The Great Box Office Panic of 2024 (2024)

In December of 2021, as the public began to thaw out a bit after the COVID deep freeze, Peggy Noonan wrote this piece for Wall Street Journal:

Peggy Noonan liked the movie, even loved it and could not understand why it had bombed at the box office. I was a Cassandra then just as I am now. I’ve been hand-wringing over this for a while but not because of streaming. While it’s true that streaming makes it easier to watch “something” at home, that isn’t why, I don’t believe, audiences didn’t turn out to see West Side Story. I think something deeper is at play, something I’ve been trying to articulate because almost no one else dares to speak out about something controversial.

But let’s start with this. The reason West Side Story didn’t make money is that the only audience left that would go see it (upper middle class liberals) were too COVID-paranoid to go. You still see them wearing masks while they walk their dogs outside. You know, those people. That was the last audience left for “Oscar movies.” West Side Story was a hot house flower designed for the Oscar race to make money in that niche demographic and that’s all it was expected to do. But a movie like that, pre-COVID, could have made money because one of the reasons Hollywood did nothing about the box office is that they made enough that it wasn’t embarrassing. But a Spielberg Christmas musical that did not open was embarrassing.

How we got there is the easiest part of this story to understand. Right around 2003, after Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises began making insane amounts of money at the box office, the Oscar race took one path (“prestige movies”) and Big Hollywood took another. I remember meeting with a famous director about ten years ago who told me “Studios don’t care about the Oscars anymore.” I was completely shocked by this statement. He meant that they are the quality stamp on their industry which had become like fast food: pump out familiar products, IPS, franchise movies — fewer choices/expectations met.

The Oscar movies stopped making money, and it didn’t even matter. In 2009, when The Hurt Locker won, it made around $15 million, compared to Avatar, which made a lot more. After Barack Obama won in 2008, we became a community invested in “firsts.” We needed the same kind of social justice wins in the Oscars — first woman, first Black director. I drove much of this from my site because I believed nothing else mattered except making history. I was a “Good Liberal” who was very much a part of our identity-first utopia in the Obama era.

So it didn’t matter if Moonlight made money or not, just as it didn’t matter if Everything Everywhere All At Once didn’t crack $100 mil up against Top Gun Maverick, the only movie people will remember from that year. The Oscars should have given their top prize to Top Gun Maverick to inspire Hollywood to go bigger, go better. But they are, or were up until last year when Oppenheimer broke the trend, identity-first voters.

COVID brought Big Hollywood to its knees, but even still, in 2021, Spider-man: No Way Home made $800 million. But nothing else really made money that year except a movie from China called Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which made $224 million. It was obvious that the box office was in dire straights.

No Time to Die only made $160 million. Dune only made $108 million. West Side Story, at $38 million. We all expected things would get better by 2022, and they did, with Top Gun Maverick in the $700 million range, Wakanda Forever at $453 mil, Avatar: The Way of Water at $600 mil. Things were moving in the same direction — IPs making money, but nothing else. The Oscar movies were WAY down the list, barely cracking $20 million.

Top Gun: Maverick- $700 million
Avatar: The Way of Water – $684 million
Everything Everywhere All at Once — $77 million
All Quiet on the Western Front — N/A
Elvis — $151 million
The Fabelmans — $17 million
The Banshees of Inisherin–$10 million
Tár — $6 million
Triangle of Sadness-$4 million
Women Talking–$5 million

But by 2023, it seemed clear that there was starting to be a problem even with the franchise movies. The two movies that did really well were Barbie and Oppenheimer, or Barbenheimer.

But there was clearly a problem. The independent film Sound of Freedom beat both Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Then we watched the showbiz press go to war on the film, drawing a clear line between “us and them” for moviegoers.

We don’t want the people who paid to see The Sound of Freedom in OUR Hollywood, OUR Oscars, OUR movie theaters.

If that is the message Hollywood is sending, whether through the stories they decide to tell or by the media that shapes the narrative around Hollywood, how could anyone expect that to be a way to bring IN more eyeballs?

