The summer of 2023 will be remembered for two movies. You know their names, and at this point there’s a statistically significant chance that you’ve seen at least one of them. Besides becoming the first woman-helmed feature to gross over $1 billion at the global box office ($1.2 billion and counting), Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a genuine kind of pop cultural juggernaut; its omnipresence obliges ideologues of all kinds to weigh in and ridicules the idea of demographics. Its impact extends to superfans and shut-ins alike: Last week, the film-tracking service Quorum found that 11 percent of Barbie’s ticket buyers hadn’t even been in a movie theater since before the COVID-19 pandemic. For this small but significant sliver of viewers, Gerwig’s conceptually sly exercise in intellectual property renovation somehow transcended not only Warner Bros.’ expertly eventized marketing campaign but also the dialectical hype of the wider Barbenheimer discourse. Even more than new releases from James Cameron, Tom Cruise, or his frenemy Christopher Nolan—who had positioned Tenet as a potential game changer in the pandemic summer of 2021 before drawing exponentially larger audiences with a morbid anti-crowd-pleaser—Barbie made people feel as if the Movies, quote, unquote, were back.
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The longing for cinema to retain a certain pride of place in an epoch defined by the deceptively cost-effective ease of streaming can be felt emanating from a few predictable precincts—the pleadings of the purists or the keepers of the flame. It’s the common denominator between Tom Hanks’s new novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece—in which America’s dad imagines a serene red carpet premiere with a multiplex full of satisfied customers gazing rapturously up at the big screen—and such explicitly cinephilic award contenders as The Fabelmans and Babylon, which dealt in similarly nostalgic iconography; ditto Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, with its sweetly elegiac interlude shadowing Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate as she revels in the celluloid pleasures of a Westwood matinee. Cue the requisite rhetoric about the sacred, communal nature of moviegoing and how “heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
Scratch a couple of inches beneath the surface of such cynical slogans, and what’s really at stake is nothing less than the fate of film as a popular art form in an algorithmic age. Ultimately, it’s the same wedge issue that’s keeping actors and writers on the picket lines heading into festival season and pushing a number of high-profile premieres well into 2024 (potentially leaving Oscar season wide open for Gerwig and Nolan to continue their dominance). While it may seem too easy to analyze a labor stoppage with multibillion-dollar implications for professionals at every level of the industry in terms of good and bad, when one of the studios’ talking points involves using AI to replace background actors with digital doubles, the vibes start to feel downright dystopian; instead of offering escape from (or resistance to) some wider, corporatized hellscape, the movies become a grim mirror of their own underlying conditions. If David Zaslav ripped off his Mission: Impossible–style face mask tomorrow and revealed himself as the Entity, would you really be surprised? [Cue the Morgan Freeman in Se7en voice]: I want you to have expected it.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the background of this whole noisy paradigm shift, an entire cycle of American movies has come and gone without anybody really noticing. They’re less a victim of Barbenheimer hijacking the collective consciousness—which absolutely is a factor—than of their own strange, hapless ephemerality. For the most part, they’re the cinematic equivalent of trees falling in some empty, faraway forest. Or maybe a Haunted Mansion: You could be forgiven for thinking that Justin Simien’s $150 million (!) family comedy—with its theme park IP and cast picked seemingly out of a hat—was some kind of Disney deepfake. The phenomenon goes deeper: For instance, did you know that in March, an original sci-fi movie starring Adam Driver—maybe the most crucial American leading man of the 21st century—laying waste to a series of CGI dinosaurs opened at a theater near you? Or that between March and April, yesterday’s next big thing Guy Ritchie directed two different genre films—a spy comedy and a military thriller—that both had wide distribution? Have you actually seen the Ben Affleck vehicle Hypnotic, about a detective unraveling a vast mind-control conspiracy, but can’t remember it because somebody brainwashed you into believing otherwise? If the over/under on 2023 movies featuring Dracula as a key character was 1.5, what would you bet? And is it possible that this Friday, an R-rated comedy featuring Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx as the voices of naughty live-action dogs will play in front of at least a few live-action human beings?
