Nicky Woolf 

Where have all the summer blockbusters gone?

The latest crop of big-budget summer films have fared dismally because the big studios are betting more money on fewer films. A flop is now a very expensive flop
  
  

Morgan Freeman and Jack Huston in Ben-Hur
Morgan Freeman and Jack Huston in Ben-Hur, which took $11m at the US box office on its opening weekend. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Is the summer blockbuster dead?

Certainly, compared with summers past, this year’s crop of big-budget, saturation-marketed summer films has been dismal.

None of this summer’s releases has enjoyed anything like the $200m opening three days of 2015’s Jurassic World. This year’s most impressive offering has been Captain America: Civil War, but it fell some $10m shy of last year’s second-biggest summer hit, Avengers: Age of Ultron, which grossed $191m in its first three days, according to Box Office Mojo, although Civil War was released in April.

At least the third Captain America film was well-received by critics. The same can’t be said for Warner Brothers’ Suicide Squad, which was so widely panned – including by this newspaper, which gave it two stars – that its fans tried to shut down the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Batman vs Superman, also by Warner Brothers, suffered a similar fate.

To be fair they did debut with reasonable opening weekends. Others, like the much-hyped sequels to Independence Day and Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland, as well as Disney’s live-action Tarzan reboot, all debuted damply and then continued to limp on at the box office.

The season ended with the catastrophic flop of the remade biblical epic Ben-Hur, starring Jack Huston and Morgan Freeman. It brought in an embarrassingly bad $11m over its first weekend and could wind up making a $100m loss, the same amount it cost to make.

Suicide Squad trailer: DC’s superhero ensemble comedy starring Will Smith – video

Tom Nunan, a lecturer at the UCLA school of theater, film and television, and the founder of independent film and TV production company Bull’s Eye Entertainment, says that the metric to look for is “fall-off” of audiences a few days after a movie opens.

A sophisticated promotional campaign can get a film a decent opening few days, but, he says, the problem is, they don’t sustain, and the reason for that is audience rejection between opening and second weekend.

“If a movie falls off more than 55% weekend to weekend, it’s a huge problem, and that’s been the problem this summer: giant drop-offs, 60, 70% and higher. That shows complete rejection.”

“Not only is performance lacklustre with these blockbuster franchises, but there’s a general feeling that the poor performance is deserved, because the quality of the films doesn’t hold up,” Nunan continues.

Studios today make far fewer films than they have in previous eras, and now focus more and more resources on a smaller number of huge-budget properties. “More and more is riding on fewer and fewer pictures – it becomes distressing,” says Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian at UCLA’s school of theater, film and television. “A lot is riding on every roll of the dice here.”

On top of that, Kuntz says, is a similar problem to the one already faced by the music industry. “The marketplace and audience is much more fragmented than it used to be.”

In the classic era, everyone saw Gone With The Wind or Casablanca, but that is no longer the case. “People are not going down every Friday to the local multiplex, so you have to do something blockbusterish to get their attention. And it costs a lot of money to market films these days,” he says.

High-budget, boutique and on-demand television dramas such as Game of Thrones are also putting pressure on the marketplace; DVD sales, once as big an earner for Hollywood as box office takings, have collapsed completely.

“Each film costs so darn much; you’re risking $150-$200m. There’s so far you can fall, so many ways to fail,” Kuntz says.

Box office figures are variable and there’s a lot of noise in the signal. 2014 was also a relatively dry year for big summer blockbusters; and overall box office take is up slightly in 2016, though some of that can be attributed to a rise in ticket prices, according to Tucker Tooley, a Hollywood producer and CEO of Tooley Productions. There’s also the fact that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was still playing in theaters for the first quarter of the year.

“To me, the big question is: where are the young males,” Tooley says. “They have become harder and harder over the last few years to persuade to come out, and the tentpole movies have always relied on them to be profitable. There’s some degree of sequel-itis; [the audience has] become more selective. But the good news is, you’ve got movies like Deadpool that get that audience active again,” he says, referring to Fox’s surprise hit earlier this year. The film, about Ryan Reynolds’s motormouth assassin, took $132m in its opening weekend on its way to box office receipts of $400m – record-breaking for an R-rated movie.

His message is that movies just have to be better to bring out big audiences: “The bar has just been raised in terms of presenting something that feels fresh and unique.

“I would say that the audience can smell a unique, good proposition,” he says, “and when they can, they show up. If not, then it’s much harder to get them.” The good news is that it is becoming impossible for studios to remain unaware of this. “A totally fresh movie like Deadpool resonates.”

“[It was] well done and unique, new and fresh-feeling. I would say there’s no way that producers, writers, directors, and studios aren’t all taking note of that.”

 

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