Cinemas are full of part twos like 'Moana 2' and threes nowadays. Whatever happened to original filmmaking? – Photo: Walt Disney Company Malaysia
Looks like another big weekend for theatre box office as Disney’s Moana 2 and Paramount Pictures’ Gladiator II pulled in the crowds. Moana 2 had five-day opening of US$225.2mil (RM996.4mil) and Gladiator grossed US$31mil (RM137.2mil) over the weekend.
But does that mean box office is back?
Not exactly.
It’s well known that movie theatre attendance has cratered since the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. In early 2020, China’s box office revenue dropped to US$3.9mil in the first two months, compared with US$2.148bil in the same time in 2019 (RM17.3mil compared with RM9.5bil). That is a crazy decline.
Of course, being locked at home accelerated the adoption of streaming services. While people had already begun flocking to the then new Disney+ and Netflix before 2020, it was the pandemic that really put the nail in the coffin of theatre-going.
Post 2010 box office success had already started its decline. Once again the fragmentation of media consumption brought about by streaming platforms and the popularity of YouTube ensured this. And in recent years, we have been given even more ways to consume media – vertical series on your phones anyone?
Movie studios are facing more and more challenges to getting audiences into the cinemas. And to do that they are turning to one thing: sequels.
Look at the box office successes this past weekend. Both sequels. And yes, sequels are attractive to studios because they have built in fan bases, costs less to market, and can trigger a nostalgia factor.
But it is this nostalgia factor that, to me, seems to be the most important.
If you look at a list of film sequels released in recent years, you have Gladiator II in 2024, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts in 2023, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One in 2023, Scream in 2022, Top Gun Maverick in 2022, and Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022. And that’s not counting the many MCU superhero films, of course.
All of these films are from original films released over 20 years ago. In the case of Top Gun Maverick it’s been almost 40 years since the original release, and in the case of Scream, a sequel to Scream 4, this is traced back to the original film from 1996. And all the MCU films can be traced back to the one that started it all, Iron Man in 2008.
The point of all this is to say, studios aren’t just releasing sequels, they are releasing sequels from a specific time. What I call the Modern Peak of the movie theatre.
While the 1930s-1940s is recognised as the golden age of Hollywood, a time when there was peak attendance with 60% of the US population going to movies weekly (most likely because they did not have TVs in their homes, let alone little screens in their palms), the 1990s and early 2000s is what I call the era of Global Box Office dominance. Films like Titanic and Avatar achieved unprecedented success, breaking records worldwide.
It is not coincidence that so many of the films released today that are sequels can be traced back to that era. It was the last time audiences went en masse to watch the same films. The power of seeing a film and then speaking about it with friends and colleagues, which would spur them on to go to the theatre and watch it in turn, is gone now.
Now we tell friends about cool shows we watched on whatever obscure streaming platform we use, and there is no urgency or excitement, we’ll get around to watching it at some point, all the content exists in the palm of our hand.
This is convenient, but it also makes our media less special.
So studios turn to hits from the Modern Peak of cinema to ensure some manner of box office success, and more and more the steer away from smaller films or new ideas that might flop and cost them millions.
But what does that mean once the nostalgia factor is over, and they have squeezed the last drop out of the Modern Peak of cinema? Will studios begin taking more chances, or will box office hits become less frequent than they are today?
It seems inevitable that the latter case will happen as we move to consuming our favourite content on a device in our palms, or maybe in a few years strapped to our heads. That seems like a loss to me. The theatre used to be special place to experience the best or most fun stories. Now it is simply an annoyance to people who would rather watch by themselves, on their own time, in the privacy of their own home. And that feels a little sad.
Avid writer Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
