Late Stage Films

 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 o...

 It's somewhat wild to think about how much re-releases just... aren't a thing anymore. They were of course the main thing that a movie would do to make money for most of the existence of movies. They come back every X years and make a little bit more money over time. Something like "The Exorcist" gets released in a few theaters in 1973, weaves its way in and out of theaters over a year because wide releases weren't invented yet, comes back into some theaters every few years for week-long residencies, and then gets an earnest wide release in the 21st century with a bit of new stuff, becoming a genuine hit.  A 40 year old horror movie made more money in the year 2000 than Adam Sandler pic "Little Nicky" or Cameron Crowe's masterpiece "Almost Famous". Since the DVD era around the turn of the century, it's generally been true that a theatrical re-release needed some kind of additional content to get butts in seats: 2001's biggest re-re...

  This past weekend saw 3 new releases completely and utterly fail at the domestic box office. This is, on one level, unsurprising: none of "Fall", "Bodies Bodies Bodies", or "Mack & Rita" were distributed by a major studio or got a major advertising campaign. On a more detailed second glance, it looks somewhat surprising to me. People (on social media, anyways) claim to want high quality and original films. "Bodies" has great reviews (a 91% tomato rating) and comes into the market armed with the A24 branding that got rather respectable launches for summer horror movies such as "Hereditary" and "Midsommar". Fall has decent reviews (the 71% tomato rating is surely good enough to not actively scare away a teen thriller crowd) and shares a pair of producers with the "47 Meters Down" franchise, a couple of truly awful movies that nevertheless made solid money as widely released indies in the summer months. And if the...