A cursory look at the box-office tracking website BoxOfficeMojo reveals a horrifying reality: the unremarkable and almost predictable nature of the audiences’ taste, and why the people world over, including Pakistan, may be stuck in this loop for the next few years … by their own preference.

Taking into account worldwide grosses, at the top of the list for October 21 sits Smile 2 with a 48 million dollars worldwide opening (the first Smile made 217 million dollars from a budget of 17 million dollars). Right below is Terrifier 3, an evil-clown supernatural slasher made for two million dollars that grossed 42 million dollars in 10 days. At third spot sits The Wild Robot, a critical favourite produced by DreamWorks, having raked in 198 million dollars from a budget of 78 million dollars.

These are followed by Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (overall 434 million dollars), Joker: Folie à Deux (overall 192 million dollars), Saturday Night, the drama — co-written and directed by Jason Rietman — about the 90 minutes leading to the live broadcast of the first Saturday Night Live show (7.7 million dollars), Transformers One (a mere 119 million dollars overall, the lowest of any Transformers film), Piece by Piece, a Lego-animated documentary about music icon Pharrell Williams (7.7 million dollars in the US only), and the re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas (nearly five million dollars in the US).

With attention spans dwindling and big Hollywood studios choking the box-office potential of films, even in small markets like Pakistan, by opting for quick money from streaming, can ‘cinema’ really survive — especially when one’s subconscious has been hardwired to accept escapist fluff as the new normal?

A further look down into the list, and a couple of clicks into the past few weeks, shows an alarming number of supernatural/horror/thriller titles — Speak No Evil, AfrAId, Never Let Go, The Crow — slipping in and out of the charts. One of the recently released titles — Bagman which, according to my research, was set to have a US release in September but never did — debuted straight to streaming this week.

Most of these films had acceptable box-office returns, given their price of production, despite bad reviews. In stark contrast, better reviewed films The Apprentice, White Bird, We Live in Time (the Andrew Garfield-Florence Pugh romance-drama which was in the top five one day before) and Saturday Night, have had trifling ticket sales.

At the time of writing, We Live in Time has collected a mere 4.5 million dollars in 10 days, while Saturday Night has been running for 25 days.

Now, before someone points out that horror films are preferred cinema fodder during Halloween month, a look back in time shows that genre films and space-filler fluffs have been dominating year-long release schedules for a while now.

This begs the question, then: has cinema now been relegated to the big, blaringly pompous, throwaway genre films?

A few weeks ago, Francis Ford Coppola gave full support to Todd Phillip’s Joker: Folie à Deux. Like me, and a handful of other critics who saw through the fake apparentness of the film, Coppola liked the film, calling Phillips “one step ahead of the audience [and] never doing what they’re expecting.”

Coppola’s own film, Megalopolis, crashed and burned in cinemas, grossing a paltry 12 million dollars worldwide. The long gestating movie had a price tag of 120 million dollars, but was self-funded by Coppola, giving him free rein to swing big and miss spectacularly.

Phillips, who was working for the studio, had that same opportunity. Working directly with Warner Bros bosses, he shifted the story away from its DC comic book baggage and chose not to screen the film for test audiences.

His decisions angered the social media “critics” — most of who flaunt their insights on YouTube shows and are invited for test screenings (professional critics for the press do not have that luxury) — and made enemies of the short-sighted comic book fandom who were waiting for yet another comic book movie continuation (which, by the way, has suffocated creative storytelling).

Most, if not all, of the bad word-of-mouth I read came from blind bias which, in turn, gave birth to the thoughts behind this article: in an internet filled with self-expertised punditry, dime-a-dozen filmmaking tutorials from people who have yet to make movies, and billions of one-minute reels on social media, can “cinema” really survive — especially when one’s subconscious has been hardwired to accept escapist fluff as the new normal?

Yes, I may be sounding a little like Martin Scorsese here, but charting the trend in audiences’ tastes for years — and observing corporate decisions to empower select genres and the quick pay-offs by digital media to shape the course of entertainment — I have little choice but to concur with the director. At least, like Coppola and Phillips, he makes “cinema”.

It’s all relative

Director Matthew Vaughn wasn’t expecting a backlash on Argylle, his spy thriller starring Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell. In an interview with Empire Magazine, Vaughn says that the test screenings went fantastically well. The Flash, a really bad film which decimated DC’s film lore from 1978’s Superman till Shazam! Fury of the Gods, did fantastically well in its test screenings too, with some scores putting it close to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. These test audiences called it “outstanding”, “excellent” and “a lot of fun.”

Test screenings have been the norm since the 1930s — the concept was introduced by silent screen comedian Harold Llyod in 1928 — but do their scores really matter, especially in today’s preference-driven era?

Where once strong stories, the heart and soul of any good movie, came out in good numbers every year, in the past few years, films with depth and nuance have been relegated to award seasons line-ups — and even then, they have been purposely transfigured into unimaginative by-the-book fodder.

Films, therefore, have turned into a medium to appease one cause over the other, in the hopes that excessive marketing and a ton of product will inculcate the preference of the few into the preference of the many.

