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      In 2023, Movie Audiences Wanted Comfort, Not Superhero Spectacle

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      Movie audiences flocked to Taylor Swift, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” but were cooler toward returning superheroes like the Flash, Captain Marvel and Aquaman.Hollywood’s movie factories run on conventional wisdom — entrenched notions, based on experience, about what types of films are likely to pop at the global box office.This year, audiences turned many of those so-called rules on their heads.Superheroes have long been seen as the most reliable way to fill seats. But characters like Captain Marvel, the Flash, Ant-Man, Shazam and Blue Beetle failed to excite moviegoers. Over the weekend, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” which cost more than $200 million to make and tens of millions more to market, arrived to a disastrous $28 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada. Overseas moviegoers chipped in another $80 million.In the meantime, the biggest movie of the year at the box office, “Barbie,” with $1.44 billion in worldwide ticket sales, was directed by a woman, based on a very female toy and spray-painted pink — ingredients that most studios have long seen as limiting audience appeal. An old movie-industry maxim holds that women will go to a “guy” movie but not vice versa.“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” collected $1.36 billion, a second-place result that also stunned Hollywood; studios have a troubled history with game adaptations. “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour period drama about a physicist, rounded out the top three, taking in $952 million and contradicting the prevailing belief that, in the streaming era, films for grown-ups are not viable in theaters.“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” stunned the film industry by bringing in $1.36 billion.Nintendo/Nintendo/Universal Studios, via Associated Press“Without question, change is afoot — audiences are in a different mood,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “The country and the world are not in the same place. We’ve had seven years of divisive politics, a severe pandemic, two serious wars, climate change and inflation. Moviegoers seem less interested in being overwhelmed with spectacle and saving the universe than being spoken to, entertained and inspired.”The biggest box office surprises of the year fell into the “spoken to” category. “Sound of Freedom,” a crime drama that cost $15 million to make, catered to the far right, an audience largely ignored by Hollywood, and generated $248 million in ticket sales, on a par with “The Eras Tour,” which targeted Taylor Swift fans and also cost about $15 million.“Sound of Freedom” came from Angel Studios, an independent company in Provo, Utah, that supported the film with an unorthodox “Pay It Forward” program, which let supporters buy tickets online for those who otherwise might not see it. In a big break from Hollywood norms, Ms. Swift cut out the middle company (a studio) and made a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator.“Our phone has been dancing off the hooks since the day we announced the ‘Eras Tour’ project,” Adam Aron, AMC’s chief executive, told investors on a conference call in November, referring to “alternative content” opportunities.Comscore, which compiles box office data, projected on Sunday that North American ticket sales for the year would reach about $9 billion, a 20 percent increase from 2022. (Before the pandemic, North American theaters reliably sold about $11 billion in tickets annually.) The average price for an adult general admission ticket in the United States was $12.14, up from $11.75, according to EntTelligence, a research firm.Worldwide ticket sales are expected to exceed $33 billion, an increase of 27 percent, partly because of a surge in Latin America. (Before the pandemic, worldwide ticket sales easily exceeded $40 billion annually.)Hollywood’s climb back from the pandemic is expected to stall in 2024. With fewer movies scheduled for release — studio pipelines were disrupted by the recent strikes — ticket sales will decline 5 to 11 percent next year, depending on the market, according to projections from Gower Street Analytics, a box office research firm.Reading box-office tea leaves is like pontificating about symbolism in works of fiction: Any halfway plausible theory works. But studio bosses need something, anything, to guide them as they make billion-dollar judgment calls for the seasons ahead.Here are five takeaways from this year:Moviegoers want comfort.People reach for nostalgia in times of stress, and movies that reminded audiences of the past — while also managing to feel fresh — have been succeeding. “Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Wonka” and the retro-feeling “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” allowed people to revisit their childhoods. “Insidious: The Red Door” hit pay dirt by bringing back the franchise’s original stars.“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” could have tapped into nostalgia to become a hit. Instead, a huffing and puffing Harrison Ford, 81, simply reminded Indy fans that they, too, are getting old. “Dial of Destiny” cost Disney $295 million to make and took in a flaccid $384 million. (Theaters keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales.)Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan in “Creed III.”Eli Ade/MGMArt film has a pulse.Sophisticated dramas with modest budgets and aimed at older audiences have been showing signs of life after two years in the box office I.C.U.The streaming era has forever shifted the bulk of prestige film viewing to the home, analysts say. But theaters found a modicum of success in 2023 with offerings like “Past Lives,” a wistful drama with some Korean dialogue, and Hayao Miyazaki’s animated “The Boy and the Heron.” The bespoke “Asteroid City” managed $54 million.Early box office results have also been promising for Oscar-oriented films like “Poor Things,” a surreal science-fiction romance, and “American Fiction,” a satire about a writer who puts together a fake memoir that turns on racial stereotypes.Bigger is not better.For the past decade, Hollywood has kept audiences interested in sequels by making each installment more bloated and often nonsensical than the last. Bigger! Faster! More!That strategy may need rethinking — it’s just too expensive, analysts say, especially with Chinese moviegoers souring on American blockbusters. “Fast X,” the 10th movie in the “Fast and Furious” series, cost an estimated $340 million and took in $705 million worldwide, including $140 million in China. By comparison, “Furious 7” in 2015 cost $190 million and collected $1.5 billion, including $391 million in China.Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick.”Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesTom Cruise’s seventh “Mission: Impossible” spectacle, released in July in the wake of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” cost roughly $290 million to make and collected $568 million, including $49 million in China. The sixth “Mission: Impossible” in 2018 cost $178 million and generated $792 million, with Chinese ticket buyers chipping in $181 million.Increasingly, franchise sequels and spinoffs need to feel fresh to succeed. Lionsgate, for instance, delved deeper into the High Table underground crime organization in “John Wick: Chapter 4” and introduced “Hunger Games” fans to a new story line (and cast) in the prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” Both movies were hits. Lionsgate even revived its “Saw” horror franchise by shifting the narrative back in time.“Each of those movies did something different than the prior,” said Adam Fogelson, vice chair of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group. “It wasn’t just ‘spend more, make it bigger, make it louder and cram in more action.’”Some audience patterns remain intact.Horror continued to be a reliable performer, with “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “M3gan” starting new franchises for Universal and its Blumhouse affiliate. Together, the two films cost $32 million. They collected a combined $469 million. Also notable was “The Nun II,” which cost Warner Bros. about $22 million and took in $366 million.Superheroes may be down, but they’re not out. Marvel’s rollicking, well-established “Guardians of the Galaxy” series returned for a third chapter and generated $846 million against a $250 million budget. Sony’s bold, anime-influenced “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” cost an estimated $150 million and collected $691 million.Stars matter.The conventional wisdom in Hollywood has been that movie stars are essentially part of the past. A celebrity name above the title no longer carries that much weight with ticket buyers. The underlying “intellectual property” is what fills seats.People pay to see Barbie, not Margot Robbie.Except that Mattel and various studios tried for at least 20 years to turn the toy into a live-action movie star. It took Ms. Robbie in the role (and Ryan Gosling as Ken) to finally make it happen. Other movies that benefited from star power in 2023 included “Wonka,” with Timothée Chalamet, and “Creed III,” anchored by Michael B. Jordan.Stars don’t have heft? Try telling that to the producers of “Gran Turismo,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Dumb Money” and “Strays,” all of which disappointed at the box office and arrived when their casts were barred from promoting their work because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. More

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      ‘Occupied City’ Review: Mapping the Holocaust, Street by Street

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      In his four-and-half-hour documentary, the British director Steve McQueen charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation.Early in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary documentary “Occupied City,” the film cuts to the interior of the elegant main hall in Amsterdam’s grand Royal Concertgebouw. In World War II, the Nazi-German occupiers held events in the hall, but at some point in 1942 the names of the Jewish composers adorning it were covered. Concerts continued, but without Jewish composers, conductors, orchestra musicians, concertgoers and even names on walls.Not long after this section ends, “Occupied City” shifts to a new location, a nondescript, boarded-up storefront. This, the narrator explains, was the site of a cafe that, in 1940, was among the first in the city to ban Jews. Soon after, the movie cuts to another location and then to another and another. And so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address.In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director (whose earlier films include “12 Years a Slave”) explores the city’s past exclusively through images of quotidian Amsterdam life today — in and outside homes, in squares, on trams — that he shot over several years beginning in 2019. These 35-millimeter visuals are, in turn, accompanied by sounds that include voices, birdsong and so on recorded during the filming; fragments of music (some composed by Oliver Coates); and the narration (delivered in the English-language version with dry equanimity by Melanie Hyams, a British voice actor).McQueen’s decision to only use images of contemporary Amsterdam in the film is as effective as it is conceptually bold, though it takes time to fully grasp what he’s doing