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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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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: New Year’s Eve Specials and ‘Time Bomb Y2K’

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      Several networks air countdown-to-2024 specials. And HBO releases a documentary about mass hysteria in the final days of 1999.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 24-31. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMariah Carey and Billy Porter during last year’s “Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All!”James Devaney/CBSMARIAH CAREY: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL! 9 p.m. on CBS. In November 2022, Mariah Carey went on a mini-tour performing a show with some holiday songs, featuring (obviously and most importantly) her hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The concert she performed at Madison Square Garden is returning to small screens to liven up the Christmas mood after all the presents have been unwrapped, the spiked hot cocoas are kicking in and the tension with a relative over a politics has eased to a silent simmer.TuesdayTHE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). If you’ve ever wondered how the prince actually got put into the nutcracker, Alan Cumming is here to tell you. This version of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” takes the story from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 book, and Cumming recounts it as an orchestra plays along.WednesdayTHE 46TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. These honors took place on Dec. 3 in Washington, but now we get to see snippets of the ceremony and some of the performances. This year’s honorees are Dionne Warwick, Billy Crystal, Queen Latifah, Renée Fleming and Barry Gibb; as is tradition, each star was treated to special performances by others, including Missy Elliott, Rob Reiner, Dove Cameron and Michael Bublé.Robin Roberts on the set of ABC News’s “Year 2023” special, which airs on Wednesday.Jennifer Pottheiser/ABCTHE YEAR: 2023 9 p.m. on ABC. This recap show, hosted by Robin Roberts and other ABC News anchors, dives into some big moments from 2023, such as the Eras Tour, Barbenheimer, the actors’ and writers’ strikes and the “Vanderpump” Scandoval. Ronald Gladden, our sweet Everyman from “Jury Duty,” Missy Elliott (she’s everywhere this week!) and some of the cast of “Dancing With the Stars” are set to make appearances to discuss a year that, for me at least, has simultaneously felt like it just started and also won’t end.Thursday27 DRESSES (2008) 3 p.m. on FX. Now that Christmas is behind us, I can get back to my regularly scheduled romantic comedy viewings. Katherine Heigl stars as Jane, who has a crush on her boss, George (Edward Burns), and also happens to be a hopeless romantic who religiously reads the vows section of the newspaper. When her pesky younger sister comes to town (my words, not hers) and starts dating George, Jane has to decide just how good of a sister she wants to be. James Marsden also stars as Kevin, a wedding reporter, who is somehow charming despite the fact that he always pops up at the most inconvenient times.FridayTHE WORLD ACCORDING TO FOOTBALL 8 p.m. on Showtime. This show, hosted by Trevor Noah, is closing out its run with an episode about the football — or soccer for us Americans — culture in Qatar. The episode will look specifically at the $220 billion the country, which drew criticism over its treatment of migrant workers and its anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies, spent hosting the 2022 World Cup.SaturdayA still from “Time Bomb Y2K.”Brian Langley/HBOTIME BOMB Y2K 10 p.m. on HBO. At the end of the 1990s, a fear started to arise about a computer bug that came to be called “Y2K.” According to the theory, one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, computer software could malfunction because the last two numerals of the year were 00, which could wreak havoc such as power failures, grounded planes and inoperative life support machines. People were loading up on guns and water; President Bill Clinton appointed a Y2K czar. In the end, computers easily adjusted to the 2000 date stamp. But this new documentary examines the concerns of the time through interviews with computer experts, survivalists, scholars, militia groups, conservative Christians and pop stars.SundayCNN NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE WITH ANDERSON COOPER AND ANDY COHEN 8 p.m. on CNN. To tequila or not to tequila — that has been the question surrounding this special for the past couple of years. This will be Cooper and Cohen’s seventh year doing this show together, but the executives at CNN banned them from drinking alcohol during the live broadcast last year, to Cohen’s vocal displeasure. It is unclear if the two old friends will be slinging back shots, but what we do know is that Jeremy Renner, Neil Patrick Harris, the Jonas Brothers and Enrique Iglesias are set to make appearances.DICK CLARK’S PRIMETIME NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2024 starting at 8 p.m. on ABC. The traditional ball drop may be in New York City, but this New Year’s Eve show takes it all around the world. NewJeans is set to perform in South Korea, Post Malone will be at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas and Ivy Queen will be live in Puerto Rico. And of course, cameras will be rolling in Times Square to count down to midnight. More