Movies and television have the power to do that, because they tell stories — and stories, whether told by cavemen’s drawings, sung by nomadic minstrels, penned by playwrights, dramatised into campfires fables or told through parents to their young, electrify the imagination and form, inspire and galvanise.

Films, however, rarely do that anymore, because industry practices now choose to make them simple and routine by design and comprehension, in a calculated effort to cater to audiences’ steadily declining attention spans.

If you’ve felt that film titles have become needlessly jejune, well, here’s your answer (case in point: a recently released teen romance film titled My Fault, or ambiguous one-word titles like Outside, Justice and Trouble on Netflix). The idea is to reach the lowest common denominator with simple words.

A recent article in The Atlantic carried the headline The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, with the blurb: To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school. Another article, The Loss of Things I Took for Granted, written by a college professor for The Slate, pointed out that his top-tier students struggled with reading more than ten pages.

This pandemic is not just sweeping across colleges in the US alone. Eight out of 10 students I have encountered in schools and colleges don’t want to read — or worse yet, can’t read with comprehension — but it’s not that they’re not reading; most of their reading quota is filled by scrolling through posts and comments on social media. Pages of information do not sink in as they used to.

Reading books, then, becomes a nightmare, and the overstimulation of the brain through pint-sized doses of highs from social media (as studies point out), warrant off-hand fluff as entertainment.

Ergo: the need for simpler, predictable, forgettable entertainment — as evident in the type of releases and the box-office numbers at the top of this article. It’s all relative.

The Hot Streaming Mess

The other big infractors are streaming platforms, and the corporate need for their continued bolstering.

Cinema hasn’t really recovered since the streaming wars began during Covid-19, when studios, seeing the opportunity worldwide quarantines presented, started releasing big-budget films immediately on their platforms.

The rush for release was a pain for producers and actors who had backend monetary deals on films (one example is Scarlett Johannson’s rift with Marvel over the financial loss she suffered from Black Widow). However, more damaging than that was the birth of the idea that a film can be watched at home for a fraction of the price of a film in the theatre — especially if you’re a family of two or more.

A film ticket for one adult is 20 dollars in the US. That’s the same cost as the film’s digital rental, but adds the benefit of giving the subscriber 14 days to watch the film, and 48 hours to finish the viewing once started — if, that is, the film is not available for free as part of a trial membership to entice new customers, or if that film has not been acquired by a monthly subscription service such as Netflix, whose monthly premium tier costs 23 dollars in the US (other countries, such as Pakistan, get Netflix for much cheaper). Alternatively, a digital copy of the film can be bought for 24 dollars.

While studios have jointly decided to hold off simultaneous releases of films to streaming platforms, the one-month embargo is hardly a good one.

To put things into context for young readers: a film used to come out on video (VHS Cassettes, and later, DVD), six months to a year after its release. In that time, the film made slow international rounds, where the hype and performance of the US release helped build attraction and interest while, concurrently, the title was sold to television stations.

At the time of writing, Transformers One and The Wild Robot, which are still playing in cinemas, have just made their digital rental debut a few hours ago. The quick-release/get-it-while-it’s-hot money-grab tactic kills the feeling of anticipation and, in consequence, trains people to wait for the cheaper option to buy or rent the film a month later than watch it in cinemas.

These decisions by studios in the US have worldwide repercussions.

Pakistan: reeling from the impact of big, global decisions

These big-game international decisions play havoc for a small cinema market such as Pakistan. The country, and its youth, if anything, are now attuned to global practices, standards and mindsets.

Taking in the fact that the audience do not prefer most Pakistani releases, the downwards ripple-effect of bad word-of-mouth for films of cinematic merit, and the limited interest in disposable fluff that the US box-office makes do on, spells doom for whatever is left of cinema culture in the country.

Capri Cinema — which was perhaps the only cost-effective, single-screen cinema in Karachi — has decided to shut down its operations in the last year. Although its management has assured this writer that it is not closed for good, the derelict conditions at the cinema tell one all one needs to know. The reason, one understands — and have oft-discussed with Capri’s owners — is the lack of releases that will pull non-multiplex audiences back to the movies.

The trouble, however, is not limited to single-screens. Atrium Cinema, one of the first “real” multiplexes of the country, shut its doors in early July. The cinema has not been able to make its ends meet.

Pakistani cinema is mostly concentrated — read: dependent — on the success of a film in Punjab, which has the greatest number of screens in Pakistan (ergo: the many Indian-Punjabi releases in the country). However, one may notice another trend wiggling its way in: the release of Malaysian, Indonesian and Turkish horror films. The films have been doing reasonably well which, again, returns us to the question: what has cinema really been relegated to?

With a clear bias against movies that have substance and story, and desperate international business tactics governing and choke-holding the global state of cinemas, where does cinema actually stand?

Can one really expect to see films like The Green Mile, The Big Lebowski or even The Godfather succeed in this day and age, where a preference for forgettable fluff has smothered creativity that made cinema what it is?

The thing is, like all bad trends, this too shall probably pass in a few years. But at what cost?

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 27th, 2024