When a movie making $500m – half a billion – is considered a financial disappointment, might it be time to rethink the Hollywood model?
The story of Disney’s live action take on The Little Mermaid was glossed over a little when the studio’s box office performance was assessed this year. The film, directed by Rob Marshall and starring the terrific Halle Bailey in the lead role, cost the studio a reported $250m or so to make, and returned $569m once its global takings had been totted up.
A decent amount of change by most people’s standards, and for another other studio but Disney, that’d be regarded as a decent result. Yet it’s not enough by the standards of corporate Hollywood, and certainly not the numbers the company was hoping for when it greenlit the film.
For Disney, the shadow of 2019 overlooks all of its current box office challenges, that being the year when no fewer than seven films it was involved with crossed $1bn at the box office. That 2019 slate, commercially at least, was pretty much perfect, with hugely anticipated sequels, remakes and Marvel films all hitting at once. It was always going to be a tough act to repeat, and so it has proven.
Appreciating a pandemic significantly altered how all this works, this year, Disney doesn’t have a single new release that’s made more than $1bn, although last winter’s Avatar: The Way Of Water passed that number on its 2023 takings alone.
In fact, when assessing the studio’s box office fortunes in 2023, The Little Mermaid, not unreasonably, gets a pass. Certainly compared to films such as Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, Wish and The Marvels (whatever you make think of the films themselves), half a billion dollars looks rather pleasant.
Yet for Disney in particular, but not uniquely, the bar to success has been set higher than that in the world of blockbuster cinema.
The expectation levels have changed as to just how much money a movie is expected to make. Studios pivoted to making few films, but bigger ones, over the course of the 2000s (it was Warner Bros that really started the drive towards this). As such, if a studio is releasing a maximum of seven or eight films a year, it needs them to be ‘events’, to be of scale, to be huge. Should a major film top out at around the $400m mark, then sound the alarm bells and run for the hills.
It’s something that Chris Pine touched on in an interview discussing the difficulty of getting the next Star Trek film off the ground he gave to Deadline in 2022.
As he told the outlet, “It was always this billion-dollar mark because Marvel was making a billion. Billion, billion, billion. We struggled with it because Star Trek, for whatever reason, its core audience is rabid. Like rabid, as you know. To get these people that are interested that maybe are Star Wars fans or think Star Trek is not cool or whatever, proven to be … we’ve definitely done a good job of it but not the billion-dollar kind of job that they want”.
The further issue of course is that even Marvel and Star Wars aren’t in the billion dollar box office game at the moment, and yet that remains the yardstick. It’s not as if the pandemic broke things forever, either. The thinking that it simply isn’t possible to get people en masse to the cinema post-2020 was quickly dispelled by Spider-Man: No Way Home, and cemented by the likes of Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer and Avatar: The Way Of Water.
In the case of The Little Mermaid, it was moving into production with Disney still counting the billions from its live action remakes of Beauty & The Beast and The Lion King. The money was bountiful, and it seemed logical that The Little Mermaid should follow a similar path.
Appreciating that the movie’s casting was targeted by the usual rabble of idiots – sigh – the ecosystem for such films has also changed. As we wrote on this site very recently, the metric of success is no longer defined so heavily by cinema takings.
To a degree, they never were. Across the 1980s and 90s, the thinking became that the cinema release was the trailer for the home video market, where the margins were much greater. Then DVDs came along, and the initial explosion of the video disc saw films such as Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery and The Bourne Identity transformed from successful films to franchise starters off the back of their home release.
For Disney, it’s hard to shake the feeling that films seem to have become content, fodder to feed the Disney+ machine. It’s not alone there: just look at Warner Bros’ sacrificing its theatrical slate of 2021 to feed its HBO Max service.
With certain companies though, there’s little getting around the fact that end consumers have become conditioned to the fact that if you miss a film in cinemas, you can watch it at home in a matter of weeks. That’s said to have damaged the box office takings of Disney movies in particular, but it also should lead to some expectation management elsewhere.
Just because a few films have managed to spike, and earn the kind of numbers that studios were feasting on at the back end of the last decade, it doesn’t mean that things haven’t moved on. In each of the cases of the movies that did cross a billion post-2020, there were compelling reasons why they did.
It wasn’t just the quality of the films concerned, although it should be noted that none of them were awful (I wasn’t a fan of Avatar 2, but could very much appreciate its spectacle). Even the pretty tepid The Super Mario Bros Movie – the highest grossing animated film in years – tapped into something, and, judging by the young fan in my house, satisfied its target audience.
Perhaps then we’ve arrived at a point where high commerce needs a reality check, and the need for a film to hit such a financial high bar in cinemas is tempered. The level of high-end blockbuster films now require production budgets north of $200m, and marketing campaigns that cost nine figures too.
Due to the numbers involved, this in turn results in a perfectly decent film grossing half a billion dollars not being deemed to have made enough money. But also: it’s the speed at which films are about to hit that mark. That, regardless of reality, a movie is deemed success or flop in double quick time, and that – frustratingly – affects the movies studios then are willing to make.
The box office was always a crude measurement of a film’s success, but surely even more so now. The level of financial expectations simply doesn’t feel realistic, and the fact that the industry works on a system of quarterly returns and earning calls isn’t as compatible with the films themselves as it once was.
Hollywood has two options here. It can go for more modest films, that don’t need such financial weight. Or it can change the way, ultimately, it measures their success.
The likelihood is, sadly, it’ll do neither. And films such as The Little Mermaid end up dismissed or regarded based on a very flawed system.
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