and why. Without ceremony, textual explanation or a flourish of introductory music, he drops you into the city’s gentle and clamorous bustle right from the get go, and there you remain even as the film hopscotches across Amsterdam, covering miles and years. The movie opens, for instance, with a daytime shot of a warmly lit hallway in what looks like an apartment, with a door opened onto a garden. It’s quiet save for the homey sounds of rustling, the metallic tinkling of what seems like silverware and some faintly babbling voices, perhaps from a radio or TV.An unidentified woman enters, and the narration — as it does throughout — begins with a recitation of an address, which grounds you. This was once the office of a printer-publisher who, with his wife and two sisters, died by suicide on May 15, 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated to Germany. As the woman onscreen opens a trapdoor, the narrator continues, recounting that while many Jews hoped to escape to England, “most could not find a boat willing to take them.” The dead man’s brother did escape, and he transferred the business to an employee, who helped Jews hide in the office. One hid for days “on top of the elevator.”McQueen continues this approach for the remainder of the film, though with striking variations that create linkages, by turns obvious and oblique. In one sunny segment, a cozy spell of pleasure and play becomes a ghost story as you watch people skating on a frozen canal outside a building where a woman sheltered Jewish residents and resistance fighters. Elsewhere, though, McQueen folds in images without commentary, notably in scenes of people protesting against pandemic lockdowns, met by police with water cannons. These images raise the specter of state violence even as the film — with its relentless, harrowing narration — puts the protesters and their freedoms into historical context.As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force. A pilot who shot down German planes before the Netherlands capitulated lived at one address; a 10-month-old baby was taken from another address to a police station; the following year, the baby was murdered at Auschwitz. Amsterdam, McQueen repeatedly reminds you, is occupied by both the living and the dead, an obvious point that takes on specific, deeply profound resonance as the film unfolds. Most of Netherland’s Jewish population, as the narrator reminds you, died in the Holocaust.Among these, alas and of course, was Anne Frank, who’s mentioned a few times in “Occupied City.” It’s notable, I think, that McQueen doesn’t include Prinsengracht 263, the building where her father’s employees kept the business running while she, her family and four others hid in the annex until they were betrayed and eventually deported to Auschwitz. The building is now a tourist attraction, which might be one reason that McQueen avoids it. I imagine that he also wanted to distance the film from the popular, commercially palatable conception of Frank, the one that seizes on her diary’s most famous line — “in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart” — and can attenuate the barbarism of her murder.McQueen’s film is “informed,” as the credits put it, by Bianca Stigter’s huge 2019 book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” which she described in an interview with the BBC as “a kind of travel guide to the past of Amsterdam.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, and McQueen, who’s British, are married and live in the Netherlands.) She wrote and helped produce “Occupied City,” and she also directed “A Lengthening: Three Minutes” (2022), a feature-length documentary about a segment of a home movie that an American tourist, David Kurtz, shot in 1938 of a Jewish community in a Polish village. Using only images from this fragment, Stigter movingly reclaims a lost world, face by face, second by second.Time is stretched differently in “Occupied City” and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past. It’s instructive, for one, that he hasn’t shaped the narration chronologically. Instead, as the film shifts from address to address, and as the seasons and people pass by onscreen, the narration skips from 1940 to 1944 and back again, pausing in moments before and after the war. For McQueen, history isn’t a neat little package that can be experienced at a safe remove and then forgotten. Here, history is in every wintry park and sunlit room because it is insistently present and very much alive.Occupied CityRated PG-13. Running time: 4 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. 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      ‘The Crime is Mine’ Review: Courtroom Tango

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      In this showbiz screwball, an aspiring actress and her lawyer best friend spin a murder accusation into a shot at fame.Filmmakers know that the courtroom is a hell of a place to put on a show — and this year, French movies like “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Saint Omer” have put women on trial to dramatize, not so much their crimes, but the gendered biases that make them look criminal.