politics drama “Fair Play.” Or David Fincher’s hit-man extravaganza “The Killer.” Or “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” Or the buzziest film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the trans cartel musical “Emilia Pérez” (which Netflix just bought for $8 million).

Each of these movies could have found an audience and, in its way, bolstered the industry. And it’s time that the industry — everyone in it — starts to unite in realizing that the future of movies may depend, in part, on a hundred modest successes, a hundred sparks that stoke a roaring fire. Even if a Marvel movie, or “Godzilla Part 23” or “Inside Out: The Live Action Wow,” doesn’t happen to be coming out that week, the audience still needs to think of movie theaters as places of possibility.

A business observer might say that to save this industry, singles and doubles won’t cut it — that we need grand slams. And it’s true; we do. But one thing the gradual burnout of Marvel-movie addiction has demonstrated is that a top-heavy film industry has the potential to crash in on itself. To save the industry, we need to save and sustain movie culture. Singles and doubles do that. Movies like “Hit Man” and “Fair Play” and “Emilia Pérez” are part of what keep people excited about movies.

Ted Sarandos knows all this. His job is to make Netflix exciting. But I also fear that he has a vested interest in trying to make movie theaters less exciting. That’s a speculative opinion, but Sarandos, cards-close-to-the-vest titan that he is, offered an unusually candid peek into his thinking in the interview he gave last week to the New York Times. “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” he said, would have found just as big an audience on Netflix (which he might be right about, though I doubt it). But then he said, in reference to those films, “There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people.” No reason to believe. Actually, for millions and millions of people around the globe, those movies were clearly better because they played as the larger-than-life spectacles they were. Sarandos then told an anecdote that spoke a thousand words, mentioning that his son, a 28-year-old film editor, had watched “Lawrence of Arabia” on his phone. He simply stated it as a fact, but what he was saying is: It’s fine! Why not get with the program and watch “Lawrence of Arabia” on your phone?

And that, in the context of what’s now happening to movie culture, is a casually blasphemous statement. If Sarandos truly believes that size doesn’t matter, and that we might as well be watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on our phones, it’s worth asking: What does he think movie theaters are even good for? Netflix bought a couple of legendary movie theaters (the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, the Paris Theater in New York), and did a splendid job of refurbishing them, and it has done a lovely, if heavily synergistic, job of programming them. So you might say that Netflix officially likes movie theaters. But in another sense, you could say Ted Sarandos thinks movie theaters are mostly good for one thing: to throw a few of his movies into, in a token scattered way, to fool everyone in the industry into thinking that he might be on their side.

[Mark Ogden]

You do not make the point that you think you are making when you call arthouse/speciality titles like Wicked Little Letters, She Said (which was both brilliant and moving), The Holdovers, Asteroid City, Empire of Light and others "D.O.A.", especially when you are talking runs of 1000 screens or less, because at that point the success of a film becomes very relative. The local non-profit arthouse here kept Licorice Pizza going for months to great box office. Tell the manager over there that it was DOA. Jesus Revolution actually found an audience and did pretty well for opening against Cocaine Bear, and it returned a very nice profit, not superhero movie numbers but by no means DOA. Did these pictures do Barbie numbers? Not at all. They also didn't do Barbie screen count or promotion either. That hardly makes them failures.

You further fail to make your point when you list films that are either misconceived or flat out suck. Back to Black was horrible, Lisa Frankenstein was stoopid with two o's (which is worse than regular stupid), and The Color Purple was pointless. I've barely even heard of the rest. WTF was The Marsh King's Daughter?

[Ryan Gallagher]

I keep thinking back to the upheaval and near destruction of the big studio music recording industry when digital distribution and streaming went mainstream.

It's not dead, but boy has it evolved from what it was in the pre MP3 era. The recent resurgence of Vinyl is like the counter-counter-culture of a new generation realizing perhaps things were better before it was all so convenient, but fundamentally a tiny-blip on the radar of the larger industry. Musicians (specifically the performing artists sub-group) at least have live exhibition to fall back on, since their margins on everything else not self-published has fallen to pennies.

Movies and TV were inevitably next, as the technology for delivery at "passable" quality caught up. There is a similar nascent movement of people buying blu-rays again in a bid to "own" their favorite content once more without fear of content streaming licences lapsing etc.

Live exhibition in the film world however, unless cleverly programmed or surrounding a special event, does not include the safety net of being a chance to see the stars in person. And we may witness it utterly fail except for a handful of venues that host premieres, festivals, and other curated series for those remaining die hard cinema lovers.

Interesting timing, I write this as a sold out hose of 1300 people is getting up to fill their drinks after a Q&A with John Waters, programmed within a double feature of his two films "Pink Flamingos" and "Female Trouble".

Films can still pack houses, however new releases from the big studios have their own special problems.

[James Wyrembelski]

My point being that there is plenty of original stuff out there, it just doesn't sell to the greater masses, which is why we get sequels, remakes, and the rest. Why distribute wide when we all know the audience isn't there outside of targeted areas, nor are they films that will keep the majority of us open. But we need to stop saying there is "nothing" original.