Every mainstream entertainment hit – from Marvel to Call of Duty, to prestige TV – is at more risk of a rapid decline in popularity than ever. Fueled by the internet and on-demand media, alternative options are compelling and diversified. So when the audience sees a weak spot in their entertainment library, many bail to new possibilities, even across different forms of media, and don’t look back. Let’s call it Niche Consumption Theory (NCT).
NCT is an underrated contributor to The Marvels bombing. While many factors sunk the box office, from middling reviews to superhero fatigue, it’s exacerbated by having so many great leisure substitutes to swap in. TikTok, PS5, mobile gaming, Netflix reality TV, VR, and other alternatives can look very appealing against a mid-tier MCU film. They won’t match the spectacle of a $300 million movie, but they don’t have to.
The 2015 comedy-drama Mississippi Grind – the movie’s release alongside the build up and aftermath of its principal cast and crew – tells you everything you need to know about the dire state of today’s big budget movies. Grind is an underseen road trip, buddy comedy, and character study of two struggling gamblers played by Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn.
Everything about Reynolds, Mendelsohn, and the film’s directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, before their intersection on Grind chart a familiar path for budding Hollywood talent.
Reynolds had a traditional leading man trajectory. He started his career in Canadian soap operas before decamping to Hollywood and landing supporting parts in a few studio comedies. Success led him into other genres (Blade Trinity) and a few breakthrough leading roles in bigger budget fare like Green Lantern and the rom-com The Proposal. By 2010, he was rich, famous, and a movie star. Around this time, he mixed in some more eclectic work with small indie directors, including Atom Egoyan (The Captive) and Persopolis director Marjane Satrapi (The Voices).
I learned a lot at TIFF 23, ending the festival with a more informed strategy for approaching future years. The sheer time on the ground helped; it was my first year as a volunteer and my first as a more devoted attendee, bumping up from three screenings in 2022 to eighteen this year.
You may be reading this and have never been to any film festival, but you’re considering watching a movie or two at TIFF 24. Or you’ve been doing this for many years and will happily pre-pay for thirty-plus films, sight unseen. Regardless of experience or interest, I have advice to make the most of your time at the festival.
I support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes; the financial inequity between studio executives, working actors, and writers is untenable. But an extended industry-wide pause could be disastrous to theaters and small independent movies. The strike slowdown will also accelerate a general decline of film (at least beyond the biggest blockbusters) as mainstream entertainment.
Let’s start with some cold economics: any remaining 2023 movie with major stars is at risk for a delay into next year. Studios see a marketing campaign without major talent as too high a burden. Stars working the red carpet and holding press junkets generate vast social media shares and journalist coverage. And for minor releases, one prominent actor can be the defining reason for a film to get noticed.
We’re seeing some of these delays already play out. Sony pushed two major 2023 releases – Kraven the Hunter and a Ghostbusters sequel – into 2024. Warner may pivot the blockbuster Dune 2 into next year as well. A24 bumped back the Tilda Swinton starring Problemista from August to an indeterminate date. As the strike extends, expect related announcements to only accelerate.
The new drama Past Lives centers on three ordinary people taking realistic actions, leading to messy outcomes. There are no clean Hollywood endings, heroes, or villains. Characters don’t die. Nobody is saving the world. Writer-director Celine Song challenges audience expectations of Hollywood escapism and genre conventions and, in the process, makes a riveting movie.
Reflecting on the forty-plus films I’ve seen this calendar year, three of my favorites – 2020’s The Nest, 2022’s Saint Omer, and Past Lives – share the same small scale and grounded feel.
Each film has different aims and subject matter. The Nest follows a rich family moving to 80s England for business opportunities. Saint Omer is a French courtroom procedural covering a woman accused of infanticide. Past Lives centers on two childhood friends who split apart, later in life reunited.
