Nobody Watches Dramas Anymore

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 The most obvious, least interesting, and maybe only correct thing to be said about "the state of cinema these days" is that any movie up for an award, or gets buzz as a film twitter or letterboxd fave, is not a movie that people actually watch. Still, the box office takes for any movie that you could primarily call a drama this year have been nothing short of atrocious.

 "TAR" will end its run under $6 mil domestic. "The Banshees of Inisherin", which regretfully I have not managed to see yet and which has already left my local theaters, just passed $8 mil and won't go much beyond there. "She Said" will end up short of $10 mil. "Bones and All" and "The Fabelmans" will likely join these. "Till", "Triangle of Sadness", the really quite lovely "Armageddon Time" have all basically ended their run short of an 8th digit. Some of these movies are not super commercial, sure, but in ye grand old days of a bit before 2020 they wouldn't have to be - quality and buzz alone could power you to an okay number. "The Favourite" is a strange black comedy, with very little about it that screams money making appeal except maybe the presence of Emma Stone, and that managed over $34 mil in 2018. Theatrical runs were much longer back then, but even if we cut off the November release to the end of the calendar year, we have about $15 mil for a film that had not yet hit 1000 theaters of wide release. Best Picture winner "Spotlight", a pretty solid comp for "She Said", hit $26 mil by the same date cutoff (ie: the movie wasn't nominated for any Oscars yet, because those weren't announced yet). None of the 8 well reviewed and wide-released dramas I've mentioned will hit that figure. You would like to think that Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" can hit that target, but who knows anymore. 

 So what's the issue here? First the straightforward one: the main audience for drama films is old people, and old people don't go to the movies anymore. They just don't. I don't think there's anything you can do to get them back. The world has changed, and one of those changes (insignificant in the scheme of, like, life, but the main problem for the movie business) is that older people don't love spending time in public with many strangers. Nobody will make money with the 50+ target demographic. A related issue: young people are not showing up to fill in the gap. An awful lot of ink has been spilled on young people being raised on franchise films and only seeing franchise films, but I don't think that's all true. Young people will watch "Everything Everywhere" or "Nope" or "Smile". The main demo for A24 and for horror is young adults, and young adults will mostly show up to those movies. What they're not doing, at all, is taking the leap to care about Martin McDonagh. 

 What can anybody do about this? Probably nothing. Nobody would want to admit that with their job on the line but I would guess the answer is nothing. Can you get older people back into crowded spaces in pre-pandemic numbers, I doubt it. Can you get younger people invested in film, maaaybe with some strong branding behind it, cloning the A24 business model. I still doubt it. I think the more likely outcome is that big movie studios accept the premise that even their prestige movies should have some kind of genre slant to get a big release. The ball is then in the court of the awards bodies themselves. They can choose to award horror or action type movies ("Top Gun", "The Woman King", "Everything Everywhere", "Black Panther", "Avatar", "Nope", "RRR"), which is *fine* but they should know that it wont make their shows any more popular. Or they can choose to nominate films like "Aftersun" no matter how little money they make. Again, that's fine, I'm not necessarily saying it's better, but that also comes with a tough pill to swallow; nominating underseen dramas will not make them any more seen. Oh well. 

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