When I became the television critic for the Los Angeles Times in early 2007, many people told me it was a very bad idea. Why would I leave my job as a film writer to write television reviews? Didn’t I know that “The Sopranos” was ending? And that, with a few notable exceptions, original scripted television was being killed off and killed by reality TV and a plethora of Internet content?
Thankfully, I didn’t hear any of that. Instead, I got to watch and write about one of the most amazing artistic revolutions of our time. I don’t know how the pendulum (and Hollywood’s tendency toward excess) will swing, but television is now facing a financial crisis, largely due to its incredible period of growth. But even though the industry is in a period of austerity, no one predicts the art form will disappear completely.
Whenever critics declare the death of something, I think back to television in 2007. I certainly thought of that a month ago when many were declaring the death of moviegoing.
In May, “The Fall Guys,” “Furiosa: Mad Max” and “A Garfield Movie” all failed to live up to pre-release hype. Instead of questioning the wisdom of those expectations,, In the wake of the particularly devastating writers’ and actors’ strikes, many in the industry and reporting on the industry were fond of declaring that the sky was falling.
More than one person has loudly stated in public that “people don’t want to go to the movies anymore.”
Then came Bad Boys 4, A Quiet Place 1: Day One, and especially Inside Out 2, and suddenly everyone was going to the cinema again, and still is. Box office takings were soaring, and The Wolverine and Deadpool hadn’t even been released yet.
After all, people still want to go to the movies. Just not in the same numbers as they did before streaming made TV self-curated and available 24/7, or before a global pandemic closed movie theaters for more than a year and studios decided to make movies available for at-home viewing just weeks after their theatrical release. “A Quiet Place” has already grossed more than $100 million worldwide in its first five days of release, despite Paramount announcing a streaming date on July 30.
As this film and others released in June and July prove, people are actually doing something (and this is important) I want to seeAnd everyone is there, talking and laughing, waiting in line to pay the $17 ticket price and the $10 bucket of popcorn. I saw Inside Out 2 a full week after it came out, and it took me nearly 30 minutes just to find a parking spot.
After last year’s strike, this summer may not be able to match the magic of “Barbenheimer” or the standards that analysts want to use, but that’s not the point.
The question is, why have we become so hasty in pronouncing a time of death when the patient is clearly still breathing?
This country has endured its fair share of trauma in recent years, but we’re not doing ourselves any favors by constantly jumping from “problem” to “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it catastrophe” about everything. (I’m not even going to get into the post-presidential debate rush into madness, but subtext, subtext, subtext.)
It’s exhausting and sometimes embarrassing. Plus, our reliance on hyperbole makes it impossible to distinguish real DEFCON-1 emergencies like the climate crisis, the housing shortage crisis, and internal threats to our democracy from smaller issues.
This is not to belittle the current state of Hollywood — these current times of austerity are very pressing, very livelihood-threatening issues for people who work in the entertainment industry — but to view the failures of a few films as an indicator not just of the state of cinema but of the mindset of billions of people is not just unhelpful, but proven by recent history to be completely foolish.
Television was supposed to be dead, but it wasn’t. The summer box office was supposed to be dead, but it wasn’t. Publishing had no future until Oprah started book clubs and “Harry Potter” came along. Oh, and remember when Taylor Swift was told she was in danger of ruining her career through “overexposure”?
There’s something both pathos and poetic justice in the fact that Inside Out 2 is currently “saving” summer. Much of the story revolves around how awful life can be when anxiety takes over; it can only imagine the worst-case scenarios, and then it inevitably spirals out of control to try to prevent them.
This doesn’t mean that some of these scenarios are impossible or unlikely to occur — it’s just that it’s best not to rely solely on anxiety to define life’s problems and provide solutions. Give joy, sadness, and even embarrassment a chance.
Pixar isn’t going to change the state of the country (after all, it has its own problems), but the hilarious laughter evoked by the film’s climax speaks to the way anxiety piles on one dire prediction after another. American politics, social media (and traditional media’s attempts to keep up), and the trauma of the pandemic have turned us into a nation of anxious adrenaline junkies. As soon as something seems to go wrong, we ignore the good, jump to the bad, and make sweeping generalizations about very complex things.
Or even before it does. Like anxiety, we are all increasingly in the business of prediction. On Instagram and CNN, analysts (professional and self-described) act like modern-day prophets, uttering prophetic and, increasingly, doom-mongering words from polls, social media, video clips, and the general zeitgeist.
Clearly, there is a crisis and catastrophe to be avoided. The film industry, like many others, has faced and will continue to face many challenges. Alarm bells are important, but when they are sounded every 10 minutes past the hour, they become less and less effective.
Not every moment requires an instant decision. Even umpires often watch video replays. There are moments when you need to calmly evaluate the problem and potential solutions. It’s easy to run around screaming that the sky is falling, but it’s much harder to figure out whether it’s actually an asteroid or an acorn, and whether or not you can or should do anything about it.
While many things change, for better or worse, some things remain the same: The entertainment industry certainly needs to find firmer financial footing, but people will always want to hear stories in the dark.
Even if parking is quite difficult to find.