First there was Tár, then The Fabelmans, then She Said. Empire of Light followed soon after. They were all big fall festival movies, aimed squarely at awards attention—and they all failed to ignite at the box office. Some did well in large cities for a couple of weeks, then faltered in wider release. Others never got off the ground at all, hobbled by weak marketing campaigns and a hard-to-diagnose lack of interest. For years, it has been a locus of worry within the industry: this growing chasm between box office triumphs and the movies deemed, by some anyway, to be the best of the year.
This year will see hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, and Avatar: The Way of Water jockeying for awards. But long gone are the days when nearly every film nominated for best picture at the Oscars had a solid financial résumé. In 2022, the situation began to look truly existentially dire. Entertainment outside the home has, apparently, become an unjustified hassle for all but the loudest, biggest spectaculars, like Marvel movies and nefariously ticketed Taylor Swift concerts.
The box office failure of so many niche films suggests a disheartening sea change in culture, one greeted breathlessly—perhaps even gleefully—by some in the industry’s commentariat class. Maybe, as those pundits suggest, we should stop wringing our hands about this shift and face the couch-bound future with a kind of tech optimism. The thinking seems to be that these artier movies will still be made, they’ll just be relegated to streaming, where potential audiences won’t have to risk quite so much money—or be forced to suffer any time outside of the house. I’m not sure that prognosis is the most clear-sighted, though. It seems more likely that studios, looking at their earnings reports, will gradually stop making these films at all.
Which would be a loss for everyone. The studios would forsake whatever value acclaim (and, yes, awards) confers on their company. Artists would lose the opportunity to, well, be artists on the scale that best fits their vision. Audiences would be denied intellectually, emotionally, even politically challenging work. Even those who would skip these movies no matter where they’re playing will eventually suffer; styles, modes, and techniques that first develop in smaller films do trickle their way up to the blockbusters.
The most immediate challenge in preserving the fall movie tradition is convincing the megacorporations who own a large swath of the industry that there is something to gain with loss-leader filmmaking, as was the calculation of the studios of old. I’m sure some filmmakers and film lovers of tomorrow have been inspired by Marvel movies, but how many more might be hooked by films they feel they’ve discovered, that open their minds to nascent passions of which they were previously unaware? The bracing social commentary of Tár, the poignant artistic memoir of The Fabelmans, the righteous empathy of Women Talking, the graceful humanity of Empire of Light—and the even more underwatched but still worthy projects from directors not named Spielberg or Mendes.
Maybe the most effective appeal would be to simple self-regard: Hollywood loves celebrating itself, reveling in its own mythos. What will that identity be in the future, though, if studios have reduced their output to boilerplate franchise movies whose identities have blurred into one indistinct mass? Perhaps studio executives could persuade Wall Street and shareholders that an aura of magic and majesty, maintained year after year by the stuff that supposedly nobody cares about, is necessary for survival of the business. Box office returns are nice—as are perks and bonuses and dividends—but can you really put a price on legacy?
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