Based on the long string of flops that Hollywood has given us this year — everything from Argylle to Madame Web, Borderlands, Trap, Unfrosted, Horizon, Megalopolis, and the new Joker sequel — I figure, at this point, I trust the McDonald’s ice cream machine more than I do the decision-makers in Tinseltown. And I’m sure that list of garbage movies will get even longer before the year is out.
The quality of movies like those above tracks the many inexplicably dumb and laughably bad choices of what are often imperious directors, without anyone around them to tell them ‘no.’ As a result, this depressing year has given us movies about Pop-Tarts; horribly miscast video game franchises; and at least one sequel (Joker: Folie à Deux) that undercuts everything that was great about the original, basically giving a giant middle finger to fans.
Along these same lines, I was excited at first about director Ridley Scott’s upcoming Gladiator sequel — but now, for a variety of reasons, I’m genuinely worried it could go either way. For one thing, the original is 20 years old. None of the major cast members are back for the sequel, which had a reported budget on the order of $300 million (meaning the film would probably need to hit $1 billion or so to break even). And while the cast for the sequel does include Denzel Washington, one of the few things that gives me hope, the eye-popping budget is certainly in line with a lot of the flops mentioned above.
Apple’s Argylle, for example, had a reported production budget of $200 million and grossed a little more than $96 million worldwide. Likewise, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, with its reported production budget of $100 million and which grossed a mere $35 million worldwide; Borderlands, with a budget of $115 million and a $26 million gross worldwide, fared even worse.
One obvious result of all this is a hit to the domestic box office, which currently stands at $6.3 billion year-to-date, down a little more than 11% compared to the same window in 2023 (per Box Office Mojo). As the BBC accurately noted recently, some of the blame for all this can be laid at the feet of the short-sighted major studios — which, of course, have been fixated on a relatively small number of high-profile intellectual properties for the last 20 years. And when those franchises run out of steam, what can the studios do (a question, it would seem, that they have yet to answer)?
If you ask me, this assessment from The New York Times probably sums up why things are as bad as they are right now as well as anything could: “Each new headline about the huge compensation package for Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, or decisions by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, to shelve entire projects for tax write-offs undergirds a prevailing narrative that the people who finance the movies are becoming the enemies of the people who make them.”
Long story short: I couldn’t blame you for feeling like the people who make movies, as well as the executives who finance them, are increasingly losing their minds — as well as their grip on the reality of what moviegoers want to see. And so the great film flop train of 2024 continues rumbling along, toward a destination that fewer people than ever seem all that interested in.
