Weak box-office punch won’t defeat action franchises
When “Transformers: The Last Knight” arrived in theaters in past June, nearly everyone hated it. The fifth installment in Michael Bay’s robot-vehicle franchise was the worst-reviewed yet, earning a dismal 14% on RottenTomatoes and dubbed “2017’s Most Toxic Movie” by Rolling Stone.
Audiences, too, shunned the film. With a $44 million opening weekend, less than half that of the previous film, “The Last Knight” is shaping up as the worst performer in the series by far.
Guess what? The studio, Paramount Pictures, is not only working on a sixth “Transformers” film but recently began shooting a spinoff, “Bumblebee,” about a feisty Volkswagen bug.
“Transformers” is part of what you might call the Summer of the Living Franchises. Shunned by audiences and blasted by critics, these Hollywood properties somehow keep stumbling forward.
Universal Pictures’ “The Mummy,” released in June, has been a box-office disappointment, but the studio still plans to create a multi-film “monsterverse” starring the Wolf Man, Frankenstein and other classic Universal movie creations. The May release “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” another badly reviewed and poorly attended film, could still pave the way for a sixth film in the series.
There have been some bright spots this summer, namely “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Wonder Woman,” which both earned positive reviews and became major hits at the box office.
But if nobody seems to like those other movies, why do they keep getting made? One reason is the increasing dominance of Disney, which owns three dependably high-grossing movie-brands: Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. Last year, Disney became the highest-grossing studio with more than 26% of total box office — a larger share than any studio has earned this century, according to BoxOfficeMojo.
As a result, other studios are trying to duplicate Disney’s success with their own franchises and “universes.”
“Disney is so dominant in this market that the other studios have to play their game,” said Bruce Nash, founder of the box-office tracking website TheNumbers.com. With a schedule that includes roughly five movies per year that are likely to earn more than $500 million apiece — upcoming titles include Marvel’s “Black Panther,” Pixar’s “Coco” and the untitled “Star Wars” spinoff based on Han Solo — Disney is “just going to keep cranking those out,” Nash says. “And all the other studios are going to have to compete. So you’re just going to get a schedule of cookie-cutter movies that all feel the same.”
That may bore American moviegoers, but Chinese audiences remain entranced. China last year added more than 7,500 new movie screens for a total of about 39,000, a close second to America’s 40,475 screens, according to a 2016 report from the London-based research firm IHS Markit.
For a Chinese moviegoer who hasn’t yet seen “Transformers” or “The Mummy” on an IMAX screen or with state-ofthe-art effects, “that’s a completely different experience,” Nash said. “Whereas, for us, we’ve become a little bit jaded.” In short, movies that play terribly at home can often succeed overseas, which encourages studios to make more of the same kind of movies.
“So,” Nash said, “we’re stuck.”