All year long, there has been a strange collective whine among delusional movie fans.
The gist of their babyish gripes: Why must the press keep bringing up Hollywood’s distressingly low box office numbers?!
The past few months have seen a spate of underperforming titles: Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17,” “The Smashing Machine” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “Caught Stealing” with Austin Butler and the Jennifer Lopez musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” among them.
The latest wobbler about a warbler is “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” starring Jeremy Allen White as The Boss.
Irate social media users turn into Medea every time outlets so much as mention the projects’ failures.
Their nonsensical shrieking has been incredibly confusing to me, since they’re not railing against some novel trend.
The Hollywood trade publication Variety has been regularly reporting these figures since 1922.
The website Box Office Mojo was founded in 1998.
And — hello! — the movies are a major American business, not a pop-up art gallery in Bushwick. Some rake in more than $1 billion. The media also dutifully says when Starbucks shuts down its outposts or when the Apple Vision Pro flopped.
I seem to recall my sports section colleagues writing that the Toronto Blue Jays recently lost a rather important baseball game.
But all of a sudden in the entertainment world, plain facts are personal and irredeemably offensive. Coddling snowflakes from the truth even extends to basic showbiz receipts.
“Who cares about what a movie made or makes?,” wrote one shaken X user. “One of the most useless statistics of all time.”
“I literally don’t care whether a movie makes money or not,” added another dolt. “Does it go into your pockets? No. It got made, shut up.”
And most hilariously, a certifiable genius said, “The obsession with the box office is killing movies and creativity.”
Yes, of course! Accurate reporting of grosses is the biggest problem facing the film industry today — not the ubiquity of streaming services, lackluster and poorly made products or plummeting audience interest.
Scroll through X and you’ll find thousands of similarly dumb posts assailing the perceived over-focus on what flicks earn versus what they cost to make.
The reality is that if there are more box-office-related headlines lately it’s because there are so many hyped-up films taking a tumble.
If you’re a fan of any of them, great.
Get mad at your fellow consumers for not buying tickets.
But you should care about how well they fared at the cash register, because it affects what your favorite artists who made them do next and the studios’ perception of their genres. Enthusiasm for musicals, for example, tends to ebb and flow with hits and misses.
Recall the old Hollywood phrase “box office poison” about actors who could no longer guarantee a crowd. Nothing new.
Timothée Chalamet has not led three December wide releases in as many years because he’s not a huge draw.
Filmmakers, it seems, are more clear-eyed than film buffs.
Who cares about what a movie made or makes? How about James Cameron.
The director, whose “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” hits theaters in December, is always to-the-point about what his epic alien series needs to accomplish to be considered a success.
“We spend a lot of money on these movies, and that’s kind of the banquet that we put before a global audience for the same ticket price as seeing some little indie,” he recently told Deadline.
“But the quid pro quo with that is we have to make a lot of money in order to continue.”
Obviously!
And, whether “Fire and Ash” does or doesn’t make a lot of money, you can be damn sure that the press will tell you.
As we have done for 100 years.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
