GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Like Golfballs Through A Garden Hose…This is the streaming suck of our lives.
Director Spike Lee and Denzel Washington represent one of the most iconic director/movie star pairings in modern Hollywood history. There was a time not so long ago when a Spike Lee/Denzel Washington movie would have been a massive cultural event. And yet here I was in a room with a group of very smart movie people who had no idea that “Highest 2 Lowest”, this duo’s fifth collaboration and their first in almost 20 years, had just been released in theaters.
Why?
The answer, in a word, is “streaming.”
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Apple and A24 were trying to convince you to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time…
- “Highest 2 Lowest” is a great movie worthy of Oscar consideration, but also…
- “Highest 2 Lowest” isn’t good enough to be worth a night out… don’t bother paying a babysitter, making dinner reservations and going out to see it in a theater… better to just wait for it to be available on your TV where you can watch with the lights on while scrolling X, yelling at the kids to be quiet in the next room, and finally resorting to watching the movie with the subtitles on because the neighbors’ house party is going off next door.
Thanks to the ubiquity of “streaming suck,” “Washington” describes the movie industry being in the Glenn Close Fatal Attraction “I won’t be ignored!!!!” moment of its existence. Her (spoiler alert) shock return at the climax of the movie is akin to what Rob Long describes in the new issue of Commentary as the stereotypical “third act boo” scene in slasher movies: In Show Business, No One Can Hear You Scream.
We’re all looking for signs that this terrible slasher movie is over and we can go back to making romantic comedies and adult dramas. But the third-act boos keep coming.
So when the final installment of Tom Cruise’s mega-smash Mission: Impossible series opened with a strong weekend box office and generally positive audience response, it must have felt like everything was going to be okay to Paramount Studios—itself exhausted and bleeding from a yearlong takeover wrangle. The movie made nearly $600 million worldwide, which sounds awfully good until you remember it cost about $400 million to make. Even the bankable moviemaking genius of Tom Cruise couldn’t escape the third-act boo.
And when the re-envisioned Marvel superhero movie The Fantastic Four: First Steps opened this summer to one of the strongest weekend box office takes in recent memory, it wasn’t just the employees of Marvel Studios and its parent company Disney that celebrated. All of show business set aside its usual bitter jealousies and rejoiced: The Summer Blockbuster is back! The next weekend, though, the movie tanked. Attendance dropped 66 percent. Boo!
About the only unalloyed bright spot is the performance of the latest installment of the DC franchise, Superman, which hit the $500 million mark early in its run, despite some headwinds in the international market. Superman is like the teenage girl in the third-tightest T-shirt: safe, for now. But that just makes the entertainment business more jittery and anxious for signs. The foundational economic rule of Hollywood is Find something that works and run it into the ground. Hard to do when nothing is working with any consistency. Hard to do when the layoffs are continuing, when streaming services are being sold or shut down, when no one in the business knows exactly what success looks like.
Washington concludes, “The only way out is with event movies, the old-fashioned hype machine and exclusive theatrical windows that are long enough that audiences won’t wait to see the movies they are excited about… which is the one thing the streamers can’t, and won’t deliver. It’s a shame we had to blow up the whole theatrical movie model to discover how well it worked.”
