Are hot summer blockbusters going cold?
Summer doesn’t officially start until June 21, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, but it’s not too soon to wonder if it’s already over for the season’s blockbuster movies.
I can’t recall a year when so many of the hot tickets of the warm months went cold so fast. Week after week has brought at least one new blockbuster contender to multiplexes, only to be greeted with box-office results that for the most part range from disappointing to dismal. The Mummy, Baywatch and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword are outright bombs, both with critics and North American audiences (global response offers some financial respite).
Alien: Covenant, The Fate of the Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales have been middling successes, not so much critically but with the most loyal devotees of these long-running franchises. These movies are all well past the sell-by date of their original appeal.
By my reckoning, the only two clear blockbuster winners so far this season are Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, with Wonder Woman being the best of the lot. It’s also set numerous records, among them the most successful domestic opening ever for a film directed by a woman (Patty Jenkins) and the smallest first-tosecond-weekend attendance decline for a modern superhero movie.
This situation may change soon. Cars 3 is out this weekend and looks likely to score with Disney/Pixar fans. Later this month, Despicable Me 3 and Transformers: The Last Knight might also be blockbuster winners.
I have my doubts, though. You’ll recall that last summer also saw a lot of blockbuster failures, with Ghostbusters, Jason Bourne, Independence Day: Resurgence and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows among the many movies that failed to excite imaginations and cash registers.
We may have finally reached the stage, more than four decades after Jaws created the concept of the wide-release phenomenon, where summer blockbusters are beginning to fade into the sunset.
The problem is primarily the failure to tell a good story. Far too many blockbusters these days are created to be components of franchises rather than satisfying stand-alone narratives. Last week’s The Mummy was a particularly egregious example of this. In launching its Dark Universe franchise of retooled classic monster movies, Universal Pictures foolishly decided to combine its ancient Mummy saga with an updated telling of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tale, with a predictably ludicrous outcome.
Its stitched-together form made this Mummy more of a Frankenstein, in all the wrong ways. Wonder Woman, in contrast, told a much clearer story that avoided the usual tedium of superhero origin movies.
Not even Tom Cruise could save The Mummy, although the film’s terrible $31-million opening weekend in Canada and the U.S. was mitigated by the $140-million launch in the rest of the world, a record for a Cruise movie.
Is Cruise happy being a star in Beijing, but not in Boston or Barrie, Ont.? Seems unlikely, and Universal must now be questioning the wisdom of making more Dark Universe chapters. Remember just two summers ago when Universal could do no wrong, with blockbuster hits like Jurassic World, Furious 7 and Minions?
How quickly times change, but the disruptions of 21st-century life might also be catching up with blockbusters.
There is increasing pressure by short-sighted Hollywood execs to reduce the “windows” separating theatrical and DVD/online movie releases to weeks rather than months.
Many would like to see films go day-and-date with theatrical and online releases, a move that, if it happens, could be the final blow not just for blockbusters for the traditional movie-going experience altogether.
Netflix is already anticipating this reality with its online release strategy. It caused a lot of fuss at last month’s Cannes Film Festival when its two Palme d’Or competitors, Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories, were criticized for not being “real” movies, since they were made for small screens, not big ones.
Bong Joon Ho’s Okja is a curious beast, since it’s an action thriller about a young girl seeking to save her giant pet pig from corporate swine. Marketed the right way, it could be a summer blockbuster, but Netflix is releasing it June 28 on only a handful of big screens worldwide, including just one in Canada: Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox.
That’s day-and-date with Okja’s rollout to Netflix’s 90 million smallscreen viewers worldwide, a gigantic audience that is becomingly increasingly attractive to filmmakers and actors.
Is the ultimate fate of the blockbuster to shrink down to a screenbuster?
It’s too soon to tell — Wonder Woman proves there’s still bigscreen demand — but this 42-year phenomenon may need a hero or heroine to save it. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.