Crashing June Tentpoles

Some are blaming streaming.  Some are blaming the ongoing WGA strike.  Some are blaming budgets.  For whatever reason, the summer of 2023 saw some of the worst tentpole bombs in ages.  We started off fine with "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" riding a wave of good reviews to a solid $350 million domestic gross and over $800 million worldwide. "Fast X" has made nearly as much, but its budget was so high that it hasn't broken even yet.  Neither has "The Little Mermaid," though it's getting pretty close.  Early June saw the encouraging success of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," which is now the highest domestic grosser after "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."  And everything else since then has been a disaster.

"Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" is currently the lowest grossing "Transformers" movie at $400 million worldwide.  "Ruby Gillman," the Dreamworks Animation film you haven't heard of, hasn't made back half of its modest $70 million budget.  "Elemental" is at $250 million, which is at least better than "Lightyear," but not by much.   The biggest bomb of the summer so far, however, is "The Flash," which "Elemental" just passed on the domestic chart, despite making half of what "Flash" did on their shared opening weekend.  Warner's massively hyped, long delayed superhero film fell completely flat at $260 million worldwide, and is projected to lose as much as $200 million.  The latest "Indiana Jones" might be in an even worse spot, but it's too soon to tell.  It opened bigger, but reportedly had a much higher budget.   

Things are looking better in July with "Mission Impossible" and "Barbie" coming up, but Hollywood is still reeling from a disastrous June, which looks an awful lot like the realization of the ominous prediction that Steven Spielberg made ten years ago, about multiple $250 million movies flopping one after another at the box office, forcing the industry to change.  There's been all sorts of doom-and-gloom predictions, especially after "The Flash" bombing, that this might be the end, or at least the beginning of the end of several major trends that have kept the summer box office going over the past two decades.  After the underperformance of "Black Adam," "Shazam," and "Quantumania," superhero films might finally be starting to ebb.  "The Little Mermaid" is the last major Disney renaissance film to get a live action adaptation, and the goodwill toward them may have also finally run dry.  And while the top two box office earners this year are animated films, PIXAR hasn't had a hit since "Toy Story 4." 

The total box office for this year is improving on last year, and the theaters have been making money even if the studios have not.  Despite so many of the bigger disappointments coming from Disney, they still have a bigger market share than any other studio.  However, only one film this year, "Super Mario," has managed to crack a billion dollar worldwide gross so far.  In 2019, five summer films hit that mark - all of them Disney tentpoles.  Disney's only managed one since: "Avatar: The Way of Water."  Universal's "Jurassic World Dominion," Sony's "Spider-man: No Way Home," and Paramount's "Top Gun: Maverick" are the other post-pandemic billion dollar earners.  In my completely uninformed opinion, the biggest reason that so many of these films flopped is that attendance levels aren't fully back to pre-pandemic levels and this may be the new normal.

There are plenty of other contributing factors.  June was over-programmed, with too many big titles crammed into too few weekends.  Budgets for some of these films have been out of control, especially with pandemic measures and costly delays factored in.  The WGA strike has shut down many late night shows and other marketing vectors, impeding advertising campaigns.  Streaming may have changed consumer habits permanently, with many opting to wait for films to become available online.  PIXAR in particular seems to have been adversely affected by so many of their recent films being released as Disney+ exclusives, and skipping theatrical runs. 

The success "Across the Spider-verse" suggests that audiences are absolutely willing to show up for the right film - even if it's the umpteenth superhero film that takes place in a multiverse, but they're getting more discerning, which means more films are getting the cold shoulder.  It'll be interesting to see how many of these flops and bombs spell the end of their franchises.  "Indiana Jones" and the DCEU are on ice for sure.  "Transformers" may finally be done.  "The Fast & the Furious" is guaranteed at least one more film, but that could be it.  

And honestly, that may not be such a bad thing.

