Three Cheers for Diversity at the Multiplex

(Photo by Kate Augustine for The Bulwark)

I WAS HAPPY TO JOIN the Ankler’s Sean McNulty this week for his Monday Morning Quarterbacking of the weekend box office. Actually, I wasn’t happy: I was thrilled. Because this is an exceptionally exciting time at our nation’s movie theaters.

It’s not just that the box office is tracking for its best year since the one-two punch of the pandemic’s theater closures and the strikes that shut down Hollywood. It’s that it has been years, maybe a decade or more, since it felt like we had such a diversity of films racking up huge numbers at the box office. There’s something for everyone, and it feels like everyone is showing up.

Toy Story 5 is on track to be the biggest movie of the year (at least until Spider-Man: Brand New Day drops at the end of next month), and it’s always nice to have some family fare putting up numbers. (This is how you hook the next generation, after all: Get them addicted to popcorn.) But look at what else has topped the charts in recent weeks.

Last week, we had an adult sci-fi drama from an old master top the charts in the form of Disclosure Day. The weekend before that, there was an R-rated comedy of the abrasive, raunchy sort that seems to have more or less disappeared from theaters come in at number one, Scary Movie. The weekend before that, Backrooms, a key text in the nouveau tube taking the nation’s youth by storm, debuted with the biggest numbers ever from mini-major A24. There’s a musical biopic, Michael, that’s about to cross a billion dollars worldwide; a big-budget sci-fi adventure, Project Hail Mary, that has wowed audiences; and a millennial nostalgia play, The Devil Wears Prada 2, that has outperformed virtually everyone’s expectations.

And those are just the hits. Elsewhere on the charts, you have The Furious, a Hong Kong import that is the craziest martial arts movie since The Raid; a pair of queer indies in the horror film Leviticus and the coming-of-age drama Girls Like Girls; socialist agitprop in Boosters; a World War II Dad Movie about, of all things, weather, in Pressure; and an indie heist flick about a piano tuner turned safe cracker in Tuner. Behold the power of this fully armed and operational multiplex!

One of David Poland’s major talking points, the thing he hits on time and again, is that we simply don’t have enough movies in release, that the number of wide releases remains down over the peak in years past. That’s still true; movie theaters could always use more movies. But for the first time in a long time it genuinely feels like there’s something for everyone, that nearly every audience niche is getting serviced by something.

Join now

Review: Supergirl

Milly Alcock in Supergirl. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

The box office is at the highest it’s been on a year-to-date level since the pandemic despite one notable absence from the multiplex in recent months: comic book movies. Supergirl is the first in nearly a year. It’s not tracking well, and if audiences stay home, they won’t be missing out on much: It’s a stinker. And kind of a bummer! From my review:

Okay, so, to recap: We’ve got a depressed hero and a dying dog, who team up with the orphaned girl Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who is seeking revenge against the brigands who killed her parents and brother. These brigands, it should be noted, spend most of the film traversing the galaxy kidnapping underage girls in order to rape them to propagate their species, which, for some reason, is male-only.

Supergirl: It’s the feel-good film of the summer!

Read the whole thing.

Hollywood and AI

I talked to Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal about his exclusive on A24 partnering with Google to see what AI can do for the film studio. But we also ran through all the tech entanglements the studios have with the burgeoning AI boom, from Amazon’s decision not to distribute the forthcoming anti-AI drama Artificial to Disney’s weird dance with Sora and OpenAI.

Assigned Viewing: The Complete Kubrick (Criterion Collection)

Okay, I’m kidding, kinda. But you should watch this trailer for the box set:

I do my darndest to keep this newsletter from devolving into rants about nonsense I see on social media that makes me mad, and I think I do a pretty good job of it. But when I saw a weird consortium of folks who seemed downright angry that Criterion was going to release a massive, thirty-disc box set that includes every Stanley Kubrick feature film and short, from Killer’s Kiss on, on 4K UHD and Blu-ray, I was genuinely befuddled.

Look, here’s the thing: Restoring and releasing these films isn’t cheap. I pinged someone at a non-Criterion boutique house about the cost of releases like this; he asked to stay anonymous since he doesn’t have any special insight into the state of the films being released, but said that costs could run between $15,000 and $100,000 per film, depending on the negative quality. Honestly, I’d assume they wouldn’t have to do too much given the fact that there are already some pretty good 4K transfers out there, but you never know. New encoding for DolbyVision, cleanups of the rarer ones like Killer’s Kiss: It adds up.

And that is before you get to what would likely be the single biggest cost for Criterion: licensing. They have to license these films from Warner Bros., Universal, etc. That’s not cheap, and it’s not cheap because Stanley Kubrick still moves units. There are some people, real sickos out there, who have bought these movies in three or four different formats. I don’t want to name any names, but, well, they’re out there.

And that doesn’t include the cost of producing new features. You have to pay folks to film them, to edit them, to conduct interviews, to do research. Twenty-five hours of bonus features don’t pay for themselves.

And even if you don’t care about any of that, here’s one last thing to keep in mind if you want to position yourself as a defender of The Cin-e-mah: The success of this set (and I have no doubt it will be a success) will help fund any number of restorations of films that Criterion might otherwise not be able to afford to bring to the world. I mean, I don’t have any special insight into the universe of boutique physical media distribution, but I’d guess that August’s Eclipse Series 49: Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi isn’t going to blow the doors off the Criterion Closet?

Look, this isn’t sponcon; I’m not even on Criterion’s comp list. I buy my discs $30 a whack during the half-off sales at Barnes & Noble and Criterion.com like you, the common man. And as such, I cannot believe that there are folks out there who are upset in any way that Criterion is putting this set out there. This is a gift to students of cinema history. If you pick it up during a half-off sale, you’re getting the entire oeuvre of arguably the greatest filmmaker of all time in the best (and probably final) home-video format ever released for just $30 a movie. In my opinion, that’s a pretty good deal. And we should be glad that companies like Criterion help make it happen.

Leave a comment

Share