Is Hollywood Sick? (or, A Night on the Town)
Is Hollywood ailing? That’s a question that’s been asked throughout its history (in the days preceding the institution of the Hays Code censorship guidelines, for example, or the time period in which it seemed televised broadcasting might be the end of motion picture theater exhibition). With the one-two punch of the pandemic crossed with competitive streaming wars — now having their own financial meltdowns — not to mention the actor’s strike — the choices provided to those still theater going are now sparse, a bit sad, and often downright irrelevant or repulsive. It’s a unique situation worth a closer look.
I recently and coincidentally watched two old musicals very different in theme, scope and budget: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain, one of the most enduring and endearing of musicals, and The Mayor of 44th Street (1942). Singin’ in the Rain isn’t a movie I love, though it has colorful, musical charms. The Mayor of 44th Street is a far more obscure George Murphy vehicle most notable for it being the last film of Richard Barthelmess, long of silent films, before he enlisted in the Navy during WWII and lived the rest of his life off his real estate earnings.
Both films had a definite something which most theatrical films today lack and it’s a something I’d forgotten I was missing until I recently watched them: they are total entertainment packages. They’re benevolent films packed with something everyone in the family can enjoy: drama, romance, comedy, music and conclusions that aren’t prolonged and aren’t downers. They’re the kind of films that sustained the Hollywood system for many decades, inducing families to drive on a Friday night to a local theater, park the car on a side street, walk down the sidewalks to the theater and leave in a good mood, discussing what they’d seen.
It doesn’t behoove me to romanticize the above-described scenario. Edgy foreign movies, film noirs, the delightfully cynical products of Billy Wilder and the often-morbid Hitchcock, to name a few, were long a part of Hollywood’s output. And yet, there are entire genres of film that are rarely, if ever, made and distributed now. What is Hollywood releasing now? Take a peek.
For the week starting August 30th, 2024, the films scheduled for the Cinemark theater in my neighborhood consisted of: four horror movies (Trap, Afraid, Blink Twice and Strange Darling), a horror-themed animated film rerelease (Coraline), a horror-themed gothic superhero film (The Crow), a horror-themed science-fiction film (Alien: Romulus) and Twisters (certainly horrific if you’re caught in a tornado). The other kind of films presented on the same schedule (with some overlap) are franchises: sequels or continuations of intellectual properties: Deadpool & Wolverine, Alien: Romulus, Twisters, The Crow, Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, and a rerelease of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Rounding out the schedule: It Ends with Us, a poorly reviewed drama of domestic violence and abuse based on a young adult novel; an abysmally reviewed Reagan biography, a Christian drama, The Forge, and the three and a half hour Daniel Live!; the last three undoubtedly due to the influence of Cinemark founder Lee Roy Mitchell’s religious convictions. Trailing behind all: two Telugu-language movies, Gabbar Singh and Saripodhaa Sanivaaram.
What’s interesting is the kinds of American movies not being shown in this representative week of programming: non-franchise comedies, musicals, and adult dramas. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was mourned when he died prematurely ten years ago, but the kinds of films he starred in aren’t being made and would never appear in theaters now; films like Doubt, Hard Eight, Magnolia, Charlie Wilson’s War. The Outfit and Tár, both from 2022, may have been the last adult dramas I’ve seen in a theater. It’s because there are none. We’re in a drought. As for musicals, they’re still being made, but aren’t marketed as such because Hollywood’s perception is that audiences today don’t like musicals. There’s no way any young person seeing the trailer for the upcoming Wicked would realize it’s a musical as no one is shown singing in the trailer; the Broadway musical the film was based in debuted in 2003, when the film’s target audience was in diapers. Hollywood’s used the same marketing tactic for all recent musicals.
Horror movies are one of Hollywood’s biggest bets now (and, as of this writing, it’s not even Halloween) and within the genre, there are interesting, auteurist films being made — JT Mollner’s Strange Darling, Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, and the films of Jordan Peele are good examples. Having acknowledged that, how sad must it be for an upcoming filmmaker to be told that they can make any kind of movie they want — as long as it’s a horror movie or franchise property.
The Telugu-language movies Cinemark shows aren’t to be sneezed at. I’ve seen many in the past year and they, on average, tell more human and relatable stories than their American counterparts. More power to them! They were all similar, though, in one aspect: every one of them I’ve seen had only one viewer in the auditorium — me. I’m glad these films are being shown but I do wonder why they’re being shown. Is it that there aren’t enough American films being released to fill the theaters?
Can and will Hollywood make a wide variety of movies again? What were they doing when they were most successful? In 1948, for example, 50% of the population went to a movie theater at least once weekly. The movies screened were of a wide variety, with literally something to please everyone. Of the 504 movies released in the United States in 2023, only perhaps half had any kind of theatrical screening at all (usually a limited one, to qualify for awards or for contractual obligation); the rest went straight to streaming.
It’s reassuring that two of 2023’s most successful films do meet my “total entertainment package” model: Barbie and Wonka, although Wonka was largely a British production and Barbie had to contain mandatory gender-politics preachiness. Both were also franchises (would Barbie have even been made if not based on a children’s plastic toy by one of the biggest toy manufacturers in the world?).
In May of this year, the New York Times ran an article about the abysmal box office sales of a Ryan Gosling comedy called The Fall Guy ($200 million dollars to make, $28.5 in its opening weekend). “This is why studios do not take risks on new stories”, the Times wrote. I contend this isn’t at all the lesson to be learned. I didn’t see The Fall Guy because a) the characters and story didn’t interest me and b) after seeing the trailer for the movie in theaters about ten times, I felt like I’ve already seen The Fall Guy. 
This poor movie shouldn’t be made the scapegoat for original storytelling in Hollywood, though. The real lesson to be learned is: stop plowing $200 million dollars into comedies, especially when there’s no guarantee anyone will go to see it. They could have made ten comedies with the same $200 million and one of them might have been a huge hit.
The powers that be need to reconsider the way they market their films. A generation or two used to see movies previewed on television and at movie theaters. Those days are gone. I often see Reddit comments by film viewers who say they had no idea a film existed — while it’s showing at a theater right in their neighborhood. Much more extensive use of social media (Instagram, X, TikTok, etc.) needs to be exploited. A benefit from viewers seeing films in a theater before they’re streamed is word of mouth — since more viewers stream than go to theaters, they’ll be more likely to stream something they’ve heard was worth watching in the theater. We need a leaner, more low-to-the-ground and cheaper Hollywood, one which, like the decision-makers in 1948, spread the available money on a wide swath of productions, only a select few of them high-budget, with a variety of genres and a good mixture of serious dramas and total entertainment — the kind worth driving your car for.
—Michael R. Neno, 2024 September 2