If the 2024 summer movie slump continues, the pictures will get small | MARK HUGHES COBB
It'd be neater if this was 2025. Not Zager and Evans territory, but it would be a closed 50-year loop if 2025 became the year summer movies die.
It's been 50 years since Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" terrified everyone out of the surf and into the silver. Think of the positives: No jellyfish. No sunburn. No hangovers in blistering heat while dousing aloe on fried skin, and less-speak-able substances on jellyfish stings (And no, Lauren, I never will forgive you for making me a Gulf of Mexico shield).
More: According to KC, how to create, bait, set a hook: Be born with the gift | MARK HUGHES COBB
No healthy outdoor activity to discourage geeks from investigating their obsessions, turning film fans into filmmakers. No comic-book nerds growing old and powerful enough to start taking superheroes seriously as Hollywood once did cowboys, detectives, war, disasters, irradiated creatures, ape men and slapstick.
Superheroes meld genres: "Logan" was a raw western, wearing debts to "Shane" on tattered sleeve. Crime, punishment and war, irradiated creatures, beast-men ― green, super-serumed and otherwise — should be obvious.
You can't miss the Stooges-level, occasionally Marx-height punch(lines) in "Ant-Man" (co-scripted by Edgar Wright, Paul Rudd, Joe Cornish and Adam McKay), "Thor: Ragnarok" (director Taika Waititi ratcheted up the humor) and the first "Avengers," written and directed by Joss Whedon:
Banner: "That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him."
Thor: "Have a care how you speak! Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard and he is my brother!"
Natasha: "He killed 80 people in two days."
Thor: "He's adopted."
and
Cap: "Hulk?"
Hulk: "Grunt."
Cap: "Smash."
An assembled team of otherwise-loner specialists taking on larger-than-life challenges? "The Seven Samurai" is an acknowledged masterpiece, "The Dirty Dozen" a silly mess of a romp, and the Rat Pack Eee-O-11 Frankly sucks. And Dino-ly too. Any genre so widespread, so mainstream, will see peaks and valleys.
Before they team, most — and I'm talking Marvel, as DC films have diverged from bad to hideous, since Christopher Nolan moved on — supes starred in their own gigs. The lone ― or with a sidekick ― exceptional individual against all odds dates back to earliest film. In the 1918 "Tarzan of the Apes," Elmo Lincoln communicated through action, and not a little heroic posing. Eight Tarzan flicks made before sound; several dozen since. Ditto other near-mutes such as Frankenstein's monster, the Phantom of the Opera (didn't actually sing for several decades, at least not so we could hear), The Tramp, and so on. Action ain't a dirty word, in movies. It's a pretty major thing. 'Cause they move.
Quipping smart-aleck anti-hero Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) was preceded by swashbuckling rogues played by tiny-mustached/goateed fellas such as Douglas Fairbanks (junior and senior), and Errol Flynn, the latter of whom, in the 1938 "The Adventures of Robin Hood," showed it's not just what you say, but how and when you banter it:
Maid Marian: "Why, you speak treason!"
Hood: "Fluently."
Bad boys sell, too, of course, from the conflicted, such as
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's dude who never asked to be re-born;
Godzilla, the sometime pal, sometime menace;
Heathcliff, Rochester, Edmond Dantes, Hud, Huckleberry Finn, Lady Macbeth and her lord, Raskolnikov, Scarlett O'Hara, Sam Spade, and on and on;
And about 85% of the Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Clint Eastwood, Claire Trevor, Marlene Deitrich and Steve McQueen roles.
Then there's the gravitational pull of the savagely evil, chaos in flesh: Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Heath Ledger's Joker, the Wicked Witch of the West (pre-musical/Gregory Maguire revisionism), Norman Bates, Cruella de Vil, Bob Ewell, Nazis as a cluster ... and Bruce, the shark from "Jaws." Fifty years ago, next summer.
For decades, the "summer" designation crept ever upward, until you'd see so-called summer flicks ― those intended as big-screen spectacle, blockbusters ― showing up by early spring.
Memorial Day weekend 2024, still spring but considered the demarcation for summer movies, the hits were "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga," and "The Garfield Movie," though in what Variety deemed a "bleak" turnout, neither made back anything like its budget.
"Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes," like "Furiosa" a flick that cries out to be seen widescreen ― I can't comment on "Garfield," not just because it stars the far-and-away most-tedious Chris, but because the comic strip resembles "Big Bang Theory," inexplicably popular despite spawning black holes of joylessness ― did OK on release this month, at $58 million, though again not close to budget, reportedly $160 million.
Adding up world-wide box office to U.S., "Furiosa" may make about $58 million (as I'm typing this, the weekend is still ongoing) in its crucial early days, against a $168 million budget.
Typically, summer movies account for 40% of Hollywood's yearly dollars. Bad moons arising.
It's easy to shine blame: Pirating. The Internet. Streaming. Lingering hangover from the pandammit. All true, and all also to blame for other business declines, though also not the whole story.
Perhaps we're jaded. When Rod Serling-scripted "Planet of the Apes" arrived in 1968, audiences goggled at its visual effects; an honorary Oscar was created for outstanding makeup. Those coffee-mug prosthetics still hold up, 50-plus years on.
The 2024 "Kingdom" makes apes so fluid and flawless, you won't notice you're noticing. You'll be shocked at the next zoo you visit, when simians don't speak.
George Miller's "Furiosa" dazzles. As with many classics, it could nearly be a silent film. A harrowing Anya Taylor-Joy barely speaks, but you may not notice, being swept up in epic beauty, a "Lawrence of Arabia" riddled with madness, oil slicks and roaring engines. And Best-Chris candidate Thor.
I watched both in near-empty theaters. No doubt they'll be seen later, on home screens. And they'll still be remarkable. Not breathtaking, though. Not communal fever dreams. Not summer.
Should this heated slump continue, Norma Desmond will have proved prophetic: The pictures will get small.
Mark Hughes Cobb is the editor of Tusk. Reach him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: The decades of summer movie dominance may be waning | MARK HUGHES COBB