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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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      The Great Experiment That Is ‘The Color Purple’

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      A new adaptation shows how rich Alice Walker’s novel is and how the source material can lend itself to unconventional storytelling.Last month, I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Black-directed films in one week.I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways.Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; and Bazawule looks at a 40-year period in the life of a Black woman living through Jim Crow and the Jazz Age.That chance week of movies also allowed me to reflect on the unprecedented journey and ultimate cinematic triumph of “The Color Purple.” Starting in rural Georgia in the early 20th century, the story follows Celie, an orphaned girl who is repeatedly violated and twice impregnated by her Pa, a man she considers her father. She is forced to leave her younger sister, Nettie, when Pa marries her off to a much older widow, Albert, whom she knows only as Mister.Beyoncé on a Toronto tour stop. “Renaissance,” which she also directed, arrives in an ecosystem partly created by the first adaptation of “The Color Purple.”The New York TimesCentered on Celie’s finding her voice, discovering her sexuality in her relationship with the blues singer, Shug Avery and journeying to forgiveness, selfhood and community with other women, like her daughter-in-law, Sofia, Walker’s novel earned her the National Book Award and made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The movie earned 11 Oscar nominations; then came a Tony Award for the 2005 Broadway show and two for the 2015 revival, making this one of the most prized narratives in American history.Nowadays, it is hard to believe that when Steven Spielberg released his adaptation in 1985, he and Walker had to cross a picket line of protesters to attend the premiere. But his drama was met with great controversy. While researching my book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” I discovered that many critics, the majority of whom were Black male writers or political leaders, had accused the filmmakers of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as hyperviolent through the characterizations of Pa, Albert and Harpo (Albert’s oldest son) and the abuse they inflicted on Celie and Sofia. Other critics took umbrage at Celie’s lesbian relationship as undermining traditional Black family values.Led by Black organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., the Nation of Islam and the now defunct Coalition Against Black Exploitation, the campaign against that movie was bitter and divisive. In turn, its defenders, including many Black women who saw themselves in Walker’s characters, felt pitted against others in their own community. The pushback was so effective that the film won no Academy Awards. (It lost the top Oscar to “Out of Africa.”)“Without a doubt the controversy is the reason we didn’t take home a single award that night,” Oprah Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original and later served as a producer of both the stage and movie musicals, told me in an interview in 2018. “I was puzzled and frustrated by the N.A.A.C.P.”And yet the film was groundbreaking, changing our understanding of what was possible for Black actors and stories in Hollywood. Ultimately, it paved the way for these new works by Beyoncé, DuVernay and Bazawule. And unlike its predecessor, Bazawule’s musical version, opening in theaters on Christmas Day, premieres alongside other films with predominantly Black casts, and so his “Color Purple” is free to reimagine and experiment with form and conventional musical conceit.Through Celie’s vivid inner life, the dynamic songs and choreography, and playful cinematic references, this version honors its literary, Broadway and Hollywood forerunners while successfully updating how we see Alice Walker’s characters and, even more surprisingly, innovating how we can experience the movie musical genre itself.Arriving in a different feminist moment, Bazawule is not bedeviled by the sexist and homophobic concerns that plagued the first movie. And yet, his most memorable scenes subtly take on those past critiques while adding new cinematic layers to Celie’s story. Early in the film, Celie’s active imagination — depicted in the novel through her letter-writing — is shown as both a coping mechanism and a surrealistic narrative detour. When the teenage Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) discovers that her children are alive after Pa convinced her that they had died, she dreams of avoiding the drudgery of her life.In the number “She Be Mine,” Celie imagines that she has left Pa’s store and walks through a Southern landscape that is paradoxically lush and marred by the exploitation of Black laborers. As she passes a group of Black men working on a chain gang and Black laundry women washing clothes by a waterfall, we recognize that her escape is limited and illusory and that she is as oppressed in her home as they are in their work.But when adult Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) tends to the bodacious blues singer Shug (Taraji P. Henson), her interiority takes over even more. As Shug falls asleep in the bathtub while listening to a record, Celie suddenly imagines a gramophone that’s larger than life, and standing on a spinning vinyl album that doubles as a concert stage, she belts an empowering song.Later, Bazawule expands his surreal aesthetic when Celie and Shug go to the movies. Sitting in the segregated balcony section as they watch “The Flying Ace,” Richard E. Norman’s 1926 silent with an all-Black cast, Celie imagines them in a different movie — one in color in which they are dressed in ball gowns and singing to each other in front a Duke Ellington-like jazz band. When we return to the present, they kiss, cementing their relationship and finally enabling Celie’s fantasy to come true. In 1985, that kiss was brief and the cause of much public debate. With access to her inner thoughts in 2023, Celie’s hopes and desires become our own: We recognize that her intimacy with Shug is long-awaited and fulfilling.Taraji P. Henson and Barrino-Taylor working on “The Color Purple” with Blitz Bazawule. Eli Ade/Warner Bros. PicturesAs Celie finds her voice, rejects the abuse from Albert and gains more and more agency, her flights of fancy seem to disappear. But, by the time we reach the showstopper “Miss Celie’s Pants,” in which she, Shug and other women celebrate Celie’s separation from Albert and her newfound entrepreneurialism, the bold color palette, uplifting music and lively dancing associated with her dreamlike sequences dominate.Unlike other movie musicals in which the songs distract from the dramatic action, the numbers and the composer Kris Bowers’s score are woven together in a way that makes the soundscape feel like the film’s true setting. This might be because Bazawule was one of several filmmakers who collaborated with Beyoncé on “Black Is King,” the visual companion to the soundtrack for the live-action “Lion King” (2021); he understands how to make an entire film sing rather than string together a series of scenes.And yet the original song Bazawule co-wrote for the movie, “Workin’,” for Celie’s stepson, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), stands apart for giving this man more multidimensionality than he had in the previous adaptations.In this scene, Harpo rejects Albert’s authority by building his own house, and it’s a harbinger of his evolution. He goes from being a sensitive young adult to an abusive husband to a man who finally breaks his family’s intergenerational cycle of violence against women. Walker’s novel partly shows this metamorphosis, but Bazawule fully realizes it here, nullifying any lingering controversies about Harpo’s fate or flaws in his representation.Growth, I suspect, was always the point. It took a while for Winfrey and Scott Sanders to convince their fellow producer Spielberg that the Broadway musical could lead to a new adaptation. “I didn’t really know if ‘Color Purple’ had another movie in it,” he told Variety. That Bazawule breathes new life into these characters reminds us of what a masterpiece Celie’s story remains for us today. More

