The biggest movie of 2008 was The Dark Knight, and it wasn’t particularly close. The second installment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was the most anticipated movie of the year, featuring an instantly iconic performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker, released just months after he died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Ledger’s work and the shadow of his life gave the movie a morbid profundity to pair with its superheroic story, catapulting it to critical acclaim and $533 million at the box office. It’s not overstating things to call The Dark Knight a phenomenon, one of the most quoted and beloved movies of the century. And yet, on the same weekend the film was released, another piece of precious intellectual property hit theaters: Mamma Mia! Phyllida Lloyd’s adaptation of the ABBA musical comedy starring Meryl Streep was also an event, of sorts. Released by Universal Pictures in nearly 3,000 theaters, Mamma Mia! was a classic case of counterprogramming, an alternative to Nolan’s bleak extravaganza. And it worked, eventually earning $144 million. This feels impossible now.
This weekend, Avengers: Infinity War reeled in a staggering $62 million in the United States, holding its place atop the pack. In its third weekend of release, it’s still outpacing the opening weekend grosses of the five biggest non-Marvel movies of the year so far: A Quiet Place ($50 million), Ready Player One ($42 million), Fifty Shades Freed ($39 million), Rampage ($36 million), and A Wrinkle in Time ($33 million). (The other Marvel entry, Black Panther, made more than $200 million in its opening weekend on its way to becoming the third-highest grossing movie of all time in the United States.) Infinity War is the embodiment of the zero-sum game that moviemaking has become in the past decade, a behemoth that scares off the competition not for one week or even two, but entire months at a time.
Since Infinity War arrived, the major studios have released just two movies: Warner Bros.’ Melissa McCarthy comedy Life of the Party, which made $18.5 million in its opening weekend, the lowest total for a McCarthy vehicle since she became a movie star; and the $16.5 million-earning Breaking In, a Gabrielle Union thriller from Universal and Will Packer Productions, the company that has delivered two textbook counterprograms, Girls Trip and the Ride Along films. Infinity War nearly quadrupled their gross. (And this doesn’t even consider the enormous international numbers.)
“I have good friends, filmmakers, who say, ‘I’m going to Netflix. I’m tired of playing the game,’” Ben Falcone, the director of Life of the Party, told me. “It’s tricky out there, there’s a lot of superhero movies, mostly. They appeal to [everyone]. I take my kids to them. I like them. But then it’s becoming a trickier environment for comedy to thrive, in particular.”
Marvel has mastered movie blanketing, stretching the dominance of its products across a month-plus. It’s an astonishing shift. As a point of comparison, on the weekend when The Dark Knight was released, Fox also put an animated movie (Space Chimps) in 2,500 theaters. The following weekend, Sony released Step Brothers, a big ticket Will Ferrell comedy that went on to become a cult classic, and Fox also released X-Files: I Want to Believe (which essentially put the kibosh on The X-Files as a movie franchise). Once upon a time, studios fought the perceived monsters at the door. Now they retreat to live another day.
Since Thanos disappeared half the competition, only three other movies besides Life of the Party and Breaking In have hit more than 1,000 theaters: the Charlize Theron dramedy Tully, the Overboard remake, and the utterly ignored action film Bad Samaritan. In February, the Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty moved from a late June release to April 27. Two weeks later, Marvel moved the release date of Infinity War from May 4 to April 27, which led to a fascinating domino effect. In what felt like a matter of moments, the Dwayne Johnson overgrown-monkey actioner Rampage slid back from April 20 to April 13. I Feel Pretty moved again, too—back a week to April 20, as far from Infinity War as it could get in such a short span of time. In a telling moment of self-deprecation, Amy Schumer left a note on Robert Downey Jr.’s release-date message on Instagram: “Ok cool um well I’ll just um. April 20th is when I guess [I Feel Pretty] will come out then but it’s not cause we are scared of you guys. Um. It’s because I forgot I had a thing.” Marvel’s might is so powerful it overwhelms insecure comic actors, the Rock, and a gang of biologically mutated predators.
For Tully director Jason Reitman, there is a modest benefit in having his film—which turns on some specific storytelling twists—released at such a precarious time for smaller films.
