The Year In Review: 2023

At this point last year, it looked like 2023 was shaping up to be a hell of a year for movies.  It was a hell of a year, alright.  Just not in the way I was hoping.  While there have been some bright spots this year for movies, the rest of the time was marred by a string of high-profile failures, especially from Disney.  Let’s start there.  Disney/Marvel had a really rough year with the only real success coming from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.  But not since 2014 has Disney failed to put out a single billion dollar movie.  There’s a number of reasons for that.  The pandemic was certainly a huge factor, but so was the change in leadership at Disney when Bob Chapek took over for Bob Iger as CEO.  A lot of the shows that came out this year also failed to live up to expectations, but let’s look at some of the high-profile movies that didn’t make a splash.  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was the highly anticipated final adventure for the titular character, barely made under 385 million dollars in its world-wide run.  The movie’s budget? 300 million dollars.  Personally, I love the movie, I think it’s a fitting final adventure to Harrison Ford’s run as the famed fictional archaeologist.  But the fact is, is that most people were not interested in seeing it.  A lot of people were not particularly happy with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so not even director James Mangold could help that.  Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was another low point for the House of Mouse.  It didn’t even hit 500 million, garnering mixed to negative reviews from both audiences AND critics. Marvel Studios The Marvels also received a less-than-glowing reception.  This film is expected to end it’s theatrical run with the lowest box-office take in the MCU.  One of the big reasons for that was the fact that you needed to watch some of the Disney Plus shows to understand what you were watching, and most people didn’t.  Disney did NOT have a good year.  Disney wasn’t the only studio to suffer massive failures.

Warner Bros also hit some major bumps with The Flash and Shazam: Fury of the Gods.  Both movies made a grand total of less than 400 million dollars.  What happened with Disney and WB when it comes to comic book movies is that people are sick of mediocre comic book movies that feel more like they just came off an assembly line.  I only saw The Flash this year for comic book movies.  I liked the movie, but the film’s issues with its main star and its multiple delays just killed any interest that people may have had.  The GOOD news for Warner Bros is that Barbie was the biggest movie of the year bringing home 1.5 billion dollars.  Run-away success much?  It’s an outstanding movie so, that success is well deserved.  Universal also released Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the same day.  Which brings us to the trend of the year:

Barbenheimer.  Yes, you read that correctly.  This is an unusual situation for a number of reasons.  First, people lined up to see Barbie, but when the tickets ran out, people went to Oppenheimer instead.  These are both great movies, but I have never seen a situation in film history where one successful movie lifts the other one up as well.  It’s utterly ridiculous the amount of memes that were created because of this.  The film-makers had no idea that this would happen.  If they did, that was brilliant marketing, because Barbie and Oppenheimer are the two most successful movies of the year.  Nothing like this has happened before, and is unlikely to happen again.  If it does, we can dub it the Barbenheimer Effect.  While a lot of the movies this year have not met financial expectations, that doesn’t they were bad movies.  What happened with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 was really nobody’s fault.  It got delayed and delayed because of Covid, and the costs just ballooned.  There really was no way that this movie was going to be as successful as the others.  But it also highlights another issue with the costs involved with a lot of these big-budget blockbusters: They’re too expensive.  A lot of them cost anywhere from 180-300 million dollars.  The more expensive a movie is, the harder it is to break even let alone be profitable.  But there’s another issue that threw a monkey wrench into the works:

The strikes.  It wasn’t just SAG, but the WGA and the Director’s Guild, too.  A lot of the contracts were up this year, and because of streaming and AI issues, the union just weren’t willing to take what the AMPTP was offering, so they went on strike.  While I agreed with the strike, there was a lot of collateral damage as a result.  It wasn’t just that movies like Dune Part II were pushed back until 2024, but a lot of businesses in Hollywood that relied on these unions and their workers ended up taking the brunt of the impact with some businesses closing their doors permanently.  Now, the strikes have been resolved to the best that they could be, but the damage was done.  Again, I’m not faulting the actors, writers and directors for wanting better benefits in their contracts, but the reality is that these strikes have had a wide-reaching effect.

Earlier this year, it was widely reported that Creed and Ant-Man star Jonathan Majors was arrested and charged with domestic battery against his ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari.  Jonathan Majors struck it big in HBO Max’s Lovecraft Country and would end up starring in films like Creed III and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.  He’s incredibly talented, but the allegations against him were clearly serious enough to charge him.  He was dropped by his agency and PR firms as a result of Majors’ alleged abusive behavior.  Unfortunately for Mr. Majors, evidence was recently introduced in the form of text messages alleging that Majors did, in fact, assault his girlfriend.  I’m no legal analyst or lawyer, but this is not a good look for him.  Obviously, defendants should always be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but these text messages are not helping his case.  Whether or not he gets convicted is almost immaterial at this point, as he will be found guilty in the court of public opinion.  As I said, he was dropped by his agency and PR firms.  I don’t really see a way for him to come back from this, not at this stage in his career.  Before anybody mentions it, Mel Gibson was a fully-established A-level actor and film-maker before his complete breakdown in 2006.  While his career never fully recovered, Gibson still managed to get some pretty respectable projects out the door like Hacksaw Ridge and Edge of Darkness.  But that’s because Mel Gibson still has some sway in Hollywood.  Jonathan Majors doesn’t.  He doesn’t have that kind of footprint for his career.  This case could cut the man’s career short.  Everybody loves a comeback story, but Majors has done some pretty serious damage to his own image.  Movie studios just aren’t going to want to work with someone who is accused of beating women.  His upcoming movie Magazine Dreams, about a bodybuilder, has been removed from Searchlight Pictures schedule indefinitely.  If Majors is convicted, what do they do with that movie?  They can’t put it out in theaters, nor can they just throw it on streaming.  Disney’s also been taking a wait-and-see approach with Majors as far as his character Kang The Conqueror is concerned.  The easiest thing that Disney could do at this point is just recast the character.

Sound of Freedom surprised the hell out of me.  I wrote a review of the film, which I eventually took down, because I felt that spending money on the film would see those dollars go to the wrong people.  The movie itself is actually quite good, if you can get past the massive untruths that the film tells you about child sex trafficking.  For a movie that was made for a paltry 15 million dollars, the movie ended up bring home almost 250 million dollars.  To understand the film’s success, you have to understand the controversy surrounding it, and I’ve done multiple posts about the film’s portrayal of the controversial Tim Ballard and his Operation Underground Railroad organization.  I’m not going to go into that anymore, so if you want to read up on that, you can check out my posts in the Opinions and News tab or you can just google it.

Between all these things and movie studio CEOs being assholes, 2023 has been a really weird year.  Video games, though, have had the best year they’ve had in years with games like Baldur’s Gate III, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Super Mario Wonder, Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1, Sea of Stars, and a whole slew of other titles that have been just crushing it.  2023 in a nutshell ladies in a gentlemen: Batshit Crazy.  2024 is going to be stacked for movies, provided that shit doesn’t go sideways like it did this year.  Also, get out and see Godzilla: Minus One if you can.  It’s excellent.