“The Crime is Mine,” a snappy showbiz screwball, takes this feminist conceit and adds stardust and firecrackers to the mix. Directed by François Ozon — a French director known for his winking subversions of genre — the film puts a twist on the trope of the spotlight-seeking murderess: the women in the film want us to know they did it.Freely adapted from a 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil and set in a vintage Paris, the film revolves around the roommates Madeleine (Nadia Terezkiewicz) and Pauline (Rebecca Marder), two dead-broke ingénues angling for a break. In the opening scene, Madeleine, a blonde bombshell who dreams of her name in lights, comes home distraught after a slimy theater producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) attempts to rape her. And Madeleine’s beau, a Buster Keaton look-alike, announces his plans to marry a wealthy heiress and keep Madeleine as his mistress. Hours later, the cops swing by — Montferrand is dead and the revolver on Madeleine’s dresser looks awfully fishy.The lofty investigating magistrate (Fabrice Luchini, marvelously ludicrous) thinks he’s got it figured out: Lowlife bohemian that she is, Madeleine must’ve killed Montferrand after he rejected her bid for a part. Pauline, a bi-curious attorney, steps in: no, no, it was actually self-defense.Several versions of what might have happened are shown in grainy black-and-white, like reels in a silent film. Ultimately, the truth is what plays best before a crowd. In court, aided by a script written by Pauline, Madeleine performs the part of the feminist hero to roaring applause, front-page glory and job offers for the juiciest parts.Odette Chaumette (Isabelle Huppert), a once-famous silent film star with a Norma-Desmond-size chip on her shoulder (and a showy persona to match), appears, demanding a cut of the spoils. The always-magnetic Huppert has played her share of tabloid murderesses, but, here, she trades out her trademark visceral steeliness for a coy and irreverent narcissism. The threat she poses to Madeleine and Pauline’s hard-won fortune carries the film’s even cheekier second act.“The Crime is Mine” is the epitome of a comfort film, decked out in old-Hollywood nostalgia and unfolding at an auctioneer’s clip. Its fun and games are deceptively smart — all the more because the women know their angles so triumphantly well.The Crime is MineNot Rated. In French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Boys in the Boat’ Review: Taking Up Oars

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      George Clooney’s film covers a high water point when the University of Washington’s junior varsity crew padded all the way to the 1936 Olympics.“The Boys in the Boat,” directed by George Clooney, is an old-fashioned movie about old-fashioned moxie. Based on a section of Daniel James Brown’s 2013 nonfiction book of the same name, and set to a plucky score by Alexandre Desplat, it’s a handsome, forthright flashback to a high water point of the Depression Era when the University of Washington’s junior varsity crew padded all the way to the 1936 Olympics. Approximately 300 million radio listeners tuned in to hear live sporting news from Berlin, and the film cuts to what feels like all of them rooting on these tall, ruddy and heroic amateurs. I’ve never seen a movie with this much applause — the extras must have been as winded as the athletes.The United States eight-man rowing team had won every gold medal since 1920, but the screenwriter Mark L. Smith glides past that fact to emphasize that these particular boys were at a disadvantage. Unlike the prestigious Ivy League squads, the Huskies were mostly middle and working class landlubbers who’d only taken up oars to pay for school. Our lead, Joe Rance (Callum Turner), trudges to campus from a Hooverville; later, the coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), pokes around his crew’s lockers to count the holes in their shoes. Before a pivotal regatta, a radio sportscaster (John Ammirati) bellows the obvious theme: “A clash of character! Old money versus no money at all! It’s a boat full of underdogs representing an underdog nation!”The script is as subtle as a bonk on the nose, and the editing repeats every beat twice-over in broad pantomime and meaningful looks. Despite some tender philosophizing from the racing shell designer George Pocock (Peter Guinness), we never quite get an insight into exactly how these eight undergrads melded into a winning team. The main oarsmen, Don Hume (Jack Mulhern) and Rance, rarely speak, and the others hardly register. Thank heavens for Luke Slattery as the coxswain Bobby Moch, who straps on a hands-free leather and metal megaphone — a contraption that, to modern eyes, looks like a torture device for mumblers — and instantly screams some life into the picture.With the female characters sidelined to one-note cheerleaders, Clooney puts his focus on the fantastic production design. The pennant budget alone must have cost a fair penny, but he even includes an assembly line scene of those pennants being made. Just as faithfully, Clooney acknowledges how little politics registered to these jocks. In Berlin, they become passingly acquainted with Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes), but when Adolf Hitler (Daniel Philpott) pops up in a Seattle newsreel, no one bothers to boo.So it’s for our sake that the film gives us the Führer pounding his fist in fury that the Yanks might one-up Germany in his moment of triumph — and for our kicks that the cinematographer Martin Ruhe bests a shot from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary “Olympia,” a dynamic redo of Moch heaving in and out of the frame, his megaphone eclipsing everything but his hair and lips.The Boys in the BoatRated PG-13 for cursing and cigarettes. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Review: A Whole Civilization in the Classroom