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Notes on "Quantumania"

I feel I should start with an apology, because I wrote and scheduled my "Creed III" review before the news of Jonathan Majors' arrest came out, and promptly forgot about it.  This is one of the most dizzying reversals of fortune for a rising star that I've ever seen.  Just after Majors had two different films top the box office in successive weeks in February, he was arrested for assault.  Now multiple films are potentially in limbo, including the entire current slate of the MCU, which is built around the threat of Majors' villain, Kang the Conqueror.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," for instance, is almost entirely built around introducing and promoting Kang as a threat.  There's not much of a plot otherwise.  Scott Lang, like Adonis Creed, is enjoying fame and fortune, and everything seems to have worked out for him.  He's written his memoirs, he's still together with Hope, and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is now following in his footsteps - maybe a little too closely, as she gets herself arrested for political activism (and shrinking a cop car) in the opening act.  This might be an interesting topic to explore, but instead the two of them and the Pym/Van Dynes - Hope, Hank, and Janet - are accidentally pulled down into the Quantum Realm, and spend the rest of the movie trying to get home again.

If you remember the previous Ant-Man movies, Janet van Dyne was stuck in the Quantum Realm for decades.  We learn that she briefly befriended Kang, an exiled multiverse-hopper, who she learned was an evil conqueror.  Still trapped in the Quantum Realm, Kang has been busy subjugating the folks who live there and looking for a way to escape.  The Quantum Realm is essentially like an alien planet, full of strange creatures like the sentient slime Veb (David Dastmalchian), a guy with a flashlight for a head, Xolum (James Cutler), a telepath named Quaz (William Jefferson Harper), and your garden variety badass freedom fighters like Jentorra (Katy O'Brien).  Corey Stoll's villain from the first "Ant-Man" is back, but now transformed into a crazed, mutated cyborg named MODOK.  And for some reason Bill Murray also shows up for exactly one scene.    

If this sounds like a random mess, it's because this is a random mess.  Ant-Man has been good for comic relief in the MCU crossovers, but the last "Ant-man" film was among the weakest in the entire franchise, and "Quantumania" is at about the same level.  The change of scenery is nice, but all the interesting minor characters from the previous films have been jettisoned, so that Scott Lang and friends can go have a more cartoonish sci-fi adventure, with monsters and spaceships and big fights with too much CGI.  The size-changing schtick is so much less effective here, where everyone else is doing similarly impossible things, and there's no normal, mundane, everyday environment to contrast with. Hope is still woefully short on screen time and personality, such that the "Wasp" in the title should probably refer to her mother Janet, who has far more to do.  Aging up Cassie is a good idea, and Kathryn Newton delivers good snark, but like Hope she just doesn't get enough attention.

At least Jonathan Majors as Kang feels appropriately menacing, but we may not be seeing more of him.  So much of "Quantumania" is about building Kang up as a threat, and filling in parts of his backstory, so the movie is really more of a prequel to future "Avengers" films than anything else.  I expect that he'll end up being recast, because the rules of the MCU are so fluid that hardly anything feels like it has much weight or substance anymore.  "Quantumania" is full of pretty colors, shaped into a strange realm where buildings are sentient, Bill Murray is boring, and somebody thought that a live action MODOK was a good idea.  Swapping Majors out for a different actor feels positively pedestrian.

I'm being unfair.  "Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania" is not an especially bad superhero movie.  Hundreds of people put in a lot of time and effort to make this, and occasionally there's a good joke or a clever line or an especially weird Quantum Realm creature that deserves some admiration.  However, it bothers me immensely that "Quantumania" tried to do something different, and ended up just making a clone of a "Guardians of the Galaxy" film with more tepid characters.  The MCU has been stuck idling for far too long, and had better find the gas pedal soon.    

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My Top Ten Films of 1946

This post is part of my ongoing project to create Top Ten movie lists for the years before I began this blog, working my way as far back as I can.  Below, find my Top Ten films for 1946, unranked.

Notorious - The suspense sequences in this film still work for me, even though I've seen them multiple times and I know how it will all turn out.  In the moment, Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic magic still works as well as it ever did.  And Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, at the height of their charismatic powers, playing high stakes spy games with Claude Rains and the Nazis, is still absolutely irresistible.  

