What Happened to Movies?

With every major film release come the box office numbers, supposedly tracking a film's success or failure. Yet media sites seem to be very confused about what these numbers reveal. It seems every movie released lately is a failure or flop because the box office numbers and grosses aren't reflecting a profit, at least not a large one. Well there are very obvious reasons for that, obvious to everyone that is except the studios.

First of all, capitalism is crushing most people in this country. The cost of living is at an all time high, grocery prices are astronomical and minimum wage has never kept up with inflation. MOST people in this country do not have expendable income for fun things like going to the movies. And if they do it's a once every few months kind of thing, not an “every time a film gets released kind of thing”.

Next we have the fact that movie ticket prices are between $15-$20 a trip, per person. For a family of four to go to the movies it's nearly $100 for one outing. That is ridiculous and thinking families can pay that on a regular basis is absurd.

Then we have that little thing called production costs. Movies for some reason are being made with 300 million dollar budgets that I promise you they don’t need. The rise of CGI has made filmmaking extraordinarily expensive when practical effects are not only cheaper but they always, always look better on screen. Yes, getting rid of CGI altogether probably isn’t practical and it would force a change for many VFX artists, but job wise it would even out because we would need practical effects designers again. And honestly I think that would be more beneficial to the industry than harmful.

And then we have the outliers, the movies that fail because they're actually bad or because there is another reason not to see them. Like the Flash. The Flash came out as one of the lowest grossing movies of the year so far and one of the lowest grossing superhero movies ever. This is due to three pretty large factors; 1) Casual viewers are tired of paying for mediocre superhero movies. The idea of superhero film “burnout” really only refers to casual viewers. No one who is an actual DC or Marvel fan is “tired” of superhero movies, we might wish they would be more consistent or have a better grasp of the source material but we most certainly are not done with the genre. DC and WB lost the casual viewers long before The Flash was even released. 2) Ezra Miller and they’re insane amount of allegations. Some people will claim Ezra is completely innocent and all they’re allegations have been debunked but with the laundry list of things claimed against them that is simply unlikely. Especially when a lot of allegations came from people who chose to remain anonymous. No one is making claims for fame or attention, Miller is absolutely guilty of plenty. And even people that were invested in this movie didn’t go see it because of their actions. Good people won this one. 3) Die hard DC fans know there is a reboot coming. This film was rendered irrelevant the second James Gunn took over the DCEU so why do we care about its contents? We don’t and that reflects in the film's box office numbers. WB made several bad decisions and they paid for it. Karma is a bitch.

Long story short, life is too expensive and studios aren’t listening to their audience. When studios start respecting the fact that us, the common folk, decide whether or not they stay rich then they might start making a profit again.