They felt fine behaving that way because that is what happened after 2016. The #resistance became the dominant culture treating the other half as human garbage at best, legit threats to their safety at worst. Their shunning of Sound of Freedom was a pivotal moment, at least to me, because I pay attention to the conversations outside the bubble of Film Twitter.

“Cancel Culture” had already gutted Hollywood after 2016. La La Land was “racist,” Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was “racist,” Green Book was “hom*ophobic and racist.” The mass hysteria upended the entire awards industry, with the Golden Globes taken off the air, the Academy bringing in thousands of new members to diversify its ranks. This was all the beginning of the end, the re-arranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The BAFTAs completely overhauled how they “selected” the “correct” nominees and winners. The Academy put in motion a “diversity mandate.” And all the while, FIlm Twitter and everyone else inside the bubble just kept pretending like nothing was going on, that all of this was perfectly normal, that they weren’t making a spectacle of themselves to all the semi-normal people who exist outside Woketopia.

Meanwhile, the people on the outside — the Proles and whatnot — were mobilizing against Hollywood, against preachy celebrities, against awards shows. The Oscars are so hated by so many people it’s a wonder that anyone watches it. They count on the good press from those of us who write from the inside of the bubble and that worked for a while. We can all barely scrape by, but is that really the future Hollywood wants? To be a floating oasis disconnected from land?

I saw people rooting for Sound of Freedom to succeed, including many of the more prominent YouTube voices who offer ongoing criticisms of what has happened to Hollywood, like Critical Drinker. He recommended the film and his video got around 1.5 million views.

And the biggest reason of all is that Hollywood went “woke.” When people like me complained about the Oscars and the film industry being too white and too male, the fix was then to blame the audiences for wanting what they had been conditioned to want for decades and what they responded to. This of it like the McDonald’s Big Mac and fries. What if one day, they just said, you know what? We’re swapping out the burger for a veggie burger and instead of the fries we will be handing out raw broccoli.

So let’s recap. Beyond the threat of streaming, where people are already paying for Netflix, Hulu and other sites, and TikTok and Youtube being interesting ways to get entertainment, the main reasons for the box office emptying out:

1. COVID drove the Upper Middle-Class liberals away.
2. Hollywood and the film community drew a dividing line of ‘us vs. them’ and wiped out half their audience.
3. Hollywood destroyed its brand by swapping out male heroes for girl boss types, making every casting decision like a diverse bag of M&Ms such that they are not real characters anymore they are just symbols or shields to protect the executives. In other words, they went “woke” and they’re still “woke.”

What you get on Film Twitter is nothing but denial about any of this. They want to blame Big Bad Streamers, especially Netflix. And of course, they have decided Trump and his supporters are the Greatest Evil the World Has Ever Known, and as long as they think that, they believe they are at war. In my opinion, they destroyed themselves while fighting this war.

So why did The Fall Guy and Furiosa “open soft”? Over the past several years (see above), audiences have carved a different path that doesn’t include movies. They stopped being exciting events in their lives and started being something they might catch on streaming or on a weekend at some point. It just isn’t an urgent thing in their lives now.

Both movies would have done a lot better, especially The Fall Guy. That made me think that another big problem is the publicity pipeline. I don’t think people are reading movie sites anymore (except this one, course) because they also “went woke,” and/or don’t really talk about the elephant in the room. They mostly parrot the party line. Reaching potential ticket buyers might require thinking outside the box. Maybe TikTok or YouTube influencers are the way to go—just a thought.

What isn’t going to solve the problem are rationalizations on Film Twitter. I’ve even seen anger and rage at people who can’t afford movies or think movies now are too long and too depressing. None of that will help save movie theaters.

To rebuild will require showing the public that the war is over and that they understand that running a business means hiring the best and the brightest and making the best films imaginable. It also means ending the “us vs. them” mindset. Or not. The ship is made of iron and it will sink.

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