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      in Theater

      Fantasia Barrino-Taylor on ‘The Color Purple’ and a Painful Role

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      Throughout the six months of production on the new film adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, who plays the protagonist Celie Johnson, often called on God for strength.“There were times that I just felt like I’m not going to make it. I cannot do it. I would cry going to set. I would cry leaving set,” she admitted sadly. “I would talk to God, and I would tell him, ‘You’ve got to make this make sense. Make it make sense. There’s got to be something out of this.’ It was so hard.”The film, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, details the transformative journey of a rural Georgia woman in the early 20th century. First adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, then reinterpreted for Broadway in 2005, it has once again been retrofitted as a musical, complete with dance. The role of Celie, however, remains consistent — one of inveterate trauma, stretched over decades of abuse by first her stepfather, then her husband, until she manufactures the strength to stand on her own. Onstage, when Barrino-Taylor took over the part in the original Broadway run, and then on film, that meant enduring endless verbal attacks, physical abuse and lovelessness, which was difficult to manage on a daily basis. Barrino-Taylor would often leave the set deflated and bruised from doing her own stunts.Before production began, she had “started traumatic therapy, where you tap into the younger person, the younger Fantasia, and you try to heal things that you either suppress or are literally forgotten,” she said in a video interview. A wife, mother of four, grandmother and owner of two dogs, Barrino-Taylor, now 39, was committed to being her best self to those around her. “I wanted to take this healing journey. So, I had to stop therapy, and I had to allow Celie to be my life coach. Girl, that wasn’t easy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More