"The Fall Guy" and the Miserable State of the 2024-2025 Box Office

It's looking grim out there.

This is not a review of David Leitch’s latest action flick, The Fall Guy (2024).

That is because on principle I do not review films I do not finish watching, and The Fall Guy is the first movie I’ve seen in theaters that I walked out on.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever sat through in the theaters, in fact it looks like the director and actors are having quite a bit of fun throughout. Stuntmen truly are the unsung heroes of Hollywood, and the attention to detail in how the stunt work is portrayed is commendable.

It’s just that only a few minutes in, in a theater filled only by myself and my friend, I started to feel an itch on the back of my neck; an itch that was signifying: You’re seriously going to waste your evening watching this? This is the average sane moviegoer should get when he realizes that he is not, in fact, watching cinema, but content that has been churned out by a host of execs that needed to fill a date on their release calendar.

Speaking of release calendars, the lineup for the rest of the year is…something.

Here I have compiled all the significant major releases for the rest of the year. Does this make anyone excited?

I want to be hopeful about Furiosa, but there’s no way WB gave George Miller as long a leash as they did on Fury Road, where he had essentially free license to create possibly the greatest action movie of all time in the middle of South Africa. Deadpool & Wolverine seems fun but that’s really depressing when the best-looking movie of the summer is a Marvel movie.

The only films that I’m really excited about on this list are Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, the only two that, George Miller aside, have real talent behind the camera.

And the next year doesn’t look that much better…

Note: This calendar is very much subject to change

This is an especially interesting slate for Disney. They’ve dumped their troubled Captain America film to February and their equally if not more troubled Snow White film to March: both films were supposed to have released in 2024 and 2023, respectively, before getting delayed for significant reshoots. Then their tentpole summer films are Thunderbolts* (that asterisk doesn’t lead to a footnote, it’s literally in the film’s title) and Pixar’s Elio, both films that were also delayed due to creative troubles behind-the-scenes. Later that year you have Blade, a film that has gone through FIVE DRAFTS FROM FIVE DIFFERENT WRITERS since development started. James Cameron is really going to be carrying the company right at the end there with his Avatar 3.

In a recent piece, culture critic Ted Gioia (highly recommend subscribing to his Substack) dives into Jerry Seinfeld’s recent quote from an interview with GQ:

The movie business is over. Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives.

And when asked what he thinks has taken over our lives instead he replies:

Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?

Gioia gives some useful statistics in his article, including this one (which I hope he doesn’t mind me borrowing here):

Yikes.

Gioia points to signs all over: Disney stock collapsing, Paramount’s attempts to sell itself to the highest Silicon Valley bidder, and the ultimate surge of AI to “enhance” content.

His solution?

Here’s an idea! Let’s go in the opposite direction—embrace human creativity, quirky filmmakers, charismatic actors, bold screenplays, rule-breaking stories.

That worked before. It happened in movies in the 1970s. It led to a golden age in TV, circa 2000. And if you go back far enough, you can see that the same risk taking created huge successes in drama, novels, musicals and other creative idioms in the past.

Hollywood has all the ingredients to make this happen. Right now, they still have all the talent necessary to revitalize cinema as a creative art form—most of the key people live within a few miles of those Hollywood studios. If you gave them freedom to work on ambitious, mind-blowing projects, I’m convinced that they would rise to the occasion.

Great art is built on risk-taking. It is the movement from contemplation to act, from potency to actualization. The studios are dying right before our very eyes. AMC is basically the only major theater chain that has avoided major bankruptcy and that’s really only because of the “meme stock” shenanigans of 2021.

So what’s a poor cinephile to do? Respond with your wallets. Be selective in what you see, do the research, read reviews from reviewers you trust.

And when good cinema/television drops, support it! Every year, there’s still a handful of good- sometimes great- ones that slip through the cracks.

Here’s a list of some of the best films/shows to drop in the past two years:

FILMS:

• Godzilla Minus One (2023)

• Blackberry (2023)

• John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

• The Northman (2022)

• The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

SHOWS:

• The Bear (2022-)

• Andor (2022-)

• Better Call Saul (2015-2022)

• The Rehearsal (2022)

• Severance (2022-)

Have you seen most of these? Probably not, but most are available on streaming to be checked out right now. Each of these films/shows listed represents the vision of true auteurs, whether they be Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Martin McDonagh (Banshees), Tony Gilroy (Andor), or even Ben Stiller (Severance). Each of these directors/producers has learned how to navigate the system; how to assert creative control over their projects and are masters of their crafts. It’s not that any of them have perfect filmographies, but they are the ones who are still trying, year after year, to produce something great and have the experience to back up their wild, crazy visions for their art.

There’s still potentially some good stuff on the horizon too, a lot of which have been funded through unorthodox or self-financed means as opposed to a studio, including:

• Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection, Part One

• Terrence Malick’s The Way of the Wind

• Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints

• Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn (and honestly everything else that exiled Pixar/Disney animation president John Lasseter is cooking up at Skydance Animation)

• Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis

• Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2

• Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

• Whatever Quentin Tarantino makes as his 10th and final film

Competence, craftsmanship, and care. These are the keys to creating any great art: art that will endure long after the last decrepit studio has fallen, subsumed by Apple, Google, or Meta.

Let’s support the craftspeople and not the crap.