February to November: Marvel and Pixar’s Falling from Grace.
In January 2006, Disney acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal, and on December 31, 2009, Disney announced that it had bought Marvel Studios for $4 billion. The process of these two acquisitions had been described in detail in the autobiography of Disney CEO Bob Iger, and he considers these to be two of the high points of his career. We needn't say more about how these two acquisitions reshaped the entire entertainment industry, leading to even greater things for Pixar, Marvel, and Disney as a whole.
But in 2023, this Disney glory was completely shattered. Within the first six months, Disney lost nearly $1 billion according to Forbes after four consecutive films failed miserably at the box office. The failures of Marvel and Pixar, in particular, have been a major shock for the industry.
Among them, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which was released in February, lost nearly $200 million, gaining awful reviews. The new Marvel/Disney+ series Secret Invasion, got harshly criticized and brought Disney a loss of $210 million. The Marvels, released in November, is another commercial and critical failure, expected to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses as well.
For Pixar, after losing $100 million at the box office with last year's Lightyear and being criticized by some audiences for the ideological nonsense, this year's release of Elemental continues to suffer from overall lukewarm reviews and has the worst first-weekend box office record in Pixar's 28-year history.
In the decline of things, there had been a lot of internal discord. Matthew Vaughn, director of X-Men: First Class, began backtracking in an October interview, claiming that Marvel should "make fewer films." Pixar's CCO also complained the fact that Disney was using Pixar as a promotional tool for the streaming business of Disney+.
Bob Iger, who has returned as Disney's chief executive, also acknowledged that there are "things not quite right" at the moment. He said the problem was "caused by the company's previous strategy, which resulted in a dramatic redirecting of audiences' attention to the streaming services."
Admittedly, the streaming-oriented strategy could be responsible for two of the above skepticisms. Firstly, streaming platform requires more content, which is a direct result of Marvel's need to not only accelerate the production speed of movies, but also venture into the unknown realm of TV shows. This is a classic example of quantity over quality in the streaming era. Secondly, Disney abandoned theaters during the epidemic and simply let two Pixar films, Luca and Turning Red, landed on Disney+. Iger admitted this was a major mistake. "It made audiences think that the Pixar movies would be streaming soon anyway so they didn't have to rush to theaters to see them."
But Iger doesn't point out Marvel and Pixar's regression in creativity, and their ideology also seems to be drifting away from mainstream audiences. The conservatives of U.S., represented by Florida Governor DeSantis, have shouted out the derisive slogan "Go woke, go broke" at Disney.
So do audiences still need Marvel's superheroes and Pixar's animated movies? The answer is still unclear, but it is certain that if Marvel and Pixar's content continues to lack originality, until the audiences' trust and patience is completely lost, then everything will be irredeemable.
September & November: Films, longer or shorter?
Ridley Scott's new film Napoleon had just released in theaters. The 2.5 hour length has turned off some viewers, but Sir Ridley said the length is already a compromise considering the hips and bladders of the audiences. In the near future, he will release the Director’s Cut version on Apple TV+, which is at least four hours long.
The film industry has always been a realm where artistry and commercialism intertwine. Consider it from a commercial point of view, no production company or theater would prefer a film longer than two hours, because it reduces the number of screenings per day, which in turn directly reduces the number of audiences. The so-called "Director's Cut" that comes with the controversy over running time is a stance of the director's persistence to artistic freedom, but is usually just a carrot the director gets after being hit by the studio with a stick.
But Ridley Scott was one of the key figures in bringing the Director's Cut to life. Back in the '90s, ten years after the Blade Runner release, Ridley put out his Director’s Cut to the market, proving this release mode could be commercially viable.
And now, with the rise of streaming platforms, Netflix, Disney+, or Apple TV+ can provide a haven for longer, grander productions and at the same time attract subscribers for that. After all, watching a 3-hour film at home via streaming is more friendly to our butt and bladder than sitting in the theater in one stand.
