I Miss Popcorn

The last movie I saw in a theater was Emma, Autumn de Wilde's charming adaptation of Jane Austen's ever-filmable novel (side-note—remember when people rolled their eyes about Greta Gerwig's Little Women, wondering why we needed another version of that story but then nobody said anything when Harrison Ford starred in the umpteenth version of Call of the Wild just a few months later? Remember theaters? Remember social life?). I saw the movie in early March or so. It is also the last time I had really good popcorn. What is it about Coca-Cola and popcorn that works so well together? I have a Pavlovian need for one when I have the other. I like the popcorn at Des Moines' Fleur Cinema so much that, in the before times, I would frequently go to the theater just to buy a bag to take home and snack from. That may sound strange (and I'm sure it is) but that interaction, buying popcorn and leaving, is more profitable for the theater than seeing a movie without eating concessions, which is an idea so strange, I can hardly imagine it. Unfortunately, movie theaters aren't hurting right now because they can't show movies, which the studios are going to take half of the box office from anyway, they're hurting because they can't use movies to entice you to buy popcorn, pop and, if you're lucky, those Sour Patch Kids that are only watermelon. 

I am worried, as is my wont, about the movie business. Even before COVID, friends of mine likely suffered through my frequent rants about the creative bankruptcy affecting mainstream Hollywood movies where every entry is a sequel, prequel, off-shoot, reboot or remake. I would like to use the word "reimagining" but imagination seems to be nowhere in sight. For years, the typical weekend champion is so workshopped and committee-driven, it lacks all artistic courage and exists only to passively flicker in front of the audience and then passively flicker out of the audience's head on the drive home. In quarantine, Liz and I are working our way through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the dominant franchise of the day (and, monetarily, of all time). We are in Phase II, about half way through all available movies, and I am reminded of how numbing these overwrought tales of computer generated images who can't die punching each other are. Liz, however, has been energized by them, telling me the other day that by watching them in short order, she's been retaining much more of their interconnectedness. Then I quizzed her with this question of obscure trivia—"What happens in Iron Man 2?"—which stumped her.

That's not to say that good movies aren't being made. They are in the same proportion they always have been. The Assistant, The Vast of Night, Da 5 Bloods and First Cow, just to name a few, are all wonderful movies that would be welcome on any year-end top ten list and, because of the virus, all of them are very easy to find. And that's not to say that the rise of the blandly passable movie began with the MCU. Every era has its share of handsome movies that make no impression and shuttle off to the dustbin of history, a club that Ant-Man and Wasp is soon to join, I have no doubt. What's different now, and it's been this way for about 10 years, is that the good movies and the tentpole stuff are mutually exclusive. You either make a popcorn flick or an award hopeful, you can't make both at once. Oscar lovers like myself get optimistic when a Best Picture favorite becomes a surprise "hit," as Parasite did last year, but that term is completely relative. Parasite's $50 million domestic box office is very good for a weird, foreign movie about class inequity but Avengers: Endgame made seven times that—in its first weekend. Avengers: Endgame made more than the combined domestic box office of every Best Picture winner of the last decade. Samuel Beckett's Endgame has more popular appeal than some of these Oscar winners. 

This is historically weird. It wasn't that long ago that the biggest movie of all time (1997's Titanic) also won Best Picture and that was not an anomaly. 1972's The Godfather similarly won the top Oscar on its way to being the all-time box office champion. Same with The Sound of Music (1965). It Happened On Night (1934), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Sting (1973), and Forrest Gump (1994) are just a small list of movies that were huge hits with audiences and Oscar voters. All of this, of course, without mention the movie that still is, when adjusting for inflation, both the biggest box office champion ever made and was named the Best Picture of 1939, frequently called Hollywood's greatest year (we're not supposed to talk about it anymore but it's called *whispers* Gone With The Wind and if you have a grandparent that still has physical media, maybe you can watch it sometime). 

Have movie audiences become mealy-mouthed plebeians? Are Oscar voters ivory-towered elitists? I think there is a little truth to both assertions and I want to make it clear that just because something wins Best Picture doesn't make it good (hello, Green Book!), nor is being a huge hit while winning Best Picture an automatic pass to the hall of hame (hello, The Greatest Show on Earth!). Part of this is simple numbers. More movies get made now than ever before and can be watched in different ways, which means that the number of movies programmed in theaters and can therefore vie for box office supremacy, is shrinking. I don't believe that if The Godfather were released today, movie audiences would reject it. I worry that if it were released today, it wouldn't be released in theaters, hugely curtailing the amount of people who may see it. The history of movies is a twisting road, perhaps the latest turn, brought on by streaming services and the new golden age of television, is that when only tentpole spectacles based on well-known intellectual property are sent to movie theaters, maybe box office numbers are no longer the best way to measure where the audience is. 

I don't know what COVID is going to do to movie theaters. Guessing at this point seems like an invitation for prognosticative humiliation (the kind I suffered a few weeks ago when I defended the South's plan to reopen their states. Oops). But it's probably a good bet that theater programming isn't going to become more diverse. Eight of last year's 10 biggest movies were produced by the same studio—Disney—which has the muscle to ensure its movies are in thousands of theaters but that's for after this is over. Right now, Disney is struggling, hemorrhaging money while sitting on top a pile of absorbed competitors and COVID-ravaged theme parks, and even their wildly popular streaming service can't staunch the bleeding. Because it's been this way for five years or so smaller, personal movies are right at home being premiered over Amazon, Netflix, et al, while Wonder Woman, James Bond and The Black Widow shiver in the corner wondering what to do.

Still, theaters that show the kinds of movies I like are the ones in the most danger of this pandemic. There will be a movie going experience again—the art form is designed to be communal—and the popcorn business is not going to take COVID lying down, but I fear that programming will be even more driven by a soulless calculus designed not to fail, which is different than succeeding. That good movies are available at home is a consolation but something is visually lost on a laptop or even the best home theaters. I worry that filmmakers who know their product is destined to be one of a dozen open tabs playing for an audience that is scrolling through their phones will eventually stop being visually adventurous. The optimist would look forward to the new innovations of small screen cinematography, but I can't muster that kind of enthusiasm just yet. I can hope that we emerge from quarantine with a new metric for rating the popularity of movies. Netflix and others are notoriously shy about releasing their audience numbers, perhaps now that streaming services are the de facto movie distributors, they will rethink that. For better or worse, the box office champion tells a story about the movie going year. If 2020 ended today (Lord willing), Bad Boys For Life would be our number one film. That certainly tells a story, but not one that has anything to do with what movies film lovers watched this year.