|
 |
Hantavirus and Ebola are back in the news, so make sure to watch Jonathan Cohn and me discuss some of our favorite virus movies. They’ll teach you how to survive! Or maybe they’ll show why we might not make it at all. Either way, they’re useful movies in a time like this! Check it out here.
Meanwhile, in case you haven’t heard, we’ve got a killer sale going on for just a little while longer. If you’ve ever thought about signing up for a Bulwark+ membership, now’s the time to do it:
FLASH SALE ENDS SOON: Time is running out to sign up for Bulwark+ at half price.
–Sonny
 |
SITTING IN A DALLAS THEATER on Wednesday night for a raucous, packed showing of Obsession, the new hit from YouTube wunderkind Curry Barker, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what the film industry felt like in 1968.
Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution chronicles that key moment in Hollywood history, a hinge point that helped keep the motion picture industry relevant for a new generation of moviegoers. Five films released in 1967 representing Hollywood’s competing self-conceptions were up against each other for the best picture Oscar in 1968: The hopelessly out-of-touch Dr. Dolittle, a big-budget monstrosity that had flopped with audiences on release; contrasting social-issues movies, both starring Sidney Poitier, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; and two howls of youthful rebellion in the ennui-ensconced The Graduate and the ultraviolent Bonnie and Clyde.
That diversity of pictures and themes and budgets and audiences reflected a key split in the Hollywood psyche. “What was an American film supposed to be? The men running the movie business used to have the answer; now, it had slipped just beyond their reach, and they couldn’t understand how they had lost sight of it,” Harris wrote in his 2008 book. In the Heat of the Night would eventually win best picture, but Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate would capture the soul of the business—at least until the blockbuster era’s emergence in the back half of the next decade.
These transition points—these shifts in taste, these periodic soul-searchings—happen every generation or two, often paired with shifts in distribution or new technologies. The Paramount Decrees in 1948, paired with the rise of television, led to the end of block booking and an overall decline in attendance. The influx of European films in the 1960s led to the movie brats of the 1970s and Hollywood’s embrace of auteurs as varied as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, which in turn led to the blockbuster era’s outsized profits, embodied by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The rise of VHS and then the explosion of DVD sales in the late 1990s subsidized the whole industry for a solid decade, at least until The Dark Knight and Iron Man revealed that the future was comic book universes and billion-dollar grosses just as the financial legs were about to be knocked out of Hollywood by streaming gutting home-video sales.
Which brings us to today. It really cannot be overstated how unusual Obsession’s performance is. In the modern era, the box office take of films declines from weekend to weekend. We literally measure a film’s popularity in its declines: The smaller the decline, the better. Even something very good and very popular, like Get Out, is measured in declines: a 15.4 percent decline from first weekend to second weekend? That was truly amazing, almost unheard of in the modern era of big openings and big drop-offs. As such, it’s truly astounding that Obsession increased by nearly 40 percent weekend over weekend, from $17 million in its opening weekend to nearly $24 million in its second.¹ And it increased each weekday in its second week compared to its first. Again: I cannot think of another movie for which this is true.
Meanwhile, Backrooms is about to become the highest-grossing film in A24 history. Projections suggest it is lined up for an opening of at least $65 million and it could go much higher than that. Don’t believe me? Check your local multiplex and see how many showtimes are completely or mostly sold out for this weekend. Like Obsession, Backrooms is the brainchild of a YouTube-native filmmaker: Kane Parsons, who can’t even legally buy a drink to celebrate his success until next month. And both films are movies made by young people about the concerns of young people: In Obsession’s case, the tricky nature of consent in all matters sexual; in Backrooms, the unreal nature of manufactured reality.
Between those two films and YouTuber Markiplier’s self-financed shock hit, Iron Lung—which opened just $1.3 million behind Sam Raimi’s $40 million action-horror-comedy Send Help back in January—I can’t help but feel as though we’re in another hinge moment after years of suggestions that streaming was sure to kill theaters and that younger audiences simply had too much to do to bother with theatrical presentations. We’re riding a cresting wave of youthful enthusiasm of the sort that has propelled Hollywood for the last sixty-some years. As an old person, this is obviously troubling: I don’t understand YouTube and I don’t like change. But as a lover of film and a believer in the theatrical experience, it’s undeniably exciting to see Gen Z embrace the big-screen experience.