We Should Stop Pocket-Watching Our Entertainment

Here’s a lede I promise I won’t overuse in future: There was a bit of a dustup on Twitter recently. Lately it’s become a trend for film news outlets and aggregators to share box office receipts for trendy new releases in the same tone NBA hater accounts use when a superstar has a bad shooting night. The post always opens with a neutral report of the film’s (usually soft) opening weekend numbers, then two line breaks, and then a one-sentence account of the film’s budget, standing starkly alone down at the bottom like a damning reveal. These posts have the tone of my elementary school gym teacher when my friend and I decided to give up on running the mile run and take a leisurely walk around the track. We went back inside to find him sitting hunched on a bench, waiting for us, hands pressed together as if he was praying. “Eleven. Minutes.” he said, in a tone that imprinted on my nine-year-old brain for the first time the notion that doing something for my own pleasure could bring disappointment and shame on someone else. That’s the tone I hear when I see these box office/budget ratio shame posts. “Fifty. Million. Dollars.”

Anyway, it’s a format designed to drive engagement and it works. So well, in fact, that real-deal trade Variety decided they wanted to get in on the party. After Sinners debuted to around $60 million, they posted that while it was “a great result for an original, R-rated horror film,” the film’s $90 million budget meant that “profitability remains a ways away.” It’s a strange thing to post. A presumably real journalistic outfit obviously is under no obligation to treat any movie with kid gloves, but it did feel a bit like chiding an irresponsible child for spending their allowance irresponsibly. Add in the layer of racial condescension and you’re in Dustup City.

Variety didn’t have to celebrate Sinners any more than they had to imply it was a failure, but that they chose to do the latter was probably not a malicious attempt to degrade a prominent black filmmaker. They were just joining in on the way all engagement-farmers talk about this stuff now. They sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. It’s a popular tweet format because people are hyper-engaged with box office receipts these days.

Obviously box office reporting has been around for as long as movies, and even this kind of shame-based financial gossip is nothing new. When James Cameron was in production on Titanic, the trades were full of set reports about the film’s ballooning budget. They were clearly hoping for a perfect conclusion to a story of megalomaniacal hubris which up to a point mirrored the creation of the real-life boat. In that instance, they weren’t so lucky. I think the recent wave of box office fixation can be traced back to the release of Paul Feig’s all-women Ghostbusters reboot back in 2016. What seemed to be a reactionary and misogynist backlash to the film’s existence was met with a backlash-to-the-backlash by progressives; both sides felt like the success or failure of this movie had real political stakes. At the time, I wrote about how much it bothered me that I had been made to feel genuine tension over the opening weekend returns of a film I had no interest in. A film making or losing money was less a comment on the film itself than it was on the general public’s stance in the culture war. The thing about a culture war is that you don’t want to win people to your side, you want to prove that they’re already there.

Sinners has gone on to make a lot more money, and that’s nice. Variety was wrong to imply that it was on its way to flopping. But even if that weren’t the case, why does it matter so much to people? Wouldn’t Sinners be just as great a film if no one had seen it? Even almost ten years after Ghostbusters, during which Woke has pretty conclusively won in the war for pop culture dominance, people still feel like there are serious stakes to a film’s box office receipts. Here’s the question I want to pose: Are those stakes actually real?

People have an image of Hollywood studios as perpetually terrified and reactionary, slaves to trends and insistent on only ever making safe bets. If a movie like Sinners, with a black filmmaker and predominantly black cast, flops at the box office, people assume that studios will take it as a sign to not make films like that again. So if you want more black artists to get opportunities and large budgets, you need to prove to the studios that it’s a worthwhile investment. And this is not entirely an unfair characterization. All cinephiles know apocryphal stories of comical superstition driving studio decision-making, like how Who Framed Roger Rabbit has no question mark at the end of its title because an executive brought up the failure of a completely unrelated film whose title had punctuation.

People act like buying enough tickets to a certain movie is a sort of prayer, and that if you pray hard enough the Hollywood gods will hear you and make more of that kind of movie. This just isn’t the case, because Hollywood is not a rational actor with which you can make fair exchanges. What do you honestly believe will be the result of Sinners’ success? Ryan Coogler will keep getting more work, sure. But Hollywood is uniquely bad at understanding why things succeed when they do. Sinners is a confluence of Hollywood buzzwords which their algorithms are breaking down as we speak: A black movie, a vampire movie, a period piece, a music movie, an IMAX movie, etc etc. These are the things about Sinners that Hollywood will see as replicable, and none of them are directly related to why people liked it so much. Do you think the answer to your prayers will be more black directors getting chances to make more black genre films? Or even that they will give directors more favorable ownership deals, as they did for Coogler? Because these are lessons studios have been stridently refusing to learn for many decades now. One movie isn’t likely to change that. David Lynch struggled to get even a single new feature made for the last twenty years of his life, and it wasn’t because he was coming off a string of high-profile flops. There simply isn’t, and has never been, a one-to-one relationship between a movie making money and more movies like it being made.

But these political factors aren’t really represented in Black Bag, as the example above cites. Why does it matter if that film makes money or not? I think there’s some similar sense of stakes in that Black Bag is an original movie, and we pray for original movies. But there’s clearly an implied admonishment to posting about its budget. It’s not audiences being shamed for not showing up for a film which will now lose its creators money, it’s the creators being shamed for spending that much money on something whose popularity has been revealed to not warrant it. On a similar note, someone posted the other day that Frances Ha was an “evil movie” that could have cost “a sixth” of its $3 million budget if Noah Baumbach “had any idea how to make a film without wasting money.” I think that sounds like a perfectly reasonable budget for a film made with a union crew and a normal-sized cast who all were paid a living wage, but that seems beside the point. It’s fine to think Frances Ha is a bad film, but what’s with the pocket-watching? Why does it matter to anyone if the people funding a film are wasting their money? Even if Noah Baumbach could have saved 2.5 million dollars and used it to fund other projects, you probably wouldn’t have liked those either!

This isn’t limited to just box office obsession. People nowadays are similarly fixated on which films get distribution deals out of festivals, and whether their release strategies are healthy. It’s not even a phenomenon exclusive to cinema. If you’re an NBA fan, you know that every season in recent years has featured people online discussing in panicked tones the league’s decreasing TV ratings. What’s causing viewership to decline, how can the league fix it, is it related to playstyles, and on and on, and no one seems to ask themselves why it matters so much to them. Unless you’re Adam Silver, it has no impact on you whether the NBA Finals get a hundred million viewers or a hundred thousand. Yet this obsession has only grown from season to season.

Like with the Ghostbusters culture war mentioned above, people now seem to desperately need the things they like to be broadly popular. I feel like this is a relatively new phenomenon. It used to be cooler if the stuff you were into was obscure, outside the mainstream. Now people have this compulsive need for everyone to be into the same stuff as them. You see it when popstar stans create elaborate social media campaigns to drive their fave’s new music up the charts. You see it when fans of blockbuster franchises dogpile critics for not sharing their enthusiasm. You even see it from the other direction, like when people make hilariously self-serving and cherry-picked charts of which movies or shows or games went woke and then went on to go broke. It’s not enough just to like something, you have to prove that it’s comprehensively likable, as though this is necessary to validate your own interest.

I find this to be a pretty dark impulse. It’s a tempting one, though. It’s nice to see higher numbers on the stuff you like and lower numbers on the stuff you don’t. But it’s worth thinking about what those numbers really mean, and where that reaction is coming from. I think we would all be a lot happier and healthier if we stopped caring quite so much about how other people are spending their time and money. Maybe if we did, we’d be less neurotic about how we spend our own.

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