October 6, 2024
The summer box office took a 21 percent dive this year.

The summer box office took a 21 percent dive this year.

LOL.

From the Wall Street Journal:

That haul was 21% lower than the summer season in 2019, the last year untainted by the coronavirus pandemic and 19% lower than the average summer gross between 2005 and 2019. It was the lowest haul since 2001, when summer movies earned $3.34 billion at domestic theaters. The summer season typically accounts for about 40% of annual box office receipts, Comscore says.

The reason, Comscore said, is there simply weren’t enough movies. The film industry is still suffering from a hangover caused by the pandemic, which delayed hundreds of productions and forced distributors to reshuffle their release schedules, say movie studios, theater owners and analysts. Studios only gave wide release—defined by Comscore as those that show on at least 2,000 screens—to 22 movies this summer, compared with 42 in the summer of 2019.

Ahem.

There was no shortage of theatrical releases this summer.

According to Box Office Mojo, nearly 80 movies were released in June alone.

What is this lack of product you speak of?

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, hundreds of movies were released theatrically.

Oh, but those movies don’t count because they weren’t released on 2,000+ screens.

So it’s not that movies aren’t getting made. The problem is that hundreds of movies are getting made … and are being released theatrically … but those movies are movies … nobody wants to see.

Why are hundreds of movies being made that … nobody wants to see?

Why not make movies people want to see?

If just ten percent of those hundreds of movies no one wants to see were turned into movies people want to see, you’ve got yourself a record-breaking summer, and Hollywood still gets to make hundreds of movies no one wants to see — which is what Hollywood appears to love doing more than anything else.

But let’s talk about the movies that did get a wide release…

Okay, Hollywood’s box office dropped 21 percent from 2019…

The non-woke Spider-Man: No Way Home and the non-woke Top Gun: Maverick prove that the coronavirus no longer stops people, even older people, from going to the movies. All on their own, those two titles raked in more than $1.5 billion — with a “b,” baby — domestic.

Top Gun: Maverick has topped Titanic's total haul, including all three of its re-releases.

So we’re done blaming the China Flu, right, entertainment media? Even an institution as willing to bend over as far as the entertainment media can’t look at the success of No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick and still shamelessly lie about the China Flu being the problem at the box office…

So where was I?

Oh, yeah.

So now that we can no longer blame da’ virus for Hollywood’s serial failure and can no longer blame a lack of product let’s look at what was released on over 2,000 screens and talk about what went wrong.

Toy Story movies can be counted on to gross around $400 million domestically. Lightyear came up about $300 million short. Gee, Disney… Maybe don’t try to groom children by putting homosexuality in a $250 million kids’ movie.

Thor: Love and Thunder underperformed. This should not have happened. Thor is not only one of the original Avengers. Marvel even added an extended Guardians of the Galaxy cameo. The result? A pretty sad (for a Marvel movie) $340 million domestic. Gee, Disney… Maybe don’t emasculate one of your most beloved masculine heroes and interrupt the big love scene everyone’s waiting for with two people talking about their gay sex lives.

Co-writer and director Taika Waititi's Thor: Love and Thunder waits until the last half hour to show its woke cards, which is okay. You can't ruin an already bad movie.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore was a five-alarm box office catastrophe with just $95 million. But that’s what you get when you open a movie with homosexuality aimed at kids. And in this case, what you probably got was a franchise killer. What was supposed to be a five-chapter franchise will probably become a trilogy (no one likes).

There’s nothing at all wrong with making a movie like the upcoming gay comedy Bros. That’s an R-rated movie produced for the gay crowd, and as I’ve always said, Hollywood should make movies for everyone. I’m not going to watch it, but I hope Bros makes $250 million. It’s the mainstreaming of this stuff, shoving it down our throats when it makes us uncomfortable and is totally inappropriate for kids, that’s what’s obscene.

So here are this summer’s lessons, Hollywood woketards: 1) Instead of making movies no one wants to see, make movies people want to see; 2) Stop with the spell-killing, insulting woketardery that leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and kills the one thing that makes a blockbuster a blockbuster: repeat business.

Maybe more Top Guns and fewer Lightyears? 

Granted, I’m no mogul, but that strikes me as a pretty solid plan.

Nothing kills art as quickly as bubbled arrogance mixed with the certainty of your moral superiority. Only a twisted combination like that could result in targeting innocent children with human sexuality. You’ve become monsters instead of entertainers..

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.