JOHN NOLTE: ‘Mad Max with a Girl’ Faces Worst Memorial Day Weekend Debut in 41 Years.
Anyway, the sycophants at Deadline are in a tough spot with Furiosa. The prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road earned great reviews, opened on the perfect weekend for a blockbuster, and with no competition in its action lane. What’s more, it’s based on a successful franchise and Warner’s promoted the living hell out of it. So how does Deadline explain away this breathtaking failure? How does Deadline write around the truth of how stupid it is to make a girl the star of a movie called Mad Max?
In the Sycophancy Hall of Fame, this delicious piece of credibility-selling will earn a wing all its own:
Despite more movies in the marketplace, we’re still feeling the aftermath of the strikes. How is that? Many aren’t in the habit of moviegoing yet[.]
Many aren’t in the habit of moviegoing yet.
How far up Hollywood’s ass does one have to be to come up with a sentence like that?
Previously, these gerbils blamed the faltering box office on a lack of wide releases caused by the strike. That was easily proved a lie by comparing the number of pre- and post-strike wide releases. Turns out there is no lack of product. So now we’re being told the strike somehow took people out of the moviegoing habit.
What!?
Well, then, why were Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Dune 2 so successful? Why is Deadpool & Wolverine about to blow the doors off the box office?
Sorry, sycophants… The problem is not the three-years-gone pandemic, it is not the strike, it is not that people kicked their moviegoing habit, and it is not a lack of product. The problem is…
The product.
With very rare exceptions, the product sucks.
And when you put a girl in a Mad Max movie, all the gushing reviews cease to matter because we can smell the affirmative action a mile away, and we know that movie reviewers, just like the corporate news media, cannot be trusted.
South Park’s “Panderverse” episode last year was only so-so as actual entertainment, but simply by making fun of the Kathleen Kennedy-style formula (“Put a chick in it! Make her gay! Make it lame!”), how much did that spell the death knell for this Hollywood cycle? (See also: the original Star Wars ending Hollywood’s 1970s obsession with dark European-inspired existentialism.) If Hollywood in 2024 does indeed wish its customers to return to “the habit of moviegoing,” then the industry has to decide if it wants to make product that entertains, or if it wishes to keep sermonizing. Because the latter formula, in the era of social media, when fans can quickly find out if the film is worth watching, or contains what Nolte once dubbed “the liberal sucker punch”), has run its course.