The Oscars kept the challenges of the cinema industry from from sight

ALSO: RIP VICE.

It’s been a triumphant year for American cinema. After the covid-19 pandemic threatened to fulfil the promise of the last 20 years of trends in the cinema industry – i.e. to kill it entirely – there has been a resurgence.

Or, at least, that was the narrative being spun last night at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, as the great and good of Western moviemaking gathered for the Oscars. The big winner on the night was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s historical epic about the race to create nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer was being rewarded for its artistic value (however limited I might find that) but also for its impact on cinema: a worldwide gross of $957m has put it on track to be a rare billion-dollar movie aimed at adults. However cynical I might tend to be, that is something worth celebrating; a unicorn in a field of ponies.

What’s less rare is the billion-dollar success of The Super Mario Bros Movie (based on the Nintendo video game franchise) and Barbie (based on the American doll). These are the two movies to reach the $1,000,000,000 threshold this year – a threshold that a decade ago was seen as the new benchmark for success. Now it is not just a marker of success, but of “has this movie just saved cinema?” status. In 2022, three films hit this figure: Avatar 2 (which did such ridiculous global business – $2.3bn – it exposes our Americancentric perspectives on theatrical distribution), Top Gun 2 and, more bizarrely, Jurassic World 2. But it’s clear that people want to believe – and Hollywood wants to sell – the idea that Barbenheimer saved cinema in 2023.

I have to say that I don’t see huge grounds for optimism, when it comes to theatrical entertainment in the coming 12 months. The issues that have been present for a number of years persist, most notably a declining screen count in North America and Europe. This is the most important issue facing the top-line figure: if AMC and Cineworld, and whoever, close 20% of screens, you are simply never going to arrive at those billion-dollar Box Offices again. Or, if you do, it will mean that multiplexes have had to salt the earth and only show the big blockbusters, which, again, isn’t the sign of a healthy ecosystem.

There’s no realistic prospect for arresting this decline in total screens, though I think there is a realistic prospect that Box Office analysts start using a per screen figure rather than a gross figure. It’s actually a more instructive figure often. Take, for example, Paul Thomas Anderson’s not-quite-Scientology picture, The Master, which opened in 2012 to a colossal per screen average of $147,000 (a figure that makes you wonder how cinematic distribution can fail to be lucrative). Obviously, that precipitated a big, national expansion, and the final gross of $28m is a shade under-budget and shows, I suspect, that the markets in Los Angeles and Hicksville are quite different. But, all the same, there are plenty of films that over-perform their original screen allocation, and it’s probably good that more are given a shot at a big national expansion.

The writers and actors strikes in the US are also a BIG problem for the American cinema industry, in terms of maintaining any sort of momentum from the Barbenheimer summer. We’ll see, in the coming weeks, how Dune 2 performs internationally, but looking ahead to the summer, it’s hard to pick the hits. There’s a new Ghostbusters later this month which is likely to be a bomb, a new Planet of the Apes in May (the last Apes movie did only about 60% of the business of its previous instalment, and this was pre-covid), and reboots to Mad Max and A Quiet Place. None of these seem likely to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Hopes, instead, rest on Deadpool & Wolverine (which is putting a lot of faith in Marvel, given their recent failures) and Moana 2, which should be a surprise arrival before Christmas.

So, the narrative right now – that cinema is sexy again – might be hard to sustain all the way into new year 2025. But I think there are also some grounds for optimism, from what might be called the Anyone but You model.

Anyone but You was a 2023 movie directed by Will Gluck (who directed Easy A and then a string of bombs like Friends with Benefits, Annie and Peter Rabbit). It was on paper (at least when commissioned) the sort of film that you know is going to do really well on streaming. It stars Sydney Sweeney, a TV actress best known for Euphoria and The White Lotus, who is slowly breaking into cinema, and Glen Powell, a chiselled bit player in a number of straight-to-streaming rom-coms. At pitch-level, it looked rather like Claire Scanlon’s Set It Up, which starred Powell and Zoey Deutsch, received a bunch of positive reviews, and was a minor hit for Netflix.

Instead, Anyone but You has been the big, unexpected hit of the new year. With a 54% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not a critical word of mouth hit. Instead, it’s been a real zeitgeisty, event movie. With a reported budget of $25m, it has done well over $200m in box office receipts, and will doubtless have a strong second life on streaming. Key to this ROI is the fact that the casting directors recognised that Sweeney and Powell were both more famous amongst the film’s target demographic than conventional analysis would suggest.

Putting aside the fact that she now seems to be heading stratospheric, career-wise, Sweeney was a Gen Z icon, as the “sexy” member of the Euphoria ensemble. Where her co-star Zendaya was already receiving top-billings, Sweeney was a bit stuck in the supporting actress loop – not amongst the show’s fans, but amongst the imaginations of Hollywood executives. Similarly, Powell was perceived – by the millions who’d watched Set It Up – as a ready-made leading man. And yet, because of the fact that film didn’t produce Box Office data, due to the way Netflix operates, there was a hesitation about pushing him into a theatrical leading man role. All of this conspired to keep their costs low – far lower than if they’d cast, say, Florence Pugh and Timothée Chalamet.

It should be read as an illustration of a simple principle: to maximise theatrical returns, film studios do not need to spend exponentially more on the product, an effort that creates a strange perpetual motion machine of overspend. The marketing campaign for Barbie, say, or the visual effects work on Godzilla Minus One, are valid methods of trying to buy success, but they are not the only routes. Instead, there is an argument that a well-timed movie with a clear target demographic (Anyone but You hitting the 16-35 crowd, pre-Christmas, when the schedule looked open and lots of friendship groups were gathering for activities) has advantages you can’t pay for.

Now, some analysts will point to the success of Anything but You on TikTok, and argue that there was an unpredictable virality there, not akin to the Gentle Minion trend for Minions: Rise of Gru. But again, there is nothing random here. It just took a studio to understand that Sweeney and Powell were undervalued by mainstream, theatrical standards (I’m sure they’re not anymore). Anyone but You proved that you didn’t need a good script, particularly, or an interesting visual style. You just needed the right stars, at the right price.

I would like to see a more plural world in the cinemas, where there are rom-coms aimed at grown-ups (albeit not very grown-up grown-ups). But the question of scale remains a tricky one. Anyone but You was a fabulous success by anyone’s standards, but if you’re running Disney or Paramount you’d need a dozen hits like that a year to make up for the absence of a Star War or Avengers. Squaring this is the challenge: is there a way of readjusting expectations? How much slack is streamlining picking up as a revenue generator? And what can make this experience more lucrative for theatrical distributors?

That’s the final, big question. Because unless movie theatres increase their percentage occupancy through their screening schedule, the rest of the point is moot. The real hope of Barbenheimer was that it would engender a habit, make people more likely to keep going to the cinema, week-in, week-out. But most people are not very omnivorous. They want to eat what they like eating. And so the tricky tango between distributors, who are dying, and content providers, who are struggling, continues.

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I wrote last year about the decline and fall of the Vice empire, and it seems like the inevitable has now arrived. Here, below the line, are a few personal reflections on how and why Vice went so wrong.