Tár is one of my favorite movies from 2022, thanks to a herculean performance by Cate Blanchett alongside Todd Field’s bold direction. For Field, this is only his third feature as director and his first in sixteen years. With such sporadic output and little connective tissue to his past work, I find his contributions to Tár fascinating to dissect. The film is Kubrickian in its clinical detail, subtle yet purposeful, messy and enigmatic, with an open provocation for the audience to get on board with the film’s unique wavelength or head for the exits.
Nowhere is that challenge clearer than in Tár’s opening thirty or so minutes. Like the fictitious composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Blanchett), the opener is bold and uncompromising in a way that feels tailor made to rankle some audiences. On an otherwise sparsely attended weeknight screening, I saw several moviegoers visibly impatient, sighing and shifting audibly in their seats.
Before I dive into that opening, it’s essential to set the larger context: Tár is a nearly three hour movie for which most is a patient “slice of life” character study. We learn about Tár (Blanchett) as she works through her musical projects and interacts with her wife and colleagues. Except for a guest lecture at Juilliard where Tár criticizes a student, onscreen conflict is mostly muted for the opening half or so of the film.
After a decade of rapid growth, Netflix took a tumble over the past quarter, for the first time losing more subscribers than it signed up. Wall Street’s reaction has been swift, with the market slashing Netflix’s valuation to less than half of its value from a few weeks prior.
Many schadenfreude-fueled takes revel in watching the king of streaming take a hit, but Netflix’s downturn won’t improve film watching habits or shake up streaming’s ascendance. The availability and discoverability challenges on streaming – clunky user interfaces, ruthless algorithms – won’t improve. Mega budget streaming sites will survive. What will change are the type of shows and movies that streaming sites buy, produce, and green light going forward.
Mainstream movies have crept up in length. A few years ago, feature-length films regularly ran a tight 90 or 100 minutes; today, that brevity feels increasingly rare. Almost half of the movies I watched that came out in 2021 ran for 130 minutes or longer, many from genres that historically tend to be shorter: action (F9, No Time to Die, The Matrix Resurrections, The Suicide Squad), biopics (King Richard), coming of age comedy romances (Licorice Pizza, Red Rocket), and neo-noir (Nightmare Alley). I suspect inflated runtimes trend beyond my tastes.
Superhero movies are a significant influence. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics have produced the biggest movies around for almost a decade, seen worldwide with record profits, and generate endless discourse everywhere from film journals to Twitter. They also tend to run long. Most MCU movies have a runtime over two hours, with installments from the popular Spiderman and Avengers series regularly exceeding two and a half hours.
Over the past several years, movies – specifically those that aren’t part of a blockbuster franchise or mega IP – don’t have the audience they used to. Compare four critically acclaimed dramas helmed by well regarded auteur directors, released two years apart: Licorice Pizza and The Power of the Dog in 2021, Parasite and 1917 in 2019. The difference is stark, with the 2021 films performing comparatively weak at the box office and anecdotally having far less attention among my friends and across social media.
Movies are aging into the rock music or baseball of entertainment, still enormously popular among a dedicated core audience, but with declining interest as other forms of media (primarily TV) fill the gap. The twin forces of the pandemic and the economic heft of massive entertainment conglomerates have only accelerated the phenomenon.
Several times this year, I’ve written about the decline of theaters and the rise of streaming, exacerbated through the effects of the pandemic. While there has been a recent theatrical comeback for big franchise properties, smaller budget indies haven’t enjoyed the same success. It’s harder than ever to find movies that aren’t a gigantic four-quadrant blockbuster on the big screen. For the exception of those fortunate enough to live in a film hub like New York or LA, moviegoing is a bifurcated experience: Marvel, James Bond, and other mega family-friendly IPs play at every cineplex around town, transitioning over time to heavily marketed streaming, VOD, and Blu-ray opportunities. Everything else gets quietly dumped off direct to VOD or streaming.
That void in theatrical availability is a lost opportunity that streaming can’t replicate. Powerful sound on a giant screen can give an enveloping, immersive quality to a film. In an increasingly distracted world where multi-tasking is the norm, theaters are a rare setting optimized for focus on a particular movie image. Audience reactions – laughter, clapping, gasps, cheers – provide a unique character.