It's a Wonderful Life - It's not Christmas if somewhere, Jimmy Stewart isn't learning that one man can make a difference, and isn't on the receiving end of the generosity and heart of the little town of Bedford Falls.  Skip the first, plodding hour if you must, but "It's a Wonderful Life" is one of cinema's most enduring classics, with the happiest of happy endings I will never get tired of watching every year.   

Beauty and the Beast - Easily the most popular film that Jean Cocteau ever made, full of arresting poetic images and little moments of film magic.  Jean Marais' Beast remains the best live action Beast, a masterpiece of animal magnetism and Gallic charm.  The well intentioned remake from a few years ago, despite borrowing heavily from the original's imagery, never comes close to achieving the same wonder. 

A Matter of Life and Death - A lovely fantasy romance from Powell and Pressburger, which has one of the best examples of a film using both black-and-white and Technicolor photography in the same production.  The love story between David Niven and Kim Hunters' characters is sublime, and the opening sequence of the doomed mission remains one of the most touching things I've seen in all of cinema.

Shoeshine - Vittorio de Sica's neorealist classic is full of childish joy and crushing heartache, following the brief criminal careers of a pair of shoeshine boys.  The rawness and the purity of the characters' emotions is still instantly engaging, and difficult to forget.  The film had such an impact at the time of release, it kicked off what would become the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars.  

Panic - A French crime film that deals with the subject of mob revenge and post-war tensions.  It's very insightful about the social realities of France in this era, and perhaps this is why it was also a total failure at the box office.  Michael Simon cuts an especially tragic figure as the scapegoat, Monsieur Hire, whose only real crime seems to be that he's an oddball and a loner in a deeply suspicious, unhappy society.   

Gilda - The title character is possibly the most famous and complicated film noir femme fatale, and Rita Hayworth's most famous role.  I had a hard time deciding whether to include this film or "The Postman Always Rings Twice," on this list, but "Gilda" is undeniably more memorable and entertaining.  Hayworth lights up the screen, and a young Glenn Ford doesn't do a bad job of keeping up with her.   

The Yearling - I frequently got this film confused with "Old Yeller" when I was younger, as the plots are similar - both deal with a young boy's love for a pet, and the heartache that results when that pet becomes a threat to the boy's family.  The protagonist in this story is younger, and the fight to keep the yearling is more drawn out, which made this the more emotionally fraught viewing experience for me.

The Best Years of Our Lives - A tender film about WWII veterans reintegrating into their old lives after the war.  This has such a different attitude from the more cynical takes on this kind of homecoming story after later wars that it occasionally feels very naive and old fashioned.  However, Harold Russell's performance is still terribly inspiring, and the rest of the star studded cast isn't too shabby either.  

The Stranger - Orson Welles directed and starred in this suspense film, which serves as an early example of Hollywood grappling with the crimes of the Nazis, and was one of the first narrative films to use footage from the concentration camps.  Welles and Edward G. Robinson deliver strong performances, and the filmmaking serves the suspense very well - probably why this is Welles' only real box office hit.

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"Nimona" Lives

Netflix and Annapurna acquired the unfinished animated film "Nimona" from Blue Sky before they went under, and now it's a Netflix release.  And thank goodness, because this may have been a bad fit for Disney, but it's a perfect fit for Netflix.  It's a fantasy action film set in a medieval kingdom, but one that's been built for a cyberpunk era, and if you squint you could mistake it for "Arcane."  It's aimed at an older audience than the usual CGI animated media, isn't afraid to get dark and angry, and features major LGBT characters, along with a scrappy, bratty, irresistible antiheroine.

Newly knighted Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is framed for the death of the Queen (Lorraine Toussaint), forcing him to go into hiding, and attracting the attention of a shapeshifter named Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz).  She thinks he's a villain, and is determined to make herself his sidekick.  Her bloodthirsty plotting and eagerness for chaos initially put Ballister off, because he's trying to prove his innocence to the interim leader and head of the knights, The Director (Frances Conroy).  However, Nimona is awfully handy to have around for jailbreaks, finding and questioning suspects, and evading the guy responsible for capturing Ballister - who happens to also be his ex - Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). 

