Video killed the radio star, as The Buggles prophetically sang in the first song aired by MTV.
If so, what killed the movie star? Can't blame video for that murder, given the length of time since the introduction to home theater. The New York Times offers us the whodunit without actually exploring the implications of the murder. After the worst October box office in nearly 40 years, with the exception of the pandemic, the utter disaster of Hollywood highbrow with consumers has become too clear to ignore:
Some were heavily marketed. Many were championed by critics. Most had star power.
But not one of the 25 dramas and comedies that movie companies released in North American theaters over the past three months has become a hit, certainly not in the way that Hollywood has historically kept score. Some have played to near-empty auditoriums, including “After the Hunt,” starring Julia Roberts; “Christy,” with Sydney Sweeney; and “Die My Love,” featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. ...
While success at the box office is always correlated to how much it costs to make a film, Hollywood has historically used $50 million in ticket sales (over an entire run) as a benchmark for a “widely seen” drama or comedy.
By that measure, “After the Hunt,” with Ms. Roberts playing a college professor combating cancel culture, is a catastrophe. It cost an estimated $70 million to make and collected $3.3 million in the United States and Canada after playing for a month.
The NYT analysis distinguishes here between the performance of its more action-oriented fare and Hollywood's "prestige" films. However, it's far from clear that the action films and more entertainment-oriented fare have performed as well as in the past, either. Marvel Studios has mainly produced disappointments from its tentpole franchises. Disney has fared even worse with their own franchises, including and especially with Star Wars, but also with its cannibalization of its animation glory in increasingly weird live-action remakes.
The nadir of all these trends, relatively speaking, was Disney's Snow White, the troubled production that finally entered theaters this year to nearly universal scorn. It wasn't just the weird animation choices; it wasn't just the mouthy stars lecturing audiences about their patriarchal sins; it wasn't just the weaving of woke themes into a fairy tale that serves as a lesson on vanity in the context of a feudal society.
So what was it? It was the fact that the product itself sucked. It sucked because of a combination of all these factors. The results of that combination could be easily seen on screen -- while the stars involved kept lecturing the audience about their moral superiority. Audiences rejected their product just as they would with any lousy product offered in a marketplace with a plethora of other options.
However, that was only the nadir in a very long decline. Hollywood's establishment has spent the last couple of decades murdering the movie star. Its interminable awards ceremonies (and its unending sequence of such) have mainly been a platform for the uneducated arrogance of script readers, offering political and social lectures for hours at a stretch while honoring didactic mediocrities, both in product and in personnel. Almost every "movie star" who in previous eras could command box-office success or at least could "open" a picture has undermined that commercial value by insulting half or more of its potential audience. Their product then insults the intelligence of the remaining potential consumers, especially in its more highbrow, awards-seeking offerings -- of the very kind that utterly bombed this year as Oscars season began.
That cycle is not exclusive to film, either. The demise of late-night television offers an even more dramatic example of this development. It's not just the networks that made these decisions; it has been the stars themselves helping to drive potential audiences away at light speed. They have become repellent in every meaning of the term.
Christian Toto calls this "the new normal," and agrees that it's not just a reflection of increased competition in the entertainment markets:
And the [reasons] media outlets won’t go near.
- Stars made themselves toxic to half the country
- Stars are, for the most part, over-exposed
- The movies just aren’t very good, in toto
- Hollywood has lost touch with the common man
The blame game follows the classic improv guidebook: “Yes, and …”
No one cause is to blame. Combine them all, and you’ve got a serious problem.
One A-lister has at least recognized that the stars themselves may be responsible for the death of their status. Earlier this month, Jennifer Lawrence reflected on her dawning realization that people are not really interested in political lectures from celebrities:
When asked by host Lulu Garcia-Navarro about how she felt about commenting on politics today, Lawrence responded: "I don’t really know if I should. The first Trump administration was so wild and just, how can we let this stand? I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for."
"So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart," she continued. "We are so divided." ...
"With this temperature and the way things can turn out, I don’t want to start turning people off to films and to art that could change consciousness or change the world because they don’t like my political opinions," the actress said. "I want to protect my craft so that you can still get lost in what I’m doing. And if I can’t say something that’s going to speak to some kind of peace or lowering the temperature or some sort of solution, I don’t want to be a part of the problem."
Lawrence is right in that this is part of the problem. The truth is that the product itself has become the problem. Arrogant stars pontificating from their ignorance are not new, and neither is politicized product, but both problems have become vastly worse over the last couple of decades. Their self-congratulatory paroxysms on interminable television productions routinely ignore content that audiences actually support, amplifying the elitist sneering at the hoi polloi that finally has given up on anything from Hollywood except for spectacles ... and even then ...
Hollywood can't put all the blame on VCR this time. The answer to this murder mystery includes too many suspects to name, but it comes down mainly to cultural suicide -- and it's almost certainly irreversible at this point. We can't rewind, we've gone too far...
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