Another filmmaker who wants to go longer is Martin Scorsese. His new film Killers of the Flower Moon is 3 hours and 26 minutes long. When it was shown in theaters before its release, some theaters created an unofficial "intermission" and this reportedly annoyed Scorsese's long time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. But now viewers can see the movie on Apple TV+, and they can watch it in one sitting if they want to.
Scorsese faces a similar problem with his 2019 crime epic The Irishman, which runs three minutes longer than Flower Moon. Traditional Hollywood studios did not find this kind of films profitable. Streaming platforms became Scorsese's only option, hence The Irishman was released via Netflix and Killers of the Flower Moon via Apple TV+.
On the other side of the coin, there are auteur directors who makes shorter films through streaming platforms.
Netflix provides a platform for Wes Anderson to release his short works. Anderson adapted four of the short stories of his beloved novelist Roald Dahl into four short films. Among them, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is the longest one: 39 minutes long. The other three are all around 18 minutes.
After adapting Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, Wes Anderson has been looking for the right opportunity to continue adapting Dahl's stories, but it never materialized due to length limitations. And this time Netflix provided a different option from the theaters to make the plan come true.
Pedro Almodovar is also going shorter. His new film Strange Way of Life stars Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke runs 31 minutes. It's a light-hearted piece of stylish cowboy whimsy that he created for the fashion brand YSL. This isn't the first foray into film by YSL, as they've sponsored Gaspar Noe's 2019 short film Lux Æterna, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Streaming platforms and sponsors from the fashion world are genuinely helping filmmakers to explore a variety of possibilities. And will the cinema-going experience continue to shrink facing these new possibilities?
November: End of the strike
On September 27, the WGA stopped its strike. The SAG, on the other hand, held out until Nov. 9 to end the strike. Hollywood stars seemed to be the first to have a sigh of relief. Alec Baldwin immediately issued a statement: "Congratulations to each and every person, on both sides, who are responsible for this great occasion." The irony is that Baldwin just escaped from justice earlier this year. On the set of the movie “Rust” which he both starred and produced, he accidentally killed the director of photography with a prop gun with bullets inside it because of a mix-up in production management.
During the 8-month double strike, there were actors who were able to continue attending various events with the identity of director or producer without being called strike-breaker. For example, Chris Pine walked the red carpet at the London Film Festival with his new film Poolman, which he wrote, directed and produced.
At the end of the Soviet film Strike (1925), images of workers being shot and cows being slaughtered are edited in parallel in Sergei Eisenstein's signature montage. And we are familiar with the story of the capitalists who would rather dump the milk into the sea than sell it at a reduced price. There was indeed a conspiracy theory in Hollywood this year that says the big studios worried that they could't legitimately cut the productions, so they're happy to see a strike, and the longer it goes on, the better.
After the ending of the strike, the first films resumed production were still the sequel films such as Deadpool 3 and Gladiator 2, while Dune: Part 2, which was pulled because of the strike, has re-announced its release date. When will the innovative and original storytelling that once made Hollywood proud blossom again? We still don’t quite know.
Conclusion
"It's the economy, stupid." This campaign slogan had helped Bill Clinton defeat George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election. This phrase was so deeply ingrained in people's minds that for a long time they thought that if they just focused on the economy and made a bigger pie for everyone, all their problems could be solved. But the series of landmark events in 2023 mentioned above are indicative of the turbulence of our era, the split of popular ideologies, the struggling recovery of the economy, the fragmentation of the market by streaming platforms, and the rapid evolution of AI, all of which are causing the film industry to falter. The cultural attributes of film itself make its commercial attributes increasingly fragile, and the recovery of the film industry is not just an economic issue.
In economics we always expect to "build up before we break down", so as to avoid the turbulence of a hard landing.
I was tempted to title this article "The Creation of a New Order" so that it would appear hopeful. But as I look around, I see no sign of a definitive new order. It seems that the movie industry is bound to come to the point of "destruction before construction", and I hope that the collapse of 2023 will lead to a reconstruction in 2024.
Seymour is a filmmaker who had produced multiple award-winning short films and Ads. He is currently getting his debut feature off the ground.
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