Annapurna doesn't have the resources of the bigger animation studios, and "Nimona" is noticeably cutting some corners when it comes to its animation.  It's using a similar style to "Klaus" and "Bad Guys," with 3D mimicking 2D, which looks great when it comes to the flashy action scenes with Nimona changing into different cartoon animals in the blink of an eye.  However, there are some sequences that are noticeably a step down from the others, and the environments are especially rough looking.  "Nimona" had its original production interrupted by the Disney acquisition of Blue Sky, and subsequently much of the first creative team and pipeline was replaced.  The characters and the writing, fortunately, help to shore up the rougher patches.

Boy do I love Nimona.  She's a hilarious, rebellious, preteen punk, who has been ostracized for being a "monster" like Shrek.  But unlike Shrek, Nimona really wants to be accepted, and has a far, far harder time coping when she's not.  The film gets much darker portraying Nimona's mental and emotional state than I was expecting, though the ND Stevenson "Nimona" webcomic is reportedly even more fraught.  All but the last act is kept light and fun, though, with Nimona doing her best to win Ballister over to the side of evil and villainy.  A lot of the humor comes from contrasting her gleeful willingness to jump into trouble with Ballister's nervous caution.  Nimona enjoys thumbing her nose at authority and stirring up trouble, but when push comes to shove she still has a loving heart underneath.  

It's fascinating to watch such a  familiar story of acceptance and tolerance take place in such a diverse fantasy world.  Ballister and Ambrosius are a couple with a same sex romance that plays out exactly the way it does in every animated PG film with a straight romance.  The knights include all genders, with both the Director and the kingdom's legendary hero, Gloreth, being female.  Most of the character designs are modeled after their voice actors, a noticeably multi-ethnic bunch.  However, there's a wall around the kingdom that nobody ever ventures across for fear of monsters, and Nimona's core trauma comes from being mistreated whenever anyone figures out that she's not human.  The kingdom is pretty egalitarian and accepting, but still has its share of blind spots, and is capable of devastating cruelty.

"Nimona" is really something special.  Yet again, this is the kind of riskier animated film the bigger studios should be making, but almost never do.  Netflix and Annapurna coming to its rescue is one of the few feel-good success stories of this summer movie season, but part of me is still sad "Nimona" didn't get to be Blue Sky's swan song with a full theatrical release.  At least on Netflix, it'll find its audience quicker, and hopefully lead to more films like it.

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My Favorite Lotte Reiniger Film

The oldest surviving feature-length animated film is Lotte Reiniger's "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," technically the third ever created after Quirino Cristiani's films from the 1910s.  Instead of cel animation, Reiniger created a form of silhouette animation using backlit cutouts, filmed with stop-motion techniques one frame at a time.  This created distinctive black silhouette characters, similar to the ones used in Chinese shadow puppetry.  This style of animation is still seen today - examples include the films of Michel Ocelot, and segments of the recent "Candyman" sequel/reboot - but all of them feel like homages to Reiniger, who utterly dominated this particular form of animation for half a century.      

Reiniger's work is so visually distinctive that it's instantly recognizable.  The cutouts consist of bold black shapes and lines, forming fanciful characters and enchanting worlds against a monochromatic background.  The movements are very limited, but graceful.  The puppets are largely static, with faces that never change, yet are still wonderfully expressive.  "Achmed" was conceived of as a "One Thousand and One Nights" pastiche, combining various elements of "Aladdin," "Sinbad the Sailor," and other stories.  Prince Achmed is an original character, but he and the princess, the sorcerer, the witch, and the other characters all feel familiar.  So does the hero quest, the romance of the young lovers, and the triumph of good over evil.  Nearly all of Reiniger's films were based on fairy tales of one kind or another, full of magical creatures and storybook landscapes.    