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      An idealistic teacher in a German school meets reality, and it’s messier than she could have imagined.Teaching, like parenting or skiing or governing or making a souffle, is an activity you can learn about from books and classes and movies, but only really understand on the job. Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a new teacher in a German school, seems to have arrived in her sixth-grade classroom armed with theories and techniques for gaining the trust and respect of her students. But she’s about to discover, as many a teacher has before, that actually managing a classroom is not as easy as they make it seem on TV.In some ways, Ilker Catak’s “The Teachers’ Lounge” (which is Germany’s international feature film entry to the Academy Awards) feels like a direct rebuttal to the glut of so-called magical teacher movies, which abound throughout cinema. In that genre (think of “Freedom Writers,” “Mona Lisa Smile” or “Dead Poets Society”), an idealistic teacher encounters reticence and struggle but manages to break through to her students and make a difference in their lives. Teachers do this, of course, but if you only watched Hollywood’s rendering of the classroom you might think stirring success is inevitable.But Ms. Nowak’s good intentions are thwarted at every turn. (Everyone uses honorifics in this school, including faculty.) Her students are a typical bunch, a mix of high achievers, do-gooders, slackers and cut-ups. Someone in the school, however, is stealing from others, and nobody can pin down who the perpetrator might be. Ms. Nowak is horrified when another teacher asks student council representatives to snitch, or at least say who they think might be doing it, especially when Ali (Can Rodenbostel) is the one they accuse. He’s the son of Turkish immigrants, and when his parents arrive to explain to the administrators why it wasn’t him, unsubtle racism pervades the room.This is where it becomes clear that “The Teachers’ Lounge,” despite its realism, is strongest on the allegorical level. The modern classroom has been described by philosophers and theorists as carceral, an institution in which children are indoctrinated into disciplinary systems that will govern their whole lives: in the workplace, in the justice system, in the public square. You must arrive on time, follow rules and schedules, respond to the buzzer, submit to evaluations and repeat it all tomorrow. This school — or at least Ms. Nowak’s part of it — prides itself on its democratic fairness, its freedom of speech and the press, its attitude of self-governance.But of course, it’s really the teachers who are in charge here, and elements of contemporary society seep in from all sides. Misinformation flies around, helped along by slanted journalism. Teachers demand students open their wallets in a random inspection, telling them that “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” Phones and parents’ group chats create a surveillance society that Ms. Nowak detests, but cannot escape; eventually, suspecting the theft may be coming from somewhere other than the classroom, she sets up her own form of surveillance, with catastrophic results.Taking on the uneasy complexity of a progressive modern society, and the friction produced when pluralism and an insistence on order and obedience collide, is a bold move, and “The Teachers’ Lounge” pulls it off with a sense of tension that makes the whole thing play like a thriller. There’s a level on which it’s darkly funny, especially if you’ve spent time around preteens. Every time Ms. Nowak thinks she has a solution, it goes sideways, in part because you cannot count on sixth-graders to just go along with suggestions from adults. Trying to build classroom solidarity after an outburst, she selects six students to complete a familiar team-building exercise of the kind that might delight 8-year-olds and mildly irritate adults on a company retreat. Here, though, it ends in predictable bedlam.A society is not very easy to keep in harmony, and a fully democratic attempt to keep the peace in any group is bound to result in a tug of war between authoritarian and even fascist principles on the one hand and unfettered chaos on the other. Catak places that struggle in a classroom, but it’s clear that like other European directors (including Michael Haneke and the brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne), he’s slyly telling a story about a society much, much larger than the kind found on a campus.Meanwhile, the students — who are Zoomers, after all — are tuned into the issues around them and ready to fight back. They organize. They refuse to comply. They denounce censorship. They talk about practicing solidarity against “measures otherwise found in rogue regimes” and the “structural racisms that our school, like others, can’t escape.” Their power is limited, but they know how to talk about it. They have learned well from their teachers. But have their teachers learned the lesson, too?The Teachers’ LoungeRated PG-13; teachers and students behaving like citizens. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Watch an Unusual Family Reunion in ‘All of Us Strangers’

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      The director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh narrates a sequence from his film, starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In this scene from “All of Us Strangers,” a man goes back to his childhood home and meets with his parents. The only wrinkle is that the two have been dead for 30 years.The sequence features Andrew Scott as Adam, as well as Jamie Bell and Claire Foy playing the long lost parents.In his narration of the moment, the film’s screenwriter and director, Andrew Haigh, noted that he filmed it in his childhood home and that it was a magical experience to get to shoot there. “It felt like a haunted house,” he said.While Haigh said he wanted to play the scene with tenderness, he also “wanted the audience to be unsure of what we were seeing. Are they ghosts? Are they manifestations of his subconscious? Is it a fantasy? And I wanted to play with those different elements, so it felt like it could be all of those things, and sort of keep making you ask questions about what is real and what is not real.”Read the “All of Us Strangers” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More