You know what it’s like when you have a problem, or maybe a few of them, and they start to interlock and overwhelm you, and you’re frozen and can’t take action, until hope seems to be fading or maybe even lost, and then one day you wake up and realize…that you need therapy?
The movie industry needs therapy.
It needs a lot of things, of course, starting with hits and more hits. That’s the long and short of it, isn’t it? But considering that we still do have hits, as well as audiences who go out to movie theaters to create them, it’s worth asking why a healthier industry — one that generates more hits than it does now, with the consistency that happened in the ’90s and ’00s — is starting to feel so desperately out of reach.
This is where the therapy comes in. In your first sessions with a therapist, you tend to unload the problems that are weighing you down so much that they’ve come to seem insurmountable. In the case of the movie business, let’s run through the tape loop of Reasons for Doom that now plays in all our heads.
1. The pandemic changed the business, making people not want to go out to movie theaters. 2. Streaming, which crested during the pandemic, became the thing they were staying home for. 3. The movie theater experience sucks (cellphones, endless trailers, overpriced concessions), and the attempts to improve and “enhance” it haven’t fundamentally changed anything. 4. Young people don’t care about movies — they’d just as soon watch TikTok.
OK, OK, we know, we know. So maybe we should all just go home and crawl under the covers and stay there. But see, I think the solution is actually standing right in front of us.
Hundreds of movies get released every year, and the majority of them don’t do all that well. But a number of them do. Blockbuster culture, the cornerstone of the movie business for decades, is still alive and kicking, and, in certain ways, thriving. (Those audiences aren’t staying home.) Marvel-movie burnout is not the same thing as the movie industry dying. And yes, there’s no debating that the costs of many of these films need to come down.
But a therapist would say that what the industry first needs to focus on, along with the mistakes it can correct, is a vision of what success would actually look like. And here’s what that is: 100 movies a year that connect with audiences. No more and no less. That’s doable, people.
If you look back at the box office salad days of the ’80s or ’90s, it was never about more than 100 movies a year. And those movies were a mix of things. Right now, I’d say that we have 50 or 60 movies a year that connect with audiences. Most of them are big-scale blockbusters, but not all. A handful are still dramas and comedies for adults (like, last year, “A Complete Unknown” and “Anyone but You” and “Challengers” and “It Ends With Us” and “Conclave” and “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever”). We need more of those.
In Variety’s recent story about the woes of the theatrical movie business, there was a telling comment from Chris Johnson, the CEO of the Classic Cinemas chain. “[Tentpoles] are important,” he said, “but quantity is more important. I’ll take six movies that are doing reasonable business over a giant movie that creates a vacuum.”
He said a mouthful. What he’s talking about is nothing less than the return of the mid-budget movie for adults — something that hasn’t actually gone away (just peruse those titles I listed above), but has faded because it’s been allowed to fade. “Anyone but You” was a major hit, and how many studio rom-coms were released in its wake? None.
That’s partly because what we once called the blockbuster mentality has only metastasized. Let’s be clear about what that mentality says. It says that in the executive corridors, only wimps want to make movies that are modest successes — that singles and doubles are for suckers. That mentality is now helping to kill the industry.
The film business is made up of competing companies, and these days, competition tends to be metaphysically cutthroat. You want to be up, and you want your rivals to be down. But that’s not how the film business used to work. It was once more of a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats thing. And the industry today needs to start thinking as one, to unite and slay the beast that is the streaming world. Because streaming is kicking ass in a way that it doesn’t need to.
Just look at the movies that have gone straight to streaming that shouldn’t have, the movies that could have been part of the 100 movies a year needed to feed a thriving industry. Films like “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” (it played on Netflix but would have done $150 million in theaters). How about “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”? It was a hit in Europe, but was streaming only in the U.S. (on Peacock). How about the sexy and mischievous Glen Powell undercover romantic thriller “Hit Man”? Not to mention “Flora & Son,” “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” and Adam Sandler’s upcoming “The Waterboy 2” (Netflix again). Are you telling me that in theaters, that wouldn’t kill?
You may have noticed that nearly all the films I just cited are not awards-buzz movies. Those used to be part of the commercial film industry; to a great extent, they no longer are. To the degree that awards films can still become hits (the way “A Complete Unknown” or “Poor Things” did), great; they can be part of the 100. But the films I’m talking about are mostly middlebrow commercial entertainments. The kinds of movies that Hollywood used to market unashamedly to audiences, and still could. We just need 100 movies a year that connect. But to have that, we need an industry that’s devoted to making and exhibiting them. Not an industry that needs therapy because it no longer believes in itself.
