The MCU has featured an endless series of villains being defeated, but perhaps it has been laid low by the most unexpected villain of all – the hardcore of American cinemagoers.
In April 2021 I wrote about being knocked sideways by my introduction to the concept of the Power Law. For instance in retail 80% of the complaints come from 20% of the customers, and this kind of weird statistic holds true for many various fields of human behaviour. But it really seems to strike with a vengeance at the North American Box Office. According to a 2019 survey just 11% of American cinemagoers accounted for 47% of all the cinema tickets sold. Which is staggering, until you reflect. I saw The Dark Knight five times in the cinema. I was one of those ideal marks for repeat viewing. So if I go from buying 7 tickets for the LOTR trilogy to 0 tickets for the Hobbit trilogy, as I did, then it’s very bad for business. And if a studio truly alienates this fraction of the audience, it’s goodnight Vienna. It blows my mind that a studio could aim at 90% of the population, and lose basically 50% of the box office by doing so.
The MPA survey was based on 2019, the all-conquering year for the MCU with Avengers: Endgame. And it was the end of an era in more ways than just the exit of several of the MCU’s original characters. That was the last year before Covid changed things, forever. Per 2019’s analysis 24% of the combined USA/Canada population does not go to movies, at all. The remaining 76% of the population averages 4.6 tickets per year. Of that 76% that go to the movies, occasional moviegoers, a bloc of 54% who go less than once a month, buy 51% of the tickets. The 11% of infrequent moviegoers who go once a year buy 2% of tickets. But the 11% of frequent moviegoers, who go at least once a month, buy 47% of the tickets. When you see those two represented on pie charts side by side, as in the MPA report, you realise the frequent moviegoers are carrying the load for the 24% refuseniks as well as the uncommitted 9% of the frequent moviegoers.
That’s a lot of weight to carry…. Cinema is no longer as important as it once was. The archetypal Saturday night movie experience memorably recounted by Gus Van Sant on the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, where the entire high school rocked up to the cinema because that’s what you did on Saturday night before anything else you might get up to, is long vanished. No amount of hype will bring that world back, just like no amount of fraud can hide the fact you can’t buy a house for the same price your parents did because of inflation, and that inflation didn’t magically not affect the price of cinema tickets too. As the Atlantic put it the other year, Americans used to go to the movies like they went to church, now they go to the movies like they go to the doctor. Infrequently, and unwillingly. And that’s where I think something may have changed that I hadn’t considered before. Enter Keynes and the Multiplier Effect. Has the MCU buckled under contact with … The Multiplier?
Early 2016 found everyone being whacked over the head with The Force Awakens as the most popular film in the history of popularity and film. Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com weighed into the fray with irrepressible sarcasm and statistics:
If you squint and fudge in just the right light, The Force Awakens is now sorta-kinda the biggest hit in United States history, and has maybe a 50/50 shot of catching Avatar for the No. 1 global spot.
Actually, a further word on Disney’s loud crowing this week about SW: TFA having reached the status of Biggest Movie Ever. That word would be “oh no, you don’t.” If you adjust for inflation — which is, y’know, how actual economic comparisons are done — it’s not even close. According to Box Office Mojo’s seemingly reasonable calculations, The Force Awakens is now roughly the No. 21 movie of all time, well below such titles as The Lion King, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Exorcist. It will certainly climb a fair bit higher, but I’m not convinced it will earn the extra $300 million required to catch Doctor Zhivago at No. 8. And I would bet Donald Trump’s bottom dollar that it won’t get anywhere near the all-time champ, Gone With the Wind, which made almost $200 million in 1939 dollars, in a nation with less than half our current population where the typical movie ticket cost less than a quarter.
The new Star Wars is a big movie, for sure. But it’s not quite as ginormous and culture-dominating and universally beloved as Disney wants us to think it is. The bigness of TFA, or at least the idea of its bigness, is a central element of the Mouse House strategy to spin Star Wars into a marketing, merchandising and entertainment empire.
I propose that the importance of this idea of bigness was dependent on frequent moviegoers, hereinafter to be referred to as The 11%. Who are these people? Who knows? But probably they are the kind of people who go to a Star Wars movie or an MCU movie or a Jurassic World movie two times over opening weekend. And this inflates the opening weekend box office. Creating the impression that everybody is going to see Movie X. Whereas in fact maybe only 11 people out of a random sample of 100 have gone to Movie X, they’ve just gone to it an unhealthy amount of times. But more likely a lot of people did go. But because The 11% went repeatedly, it seriously warped the perception of the movie’s bigness. This dragged out the recalcitrant 2% of infrequent moviegoers to buy tickets, and it made the occasional moviegoer decide to check this particular movie out – as happened in 2015 with The Force Awakens and Jurassic World. The 11% make movies big. Or they used to
The fall of Star Wars might be a case in point here. There can be little doubt that the 11% were out in force in December 2015. But when they were served The Force Regurgitated it might have given them pause. There was already a tremendous amount of bad faith going on. Disney bought Star Wars and then unceremoniously junked the entire Expanded Universe. Revered novels, beloved comic books. Thirty years of fan investment. Gone. And then came The Last Jedi. I still haven’t seen it. Out of complete lack of interest. I know many people disagree mightily with its choices regarding Luke Skywalker. Not least because Mark Hamill let us all know his Voltairean approach: I disagree with what you are writing for my character, sir, but I am contractually obliged to act it out. I have previously written here that its DVD release seemed to be accompanied by American websites lambasting upset fans with a ‘party line’. JJ Abrams, apparently oblivious to the lesson of 2016’s Ghostbusters, (don’t piss all over the customer until after you’ve got their money) then endorsed the line: “Their problem isn’t Star Wars, their problem is being threatened. Star Wars is a big galaxy, and you can sort of find almost anything you want to in Star Wars. If you are someone who feels threatened by women and needs to lash out against them, you can probably find an enemy in Star Wars”. Solo then sank without trace at the box office. Almost as if a very small number of personally insulted people had crossed their arms and said Nope. And then The Rise of Skywalker also bombed. To be clear, these films still made a lot of money. But they cost an awful lot… And the Star Wars numbers were trending downwards.
