By Mark Harris
(Harris is a cultural historian and the author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.”)
For Hollywood, 2023 was not so much a disaster as a preview of disasters to come. Sure, one of the big stories last year was the Barbenheimer phenomenon — two celebrated hits that marched arm in arm toward a combined 21 Oscar nominations — but everywhere else you look, the prognosis is grim.
The industry, still staggering back from the pandemic shutdowns, was hit with twin strikes that brought production to a halt for six months. Writers, actors and virtually the rest of Hollywood’s work force were united in animus against the studio bosses, who, in their refusal to cut necessary deals, blithely cast themselves in the roles of supervillains. That fury persists: Each new headline about the huge compensation package for Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, or decisions by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, to shelve entire projects for tax write-offs undergirds a prevailing narrative that the people who finance the movies are becoming the enemies of the people who make them.
Twenty twenty-three was a year of downsizing, diminishment, shelving, sidelining, retrenching, retreating and bet hedging. And 2024 is the year of consequences. The plain fact is that, thanks to the strikes, there simply aren’t enough movies and new shows in the pipeline to give the business the boom year it badly needs. (This weekend’s big opening, “Dune: Part Two,” was delayed from its original 2023 premiere date because of the strikes’ disruption.) For Hollywood, it will take at least a full year for the supply lines to start flowing at capacity again — and there are fewer supply lines than there used to be. Only five of the legacy movie companies still operate as traditional studios and one of those, Paramount, is up for sale.
As for new projects, the industry’s current whispered motto seems to be: Just survive till ’25. Writers and producers pitching projects are being warned to keep expectations at basement level: Nobody’s buying, everybody’s cutting costs, caution rules, and the boom times are over. To quote Tony Soprano — the main character in a hit show back when a golden age seemed to be dawning, not dimming — things are trending downward. He had no idea how prescient he was.
If “Hollywood” were a big summer movie, we’d be right at the end of Act II, at the always-darkest-before-the-dawn moment in the story, when all seems lost. Or, as one agent put it to me, “A lot of us are feeling like we’re working in the aftermath of an industry, not in an industry.” But as any fan of Hollywood screenplays knows, this is also when the beaten-down heroes look at the redrawn battlefield, assess the new, heightened stakes, regroup and eventually triumph. The movie business, since at least the 1940s, has always defined itself by perceived threats to its survival — charges of Communist influence, the advent of television and the rise of the VCR, cable or streaming — and it’s always found a way to rebound.
In the mid-1960s, when studio culture was besieged and foundering and nobody who ran Hollywood could understand why the old ways were no longer working, “it wasn’t just that we were sick of the system,” the director Arthur Penn once told me. “The system was sick of itself.” But that malaise, dejection and uncertainty led to a major upheaval — and a decade of churning creative excitement. The New Hollywood movement of the late 1960s and 1970s happened because a bunch of great young filmmakers made a bunch of great new movies (“Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” and “Easy Rider” and “The Godfather” and “Jaws”) that turned out to be huge hits. But it’s worth noting that the people in charge at the time considered most of those movies exceptions, oddities and anomalies. The industry didn’t realize that the world beneath its feet was changing.
That’s where the movie business is right now: The system, it seems, is once again sick of itself. The industry has, for the past four years, been wondering when it can get back to normal, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that there may be no such thing. There is only forward to something new. The industry is about to find out what that might look like.
In the ashes of last year, an outline of this new normal started to emerge. It’s a landscape that consists not of just big studios (this isn’t the 1950s) or big studios competing with upstart indies that steal their awards (this isn’t the 1990s) but of a mix of new and old models: studios; indies; streamers like Apple, Amazon and Netflix; and the kind of out-of-nowhere hits, faith-based movies and red-state phenomena like “Sound of Freedom” that keep taking people on the coasts by surprise.
It’s also a landscape that, like so many these days, involves Taylor Swift. In 2023 “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” bypassed traditional distributors, went straight to theaters and outgrossed all but 10 of last year’s biggest movies domestically. If theaters are going to survive, this kind of communal event — the “you have to be there with 20 friends” movie/dance party — is probably going to be integral to their future. One acknowledgment of the Swift effect came when the streaming rights to “The Eras Tour” went to Disney for reportedly more than $75 million. Hollywood finally stepped up with a tried-and-true old-school principle: If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em (even if it’s a very expensive meal).
If the defining piece of good news for the studios in 2023 was Barbenheimer, the industry seems unwilling to learn from its success. Barbenheimer suggested that audiences might get excited when two huge, very different films open on the same day — but studios, which used to compete head-to-head almost every weekend, now try desperately to avoid those scheduling clashes. Astonishingly, several weekends in 2024, as of now, have not even one big new movie, let alone two, set to open. That’s a mistake. Studios need to chase this kind of collision, and Barbenheimer was a useful reminder that old-world studios (Universal released “Oppenheimer,” and Warner Bros. released “Barbie”) are among the few entities with the sheer marketing muscle to stoke a bona fide worldwide event.
Twenty twenty-three provided two blockbusters that are going head-to-head for best picture, a Hollywood studio dream come true. But that can’t erase the fact that superhero movies, the industry’s cash cow for the past dozen years, showed ominous signs of collapse. All four of Warner’s DC movies underperformed, including “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” “The Flash” and “Blue Beetle.” Disney’s “The Marvels” — a sequel to “Captain Marvel,” which grossed $427 million — earned a woeful $85 million. It seems unkind even to mention Sony’s disastrous attempt at building out a “Spider-Man” extended universe with “Madame Web.”
Superhero movies aren’t done — Disney and Warner Bros. have locked in multiyear, multimovie plans, and “Deadpool & Wolverine” is likely to be a hit this summer — but what had been a bulletproof business plan is in tatters. The days when audiences would faithfully trot out for every interconnected chapter of a cinematic-universe saga are over. That’s no longer entertainment. That’s homework.
If there’s a silver lining, perhaps it can be found in an earlier superhero film, one that premiered amid great doubts about the industry 35 years ago. In the summer of 1989, prestige Hollywood moviemaking was in a rut, and anxious executives fretted that maybe young people just wanted to stay home and watch MTV, much in the way they now worry that youth are addicted to bite-size TikToks. But in 1989 the success of the director Tim Burton’s “Batman” and the unexpected breakout hits “The Little Mermaid,” “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and “Do the Right Thing” opened up new vistas of possibility. Three genres that had been written off as marginal — comic book movies, animation and indies — became gold mines. Hollywood may not yet know what’s going to replace superhero films as the next reliable blockbuster category, but this current crisis at least provides an incentive to start chasing a reset.
A reset, however, requires creative energy and imagination, and that’s a part of the movie industry that legacy studios have spent much of the modern era trying to eliminate. Studios have moved into an age of brand stewardship and out of the business of generating ideas and developing scripts. They’ve redefined their business as curation rather than discovery. That has to change, too. This isn’t a high-minded plea for the industry to become something it’s never been; instead it’s a pitch for the studios (and now streamers) to reconnect with the enterprising, flexible, relatively quick-to-pivot business model under which they operated successfully for a vast majority of their existence.
Hollywood has a long history of toggling between spurts of irrational exuberance and deep valleys of clinical depression. Before the perils of streaming and A.I., the existential threat in the aughts came from peak TV, that siren luring away A-list talent and audience eyeballs. But not everything that looks like an industry killer turns out to be one. The e-book did not end books or bookstores. And streaming, a business that, for all its flaws, gives more people more access to more films, will not kill movies or moviegoing. It’s possible that the bungled decisions that led to two prolonged strikes — the most vigorous recent attempt by studio heads to shoot themselves in the foot — created one unanticipated benefit, a green shoot of improbable hope: a serious delay in the completion of giant franchise movies. Given their recent disappointing box office numbers, a few of those decades-old franchises, like “The Fast and the Furious” and “Mission: Impossible,” may have finally reached retirement age.
In light of this blockbuster shortage — and out of sheer panicked supply chain necessity — Hollywood is looking at and buying and even making plans to produce a bunch of scripts that can get off the ground fast and be cast, shot and edited reasonably quickly. They’re the kinds of films that don’t require a $250 million budget and a year of complicated postproduction work. They’re films like “Hamnet,” directed by the Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (whose last film was an underperforming Marvel movie, “Eternals”) and “Novocaine,” a thriller acquired by Paramount starring Jack Quaid. Even Tom Cruise, who hasn’t starred in a nonfranchise movie since 2017, is teaming with the Oscar-winning director Alejandro Iñárritu. These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes.
They’re the kinds of films you might sometimes wish Hollywood made more of. Maybe you remember them. They’re what used to be called movies.