Strays is the title of Josh Greenbaum’s canine-themed follow-up to his amiable Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar; it’s also as good a name as any for this phenomenon of movies that don’t seem to have been made by or belong to anybody. Originally slated for a June 9 bow, Strays arrives two months later without any buzz and with only the tiniest modicum of press attention: a condition, surely, of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, which prevents Ferrell, Foxx, et al. from expressing what is surely a deep and abiding sense of pride in their work. But the lack of fanfare—and awareness and excitement—also feels strangely like business as usual these days. If one of the major narratives of 21st-century Hollywood has been the steady erosion of what were once referred to as midrange studio movies—films produced and aimed at a level somewhere between blockbusters and the indie/art-house scene—the increasing indistinguishability of theatrical and VOD aesthetics, in combination with the severe narrowing of theatrical release windows, has resulted in a crowded yet intangibly barren cinematic landscape.
When William Goldman famously said that nobody in the movie industry “knows anything,” he wasn’t playing dumb so much as articulating a complex and contradictory logic by which certain genres and stars are reliable until they suddenly aren’t and left-field outliers become unlikely templates in the hopes that lightning will strike twice. Right now, box office analysts are trying to contextualize the $100 million breakthrough of Sound of Freedom, which has transcended its own unapologetic rightward tilt to become a palpable hit; whatever one makes of the film’s content—or the irony of an anti-child-trafficking thriller partially funded by someone charged with child kidnapping—the controversial pay-it-forward-style ticket-buying scheme that’s been juicing its weekly numbers could prove influential going forward. Considering that the average “multiplier” for an American theatrical release—a figure that represents domestic revenue divided by opening weekend revenue—is historically between 2 and 3, Sound of Freedom’s score of 10.9 is downright stunning, and the same goes for Pixar’s clunky but touching Elemental, which was written off as a flop before slowly powering its way to profitability thanks to better-than-average word of mouth. The most sheerly profitable movie of the year, though, may be the micro-budget experimental Canadian horror film Skinamarink, which rode an unexpected wave of virality on TikTok to a $1.5 million gross and the arts section of The New York Times. The movie couldn’t be smaller, but its cultural footprint somehow feels bigger and deeper than 20th Century Studios’ Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman, which scared up $67 million worldwide—more, it should be said, than M. Night Shyamalan’s critically acclaimed and hugely promoted Knock at the Cabin, which, while far from invisible, didn’t get the traction of 2021’s Old.
Shyamalan is, of course, an auteur—one of the few who hasn’t been sidelined or otherwise rendered invisible by the current situation. Last week in Slate, Sam Adams used the baffling fact that The Meg 2: The Trench was directed by former U.K.-horror hell-raiser Ben Wheatley to make an impassioned case on behalf of hacks: of hiring faceless directors to make faceless movies. That The Meg 2 actually did pretty well in its opening weekend doesn’t necessarily undermine Adams’s point: It’s blander than any movie featuring dozens of people being eaten alive should be, and its existence underlines the frustration of seeing gifted directors greedily swallowed up by a system indifferent to their artistry. (Exhibit B: Haunted Mansion, which, again, was helmed by the director of Dear White People.) One filmmaker Adams didn’t mention was Jaume Collet-Serra, a contemporary master of the midrange studio thriller, sadly conscripted into becoming the Rock’s pet director on Jungle Cruise and Black Adam. While the latter wasn’t quite a stray movie, it ticked some of the same boxes pertaining to disengagement and superfluousness; coming a couple of years after the Snyder Wars, its over-cranked but anodyne contents seemed to be begging the rhetorical question: Is that all there is? When Dwayne Johnson took to social media to insist that the film was a cornerstone of DC’s various franchise reboots, he sounded mostly like he was trying to convince himself; his subsequent criticisms of James Gunn and DC as rumors swirled that there would be no Black Adam Part Deux similarly smack of sour grapes. Meanwhile, the world … shrugs.
The question of whether any really worthy stray movies are falling through the cracks is of course deeply subjective. Who’s to say that [checks notes] The Retirement Plan, the latest check-cashing venture for Nicolas Cage, won’t join the pantheon of late-August masterpieces? My pick for 2023’s most sadly neglected movie would be Kelly Fremon Craig’s superb, openhearted adaptation of Judy Blume’s kid-lit classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., which opened in late April opposite a couple of other strays—Big George Foreman and Sisu—and stalled out commercially despite uniformly strong reviews and Oscar-worthy supporting work by Rachel McAdams. Good movies failing to connect with their target audiences is nothing new, and maybe it’s easier to imagine a film like Margaret succeeding several decades ago because it looks and feels so much like a throwback. It’d be nice to think that one day, the misfit-toy movies of this era will at least command some kind of anthropological interest—hopefully as a weird hiccup in movie history, instead of as a retrospective bellwether pointing toward the beginning of the end.
