July 21st, 2023 is one of the most anticipated days in recent cinema history that I can recall. With Barbie and Oppenheimer both set to finally arrive in theaters, it's difficult to remember a single date that had movie-lovers as universally excited as this approaching Friday.
We've had our fair share of monumental moments in film over the last few years, from Everything Everywhere All at Once and Parasite's refreshing and exciting Oscar victories to the return of James Cameron after over a decade with Avatar: The Way of Water, but there is something about this Friday that feels different.
The Box Office
I despise the focus on money when discussing film, but it is an unfortunately unavoidable fact. It is money that has drives what gets put on cinema screens, and it is money that has created a tunnel vision from studios in recent years.
If you've looked at the selection at your local Regal or AMC theater in recent years, does it not feel like the types of films being shown have narrowed?
For example, I went to a Regal location last week for a piece I wrote on Sound of Freedom. Needless to say, I needed a pallet cleanser afterwards. My options at this theater were:
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
- The Flash
- Insidious: The Red Door
- Joy Ride
That is, in total, six films. Four of those six were sequels. The other two options were a 90-minute comedy from a Family Guy writer and a QAnon riff on Taken. For some reason, Asteroid City was not being shown.
It paints a grim picture of the current state of film, or at least the films you can see at the theater.
We are here for a reason, though. The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe through the 2010s drove the sequel fever that was set off by Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. DC's attempts at a counterpart Extended Universe have mostly failed critically, but that hasn't stopped them from trying, and it hasn't stopped theaters from loading their screens with those attempts.
Franchise Fatigue?
Only recently, with Black Adam, Flash, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, have the DC films truly tanked financially.
The Marvel fatigue seems to have set in as well. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania came and went without much fanfare, and Thor: Love and Thunder was downright loathed. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 did well both financially and critically, but that put a cap on a story thread that likely won't produce a follow-up.
A big factor in this super hero fatigue has been the fact that, frankly, people have lives outside of these franchises. The general audience was able to follow closely enough in Marvel's first decade, from Iron Man to Avengers: Endgame, that that finale had widespread cultural impact. Since then, the universe has become unrealistically unwieldy.
Want to see the new film? Well, you've got to watch these other three films, as well as two other Disney+ shows. Oh, and there's going to be several easter eggs that you won't grasp unless you've been reading the comics since 1965.
And that's just Marvel.
Between Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones and Transformers and Insidious and Fast and Furious, you've got around 30 movies to watch if you want to get all the references and understand why the guy two seats down from you just gasped at a benign character introduction. (Just imagine where we'd be if Star Wars hadn't taken a cinematic hiatus to regroup).
Eventually, people with jobs and families and a variety of hobbies are going to give up. They're going to stop trying to keep up with the frenetic pace that all of these franchises demand you consume their content at.
That is where Barbie and Oppenheimer come in.
If you're headed to the theater for either of these films, you don't have any research to do beforehand.
Oppenheimer homework? Well, you know how World War 2 ended when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan? Here's the story of the guy who built those bombs.
Barbie homework? You know what a Barbie doll is, right?
In both cases, you can go a whole lot deeper on the research front. There are plenty of fascinating details on Robert Oppenheimer and what he went through in constructing these bombs, and there are plenty of interesting discussions on the Barbie doll and the way she has reflected things like societal gender roles and female body image.
None of that research is absolutely necessary to know what's going on in these films. If you've got the general jist, you're good to go.
What's at stake?
These are two standalone films that are building massive cultural momentum as their release date approaches. Their projected box office numbers are staggering.
I'm not advocating for the death of franchise filmmaking. It's not usually my bag, but these films are not devoid of value. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the greatest cinematic achievements since the invention of the camera. That first decade of Marvel was genuinely fun. Even as unwieldy as the universe has become, I'll always have a soft spot for Star Wars.
However, these franchises have usually pushed aside more original films like Barbie and Oppenheimer. There was the time Disney pushed Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight out of the Cinerama Dome. More recently, Tom Cruise fought exhibitors to show his seventh Mission Impossible film instead of Oppenheimer.
The existence of franchise films is not a problem. Their use of the bully pulpit to strong arm cinemas into shutting out more original films is where the issue lies.
Now, we head into the weekend of Barbie and Oppenheimer on the heels of Mission Impossible 7's lackluster opening weekend. The numbers suggest that Oppenheimer will have a much stronger showing.
If these two films succeed at the astounding rate they are expected to, at the same time that so many franchise films have fallen flat, it is a rebuke of the status quo, and a demand for something different, that studios will receive loud and clear.
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