Though rough by modern standards, "Achmed" is still impressive today for the sheer intricacy of the individual images, and Reiniger's ingenuity in creating various effects and illusions.  Transformations are common in her films, like the evil sorcerer who shapeshifts into different creatures to fight our intrepid hero.  Horses and princesses can fly, and the genie is one of the few characters who isn't a black silhouette - he's a ghostly light blue.  Reiniger used a rudimentary multiplane camera in "Achmed" ten years before Disney would develop theirs.  Even after the advent of sound and other improvements, her style largely remained the same.  She started using more complex, full color backgrounds in the 1950s, but the black silhouettes persisted.  Astonishingly, in the early years of her career, she largely worked alone on her animation - storyboarding, making puppets and backgrounds, and carrying out the painstaking animation process herself.  Her one major collaborator was her husband, Carl Koch, who served as her producer and cameraman.  The creation of "Achmed" took three years, from 1923 to 1926, and was completed when Reiniger was twenty-seven.     

"Achmed" wasn't considered revolutionary only because it was a feature length film, but because it was a true experiment in filmmaking technique and artistry.  It was considered a piece of avant garde cinema, before animated features were found to be commercially viable.  Reiniger only made one feature, but contributed to several others, and her output includes dozens of shorts and advertisements over many decades.  Sadly, her career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazi regime in her native Germany, and much of her work is considered lost.  Still, her influence has been considerable and persistent.  I'm constantly finding homages to her style in everything from "Samurai Jack" and "Steven Universe" to "Harry Potter."  And after all this time, she's still the only female animation director that most cinephiles can name.      

What I've Seen - Lotte Reiniger 

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

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Rank 'Em: "Black Mirror" Series Six

It's been four years since the last batch of "Black Mirror" episodes, and Charlie Brooker has returned with five stories that aren't quite what we've come to expect from the show.  One installment is a "Red Mirror" story, a horror piece with some social commentary, but nothing to do with technology.  Three of the five stories take place in the past, or other versions of the past.  I liked all of them to some extent, though as usual some are stronger than others.    I've ranked them below from best to least.  

1. "Joan is Awful" - The most typically "Black Mirror" installment of this series spoofs Netflix itself, imagining what would happen if an ordinary person became the subject of their own, highly invasive tell-all documentary.  The excellent use of the guest stars, especially Salma Hayek in prime comedic form, gives this some extra punch.  The premise is more existential than usual, more "Twilight Zone" than typical "Black Mirror," but Brooker does raise some good points about privacy, clickthrough agreements, AI generated content, and likeness rights.  You can see the ending coming a long way off, but at least it's an emotionally satisfying one.  

2. "Demon 79" - This is the "Red Mirror" episode, which plays out like a period British horror movie, set in 1979.  Anjana Vasan does a great job playing a quiet, timid immigrant woman, who is tasked with committing three murders to stave off the apocalypse.  I just love the whole tone of this, the way that the supernatural elements are mixed into the story, and the way we're kept guessing until the very end.  Papa Essiedu playing Vasan's guardian demon, but made up to look like the guy from Boney M, is just delightful.  Straight thrillers are pretty hit or miss for me, but this is a good one, and there's also a lot going on here related to the social climate of the UK, which is handled very well.

3. "Beyond the Sea" - I really disliked how the ending to this played out after spending so much time building up a really interesting, nuanced set of relationships among the three main characters.  It feels like Brooker went with the least interesting outcome, though it is more in line with the more nihilistic earlier seasons of "Black Mirror."  Still, if you lose the last five minutes, "Beyond the Sea" is very close to being one of the best installments of "Black Mirror."  It takes a very flawed premise and uses it to explore themes of marriage and toxic relationships with rare intensity.  The performances here are so good, it makes me sad we do not see Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett in more dramatic roles like this.  