The Rise of Skywalker made 1.077 billion, and 515.2 million of that came from North America. The Force Awakens made 2.066 billion, and 936.6 million of that came from North America. Those are numbers going defiantly in the wrong direction, and without adjusting for four years of inflation. They tell the same story of decline as afflicted the Hobbit trilogy, where each movie made less, whereas with the Lord of the Rings each movie made more. At the same time in 2019 Avengers: Endgame made 2.799 billion, and 858.3 million came from North America. The 11% were still there, they were just being selective. And being selective means that in 2019 Captain Marvel, sold as a tee-up for Avengers: Endgame, could make 426.8 million in North America, while its sequel The Marvels limped in at 84.5 million in North America. Again, almost as if a very small number of personally insulted people had crossed their arms and said Nope. And then went to Oppenheimer, in Imax, twice.
Memorial Day 2024, a weekend that will live in box office infamy, when Furiosa was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by The Garfield Movie. As the Atlantic noted, “excepting 2020, when the pandemic kept theaters closed, these numbers added up to the lowest Memorial Day domestic box office in nearly three decades”. Ruh-Roh, to quote another well belov’d cartoon animal. Barbie and Oppenheimer were movies that dragged out the infrequent cinemagoer and the occasional cinemagoer, and The 11% was probably more invested in the latter than the former. (I am making some assumptions about the make-up of The 11%, prove me wrong) But that’s a 2015 duopoly surrounded by the fiery wrecks of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Flash, Blue Beetle, Shazam!: Fury of the Gods, and The Marvels. I’ve previously suggested James Gunn’s unwise canning of the DCEU may have destroyed all the films yet to be released because The 11% did not take kindly to his decisions: drop Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot, keep Jennifer Holland (who just happens to be his wife).
But the fall of the DCEU was nothing like the collapse from Olympus of the MCU. Since Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has developed not necessarily to Disney’s advantage. Indeed the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer is now permitted to joke about how dire the situation has become. And it has possibly structural implications for Hollywood writ large. “Currently, the benchmark for a successful summer movie season is $4 billion,” writes Shirley Li in the Atlantic, “and summer ticket sales are already 22 percent behind 2023 and 41 percent behind 2019.” Should Hollywood be accepting a changed reality? That between 2019 and 2024 something has changed, so that now they only have 60% of their market left? Taking out a billion dollar Marvel movie or two definitely accounts for that missing chunk. The problem is, in the absence of another detailed MPA survey, knowing who has gone, and why. There can’t be any doubt that Covid completely ruptured the movie-going habit. I readily acknowledge that in myself, and consider it simply changed priorities. But is there something else?
I checked out of the MCU a long, long time ago, and for years after was frustrated at how the media, especially in America, fawned over it. Almost as if they were so hopelessly dependent on its box-office lustre for clicks that they were afraid to say anything less than laudatory, in case it might cause Disney to sever their access. So when it became acceptable for Disney to attack its fans, cf JJ Abrams, they pitched in with gusto. And then, after the box-office bubble of the MCU had burst, they started writing about how the MCU was actually flailing about, and how a lot of it, post-2019, had not been very good. Which is what the fans had been saying, but they’d been too busy attacking them for being awful people to judge whether they were making awful arguments or not. Were these movies riddled with embarrassingly awful and frankly unnecessary CGI? Yes. Were they becoming borderline incomprehensible without a subscription to Disney+ to keep up with a firehose of subpar content? Yes.
Was there a concerted effort to, cf Kathleen Kennedy, pivot the MCU away from a male audience towards a female audience? Um, yes… And it was being done with all the skill and writing vim that had accompanied the successful reorientation of Star Wars. (Sigh) But here’s the rub. The audience for The Marvels was more male than female. Four years after the girlbosses assemble scene in Avengers: Endgame. The female audience that was being targeted was patently non-existent. It would turn up for Barbie, repeatedly, and dressed in pink. But it simply would not show up for any of what had become cruelly dubbed The M-She-U. But a failure to attract a new audience isn’t a catastrophe so long as you haven’t torched your existing audience in the attempt. Um. Yeah, about that. JJ Abrams had some strange ideas about why men didn’t respond well to his creation Rey. And he attacked them, and they left. The MCU introduced a number of characters best described as insufferable, and then savaged anyone finding them insufferable.
And now there is a big old crater at the North American box-office where the MCU’s takings used to be located. The 11% held enormous power. 47% of the box-office was in their hands. And if they chose to cross their arms, I argue, the absence of their multiplier effect could take out a damned good chunk of the remaining 53% of the box-office a studio might be expecting to get. Know your audience. I remember reading a statistical study using Facebook data on interests and likes where it was convincingly shown, before its release, that Sony had gravely miscalculated in thinking there was any overlap between women going to Bridesmaids and women interested in going to Wiig and McCarthy in Feig’s Ghostbusters. It would be like assuming people who went to Drive would go to Barbie too, because Ryan Gosling was in both. Can Hollywood entice back The 11%? Or are they just done with movie-going forever, and the reason that the streaming of anime in North America has gone thru the roof recently?
If you tell people that a film wasn’t made for them, loudly, bitterly, and in public, well, they might just take you at your word.
Talking Movies 