Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Doom Photo: Jonathan Olley
In 2013, Steven Spielberg told an audience at the University of Southern California that the final days of the blockbuster are near. As the 27-year-old director of Jaws, Spielberg himself has done more than any other director to ignite Hollywood's love of big-spending, big-time movies. But nearly four decades later, he sensed a shift coming.
“There will be an explosion,” he told the crowd, “with three or four, maybe even half a dozen mega-budget films.” will crash to the ground and it will change the paradigm.»
Exactly 10 years later, his prophecy came true. 2023 saw UK cinema attendance soar, with box office receipts once again breaking the £1 billion barrier for the first time since the pandemic. But five films that probably would have looked like safe bets before Covid ended up being among the year's most notable bombs. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Doom, Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Flash and Wish: all cost $200 million or more to produce; all of them did not break even after release.
They were pretty bad too. Amazingly, four of them were released by Disney and fell into three genres — part of the Marvel franchise, computer animation and Lucasfilm's heady revival — that, over the previous decade, had made the studio the most powerful on the planet. Instead, the two most commercially successful films of the year were a candy-colored musical-comedy and a biopic about a nuclear physicist — both of which had budgets that were roughly half or less of those lavish flops.
Ezra Miller and Michael Keaton in the big-budget bomb The Flash. Photo: PA Media
To add insult to injury, both were critically acclaimed and became awards season mainstays — a feat that, despite ill-conceived wheezes such as the failed Oscar for Best Popular Film, the previous decade's mega-productions so and did not come true.
So, something has changed—and Hollywood seems to be changing with it. Consider this year's relatively modest list of summer blockbusters, which includes Furiosa: The Saga of the Mad Max and The Fallen Boy, both produced on Barbenheimer's budget and no less compelling for it. Or listen to the roar of approval at this year's Oscars when Best Adapted Screenplay winner Cord Jefferson (writer and director of American Fantasy) suggested to studios that in the future, instead of making one movie that cost $200 million dollars, they could try to make 20 films costing 10 million dollars instead.
The collapse of a $200 million blockbuster is a very modern cautionary tale, since it's hard to tell exactly where the cultural reasons end and the financial ones begin. Regarding the first, it seems that moviegoers are already tired of the brands that these films have been promoting for over a decade, such as Marvel and DC.
And it can be argued — at least this is constantly said, mainly on YouTube — that the wide audiences are also tired of all these shallow progressive messages that were created primarily just to make pietistic Twitter types feel good about rooting for (or producing) corporate products.
Last year, Zigi Kamasa sensed change was coming and took steps. Former Marv Studios group CEO Matthew Vaughn decided to launch True Brit Entertainment on his own in November 2023, an independent British production company that would work within the budget group that Jefferson backed on the Oscars stage.
At Marv, Kamasa oversaw the development of the Kingsman franchise, whose budgets grew from $85 million in 2014 to $200 million with the release of Argylle in February of this year. But as the business emerged from the pandemic, he says, he «sensed a change of mood among all these established British directors who had left to work in television over the last decade because it had become so difficult to find money.» make medium-budget films that appeal to the public. They wanted to make films for cinema again, and everyone had great ideas for the films they wanted to make.”
Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell in Argyle Photo: Apple/Universal
Market research showed that people wanted them too. Kamasa commissioned a survey of 1,000 regular UK moviegoers, asking them to rate which films they would like to see more often. «Original stories» came first, followed by «British stories.» («Superheroes» was the latest.) Since launching True Brit in November, Kamasa already has two films: Marching Powder, a drug-fuelled crime film that reunites Soccer Factory star and director Danny Dyer and Nick Love, and also unnamed «London». -a set-piece holiday musical by Gurinder Chadha with songs by Gary Barlow, inspired by A Christmas Carol. Two more will be announced in the coming weeks.
As evidence of audience demand, Kamasa points to the surprise commercial success of three recent mid-budget films that have little awards-season momentum behind them: the romantic comedy Anybody But You, the Anthony Hopkins-led period piece One Life, and the foul-mouthed film «One life». comedy «Evil Little Caps.»
“Cinema has always become a popular art form when it gives audiences something they can’t get at home,” he explains. “In the 1970s, this was revolutionary content. In the 2000s it was a spectacle. Today, I hope this is originality.”
As odd as it may seem to describe a rom-com starring the traditionally hot Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney as original, Kamasa is absolutely right: when cinematic universes took over, this once ubiquitous genre was mothballed in the 2010s. And with streaming platforms milking formulas as hard as Hollywood milks intellectual property, novelty becomes a serious temptation.
What about the resource economy? Even before Covid, the franchise model was driving up costs, in part because escalation was built into its very nature. To meet release deadlines planned years in advance, films also regularly went into production without complete scripts, which usually required expensive reshoots. And increasingly huge sums were spent on visual effects — from 1,500 to 3,000 individual shots per film, often produced very quickly.
But as Paul Ashton, head of film and television at Creative UK, explains, the pandemic has turned that rise into a spiral.
“There was a whole new level of health and safety protocols that had to be paid for, which in turn made films shoot longer,” he says. “But with many workers, technicians, craftsmen and women having to leave the industry during the Covid shutdown due to a lack of work, this has created a shortage for when things get going again, so labor costs have risen along with demand.”
The sharp rise in inflation associated with the cost of living crisis also had an impact. “If food prices at the weekly shop went up, imagine that multiplied by all the cast and crew for the duration of filming,” Ashton continues, nothing to the point that “even at the lower end of the scale” it becomes almost impossible. make a debut feature for less than £3 million. “It’s hard to believe that back in 2016 a film like Lady Macbeth could be made for £500,000.”
Studios once operated on that scale, too. During the indie boom of the 1990s, many of them opened specialty subsidiaries such as Paramount Vantage and Focus Features, which gave filmmakers free rein to pursue cheaper, riskier projects while the core divisions were restructured around fantasy and superheroes.
Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa in The Leftovers By Sicia Pavao
But within 10 years, executives had completely lost track of how these more creatively ambitious films worked: When Warner Independent folded in 2008, the parent studio was so confused by the Indian drama Danny Boyle had just made for them that they started playing sent straight to DVD. Instead, they took it to Fox Searchlight, and a few months later, Slumdog Millionaire won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and was on track to make $378 million worldwide.
Elizabeth Carlsen of Britain's Number 9 Films cut her teeth during the 1990s heyday — one of her first producing credits was on Neil Jordan's The Crying Game — and has had to navigate the mega-blockbuster slump in the last few years. While filming the powerful period film Mothering Sunday between the 2020 lockdowns, “it was surprisingly easy because everyone was so keen to get back to work,” she recalls. “But a year later, when we were filming Life with Bill Nighy, the amount of money spent on an infinitely higher budget meant we had almost no crew or equipment left. We literally called up film schools and asked if we could borrow their lights.”
Jeremy Hunt's recently announced financial incentives, under which British films with budgets up to £15 million will receive a 40 per cent tax break, will certainly help with this. But the broader meaning of the upcoming changes, Carlsen continues, is undeniable. “Look at Anatomy of a Fall, which cost almost £2 million. Look at All of Us Strangers, which is now worth over £5m, as well as Poor People, The Leftovers, American Fantasy. These are very different films with no prior brand recognition and they all work well together. People are coming back to theaters to see these things, and it's important that we build on that.
«As a producer, you always see these huge changes — one moment it was DVDs, the next it was streaming , it's these extremely expensive franchises that make you think that your good old model of making things is about to collapse. You say to yourself, «It's over, it's over.» But somehow it never happens. And now we see how green shoots appear.”
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