4. "Loch Henry" - Not much to criticize here, but not much about this stands out either.  It's your standard story about a pair of filmmakers putting together a true-crime documentary, where they get more than they bargained for.  The shots taken at the true crime genre are very clever, but at the same time the whole thing relies on a couple of big shocks that didn't work too well for me.  This is the one episode this year that is totally contemporary and contains no speculative or fantasy elements.  And while it does rally against the misuse of media, it's the kind of media that's been with us, in one form or another, since long before the internet age.  And that brings us to… 

5. "Mazey Day" - A portrait of an unscrupulous paparazzo, played by Zazie Beetz, who is racing to get the first picture of a movie star in deep trouble.  If it weren't for the paparazzi element, this easily could have been another "Red Mirror" installment.  Again, I don't have too many issues with this episode.  It just wasn't as good as the others.  I think the execution was the biggest culprit, as the material should have provided plenty of opportunity for thrills and chills on multiple levels,  but nothing here really got under my skin.  

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About That "Super Mario" Movie

I understand why it took such a long time to put another "Super Mario Bros." movie on the big screen after the disaster that was the live action 1993 version.  However, after seeing the final product, this feels like such a no-brainer.  Everyone who grew up in the '80s and '90s knows the original game, and everyone who's grown up since knows some version of the characters and their universe.  For context, I played the first three games, watched at least one television show based on the game, and even read some of the comics, despite not really counting myself a fan of the franchise.  "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" had plenty for me to get fuzzy nostalgic feelings towards, and didn't feel like a waste of my time, despite being a very mediocre kids' movie.

Boy, is "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" mediocre.  Put together by Illumination Studios, and a bunch of primary creatives from "Teen Titans Go!," all the characters speak and act like they were written by eight year olds, all the character designs are taken directly from the old comics and the video game box art, and the voice actors are a collection of familiar actors who were only cast for name recognition.  Because it's Illumination, there are obvious needle drops everywhere, and a long, drawn-out sequence involving our heroes getting on the wrong side of an ornery dog in the opening act.  It takes far too long for Brooklyn plumber Mario (Chris Pratt) and his brother Luigi (Charlie Day) to go down the wrong pipe and end up in the magical Mushroom Kingdom, which is under threat by the evil Bowser (Jack Black).  Luigi winds up captured by Bowser's minions, so Mario teams up with Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) to defeat evil and save the day.

If you're here for the nostalgia, there's plenty.  Many of the action scenes are built with the original games' mechanics in mind, including a whole training sequence designed to look like a level of one of the early "Super Mario Bros" NES games, and a big race that is straight out of "Super Mario Kart."  There are Easter Eggs everywhere you look, with many of the games' creatures and design elements included in some way.  The most effective references are the aural ones, which bring back a ton of familiar musical themes and sound effects.  Kudos to composer Brian Tyler for being subtler than I expected, and doing some interesting things with Koji Kondo's familiar Mario themes.   

There's a little updating to the characters  for 2023, but not much.  A more competent Princess Peach never needs rescuing, and is the one who guides Mario along on his journey to becoming a hero.  There's a cute explanation for why Mario and Luigi no longer have broad accents, but they do gain a stereotypical big Italian family.  The only actor who brings much to their character is Jack Black, whose Bowser is now a lovelorn reptile pining after Peach, writing and performing love ballads when he's not plotting evil deeds.  Keegan-Michael Key and Seth Rogen are also clearly trying their best, though they're not important enough to the story to leave much of an impression.  One of the only new characters, and the only really good joke in the film, is the cute little Luma (Juliet Jelenic), a chubby little sprite who is one of Luigi's fellow prisoners, and reveals a disturbingly dark outlook on life.      

I'm probably being too tough on "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."  It was obviously designed for younger kids, maximizing the noise and action, while keeping everything as cuddly and bright as possible.  They got the important things right as far as the characters and the worldbuilding, and the filmmakers are clearly fans of the franchise.  As children's entertainment, this is perfectly acceptable and unobjectionable fare.  However, I can't help wondering what this movie could have been if it were in the hands of a creative team that was able to take some risks and not just rehash the familiar elements from the games.  I don't look forward to the inevitable sequels and spinoffs to come.  

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