The Opportunity in Macrocultural Failure

What comes next

Announcement time! If you’re in New York City on June 14, come see me read from my upcoming novel at the Tense reading series. Buy tickets here—they go very fast. It’ll be a cool crowd.

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It was the worst Memorial Day box office in almost thirty years. Furiosa narrowly topped The Garfield Movie with an estimated $32 million for the four-day weekend, barely edging out Casper’s $22.5 million in 1995—not adjusted for inflation. The hope, for Hollywood, was that the Anya Taylor-Joy-fronted Furiosa would open at $40 to $45 million. Now that the film is officially a bomb, it appears movie theaters are in for a brutal summer, thanks to a lack of obvious tentpole films. Delays from last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike are partly to blame. If you read the trade press, you’ll find hope in Deadpool & Wolverine, due out on July 26, to juice the numbers slightly.

Some might trot out the narrative that human beings don’t want to go to movies anymore in a post-pandemic world. With higher ticket prices and infinite streaming options at home, why head out to the theater every week? There is some truth to this—the bar, certainly, has risen for people to show up and pay inflated prices for popcorn and soda. Certain films that would have roped in larger audiences in 2014 or 2015 will struggle today. Last year, though, taught us the movies can be alive and well when audiences are offered compelling choices. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both, on the merits, very good films. Neither were retreads. Barbie does threaten a new era of doll IP films and those films will, on balance, probably underperform, but Greta Gerwig had the first entry and gets credit for reimagining what Barbie and Ken’s story might be. Oppenheimer was a historical epic, of the likes that Hollywood used to be fond of before its addiction to superheroes.

The parallels between the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the collapse of the western are too obvious to ignore any longer. As Ted Gioia noted, the western had a half century-long grip on television and film before disappearing almost entirely. Even as popular culture and the wider world began to rapidly evolve in the 1950s and 1960s, westerns were still all over television and film. They had achieved market saturation, even as younger audiences were turning away. It would take the rise of New Hollywood and a generation of younger filmmakers to put the western to bed or, at least in the case of Bonnie and Clyde, invert and innovate the outlaw genre so much that audiences wouldn’t accept formulaic dreck any longer. The decline of superhero movies may also mirror fatigue with IP generally; Garfield and Mad Max weren’t spared, and there will probably be fewer and fewer prequel and sequel tentpoles which can deliver, for Hollywood, enormous profits. Top Gun: Maverick may have been the exception, not the rule. New Wolverine and Spider-Man spinoffs simply won’t dominate like they used to in the 2010s. And there’s some logic to that. A decade ago, a big budget superhero movie held some novelty. Iron Man had only kicked off the MCU era in 2008. The trouble for Hollywood is that this model largely did not mint new stars. It used to be, as my friend Mo Diggs argued, well-written scripts could elevate careers. Beverly Hills Cop helped make Eddie Murphy into a movie star, not the other way around. This was beneficial for actors because it put far less pressure on them and ultimately did not diminish their brands. The superhero films, increasingly forgettable, ultimately suppressed whoever was playing Thor or Spider-Man or Hulk because it was the intellectual property, in the mind of the fan, that came first—not the actor putting on the costume. And these films, so reliant on special effects and global reach, ran up gargantuan budgets that, in most cases, can’t be recouped any longer.

Hollywood is struggling. The streaming era cut deeply into their profits. Studio heads, in the interim, are retreating into the formulas they know well and hoping artificial intelligence can save enough cash to make most actors and writers irrelevant. They will fail because the products they pump out won’t be good or memorable. Instead, they will lose their perch at the top of the macroculture as the macroculture itself contracts. In a decade, YouTube films could be winning Oscars. And in this contraction is a great opportunity for innovation and ambition, a reemergence of the avant-garde. I was not as enthusiastic about Civil War as others, but I do believe, as Diggs has argued, it represents the near-future of filmmaking—original stories on smaller budgets, stories that are good enough to carry themselves through word-of-mouth and online buzz. I was hard on Civil War because I, personally, expected more from it, but it was undoubtedly better than a large majority of films that have entered theaters in recent years. It was well-crafted and operated from a fairly novel premise. Another smaller, profitable film that I liked much more was Challengers. Perhaps it was because I was once an amateur tournament player. If the tennis film needed Zendaya as a lure to casual viewers, it stood on its own as a beautifully-directed, tightly-wound personal drama that might have broken out the career of Josh O’Connor. Here’s the stark truth: both Challengers and Civil War made money. They did this because they hit a certain quality threshold and didn’t cost unseemly sums to make.

The blockbuster model will wither, and that’s fine. It’s less than a half century old, dating back to Jaws. And without it, the avant-garde will reconstitute itself, as New Hollywood did in the 1960s. I am optimistic, too, the romantic turn in the culture will gradually reinvigorate the broader arts, whether it’s literature or music, where too many gatekeepers and practitioners have forgotten how to surprise and challenge their audiences. Literature, which moves more slowly because publishing timelines are far too long, may operate on a lag. As larger publishers catch up, the nimbler indies and self-publishers will produce fiction that is less staid, less solipsistic, and less beholden to one particular literary model of the twentieth century: the dry, meditative Sebaldian novel. This is already happening, with darkly original novels like Incel finding an audience and John Pistelli’s self-published Major Arcana landing a book deal. Substack, which has united and networked creators like few platforms before it, will play a role as well, since this is where the most inventive writing now happens. Gatekeepers have lost interest in nurturing new talent. The latest handwringing, in Esquire, over the declining status of the debut novelist is evidence enough of this. It’s harder than ever, it seems, to market them. But quality comes first, and always will. The status quo will only be so tired for so long.