“We’re coming out literally the week between Avengers and Solo [A Star Wars Story],” he says, “so I wasn’t worried about the cacophony of Tully noise.”
The entire concept of counterprogramming hinges on seeing just one movie over a weekend, presenting an alternative to the noisiest release of the week. But Reitman suggests that—gasp—maybe some people want to see more than one movie in a weekend.
“I can easily go watch two different kinds of movies in a day; that’s not an unusual thing for me,” Reitman says. “The idea of seeing The Florida Project and Solo in the same day would sound like an awesome day to me, where maybe for other people that would be schizophrenic.”
Though the ever-imperiled gambit of the ticket service MoviePass allows for more viewing opportunities for regular movie fans, the likelihood of an average person seeing two movies in a day, let alone a weekend, are small and dwindling. Theater attendance has consistently dipped in recent years, hitting a record 25-year low in 2017. The battle for attention spans is ferocious right now—Netflix is making a bid to fill every last gap of free time in modern life. Since Infinity War hit theaters, Netflix has released three original films (one of which, The Week Of, is the kind of Adam Sandler comedy that would have been a superhero antidote five years ago), two documentaries, three stand-up specials, and five new seasons of series TV. That is more than 40 hours of programming in a 16-day span. So there is now a boomerang effect on blockbusters: Avengers: Infinity War has to be so big, so loud, so destructive because its competition is so relentless. But there’s a downside to being outsize.
The knock-on effect of a box office powerhouse is obvious: Fewer theaters open for new films, followed quickly by fewer films being programmed for those time periods, followed eventually by fewer films being produced, period. Infinity War and Black Panther are intimidating and then crushing competition. These movies—movies that I, like Falcone and millions of others, generally really enjoy—are creating a beggars’ class of haves and have-nots that threatens not just the old manner of movie-release strategy, but the notion of film lovers. It is brand loyalty as artistic assault. Today, we have repeat customers, not cinephiles. If you are not one of the many people interested in seeing Infinity War three or six or nine times, you may go several weeks before returning to a theater. And that means the death of the Movie Month.
I love a good Movie Month, a torrent of interesting, unique, must-see films colliding in the space of 30 days. Here’s one, October 2013: Gravity, Captain Phillips, 12 Years a Slave, The Counselor, Blue Is the Warmest Color. Here’s another, November 2016: Doctor Strange, Moana, Nocturnal Animals, Fantastic Beasts, Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge, The Edge of Seventeen. This is an arbitrary, unscientific method, but it’s a fun way to engage in movie culture. That November ’16 period is a run that makes people care about going to the movies, a mix of high and low, blockbusters and moody dramas, awards fare and kid flicks. It creates moments, memories, even eras, if it all breaks right.
The studios are not meant to collude with one another to create nostalgic incentive for its consumers; they’re in competition, after all, and the goal is money. But the meticulous strategizing that goes into road-mapping the year in releases—and the quick-twitch willingness to change for fear of getting stomped by a Marvel monolith—indicates an awareness of the issue that isn’t new but is only growing more severe. This hardly even accounts for the array of impressive smaller films that have hit theaters and home release in the past four weeks: Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Tony Zierra’s Filmworker, Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In, and myriad other specialty and arthouse releases. If you don’t live in a major city, it can be more difficult to see some of those for weeks or even months. That means a threat to independent theater chains, independent filmmakers, different kinds of stories, and films untethered to some manner of super-connected cinematic universe. In other words, it is a genuine threat to movies.
This Friday brings Deadpool 2, and it’s fair to assume there’s a crossover in the audience for this movie with the Avengers. It’s also fair to assume Deadpool 2 will end the Avengers’ reign atop the box office. Though, if Disney purchases Fox, it will eventually be understood, historically, as an unbroken chain of superheroes crossing over unto one another into eternity. This summer, Black Panther, Infinity War, and Deadpool 2 will be followed swiftly by Solo, Jurassic World, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and so on through the summer, a daisy chain of content stretching into our own kind of infinity war. It is a coherent corporate strategy propagated and repeated until moviegoers want something new. That may never come. It sounds dire. And I know what you’re thinking: Why so serious? Night is always darkest before the dawn, right? Well, when the superpowers that be have gotten this good, there appears to be no end in sight.
