THB #350 : The Repetition Of Myths

We are swimming in our own juices a little bit these days. The WGA Strike, brought to you by AMPTP unwilling to seriously negotiate anything but minimums, has slowed everyone’s roll. As a result, we have been having a lot of the same conversations for a couple months now.

h/t, The Daughter Diaries

The problem I keep running into, banging my head against the wall each time, is that we in the media are forever looking for a hook for these stories. And more often than not, that hook is too simplistic and only partially fact-based. Then, when the hook doesn’t play out as projected by those selling the angle, we get weeks of coverage about the failure, whether the presumption of failure is applicable or not.

Part of me disassociates from this because history tells us that the media influence, in reality, is not a significant thing. But it does make me nuts when someone, industry or civilian, starts to explain that something that is simply not true is “just the way it is.”

And of course, most of the mythologies are mixed in with truths, as all the best lies are. There is a world of difference between the failures of The Little Mermaid, the domestic result for Fast X, the frustrations of No Hard Feelings, and the soft response to Indiana Jones & The Dial of Destiny. That doesn’t even start to deal with the independent side of the business, which has a whole different set of hurdles.

The myth that Top Gun: Maverick, the 3rd highest grossing film of the last 18 months, just barely ahead of The Super Mario Bros, saved theatrical continues because no one wants to get into the detail work that there is a big difference between the performance of any individual movie and the overall theatrical ecosystem.

A Vanity Fair piece, that is not terrible, but makes some inaccurate leaps, suggests that anything less than a $4 billion domestic summer will be a failure… a feat that at the time of publication (July 6) was already highly unlikely, given where we are right now, even if the 3 films everyone is obsessing on are all major hits.

And of course, there is the endlessly sloppy matter of the disengagement from international box office in almost every single one of these stories… even though 60% of the Top 10 of pre-COVID 2019 films grossed more than 2/3 of their overall box office internationally and not a single one of them was majority domestic (50%+). This year, only 2 of the current Top 10 have as much as 60% coming from overseas. This is a much bigger real concern for distributors than Indy 7’s opening weekend. It makes Fast X a money maker… and it fails to save The Little Mermaid from itself.

People still make fun of Prince of Persia, which flopped massively in the U.S. in 2010… but was kept from being a serious disaster for Disney after doing more than 2.5x as much business internationally.

People are writing about Disney’s animation-to-live conversions. Well, The Lion King kinda-live did $1.1 billion overseas and Aladdin did $695 million overseas. I’m not a fan of either, but if you want to poke at Disney for going forward with more of these, look at those international numbers. If Mermaid did overseas just 60% of what it did domestically, it would be over $700 million worldwide and it would be being embraced as a hit for the studio.

Perspective matters.

It took 1975’s Jaws 59 days to get to $100 million, the 8th Monday of its release.
Star Wars (1977) was never in 1100 theaters in 1st run or had an $8 million weekend.
Batman was the first to gross $100m in 10 days (1989).
Spider-Man was the first to open to $100m in 3 days in 2002.
The Avengers was the first $200 million opening in 2012.
Avengers: Endgame was the first $300 million opening, back in 2019.

That’s 24 years to get from Jaws, which opened to $7 million on 409 screens and would never have a bigger weekend as it built its fame and fortune, to the first $100 million opening of Spider-Man.

And then, just 17 years from the first $100 million opening to the first $300 million opening.

It wasn’t because everyone just liked Avengers so much. It didn’t just happen. It required a lot of intention and choices and hard work to get there in such a short period of time.

Hollywood creates mythologies with its movies. And it has always create mythology about how the movies get made and distributed.

Here are some of the current myths that turn up over and over again: