All hail avatar! How event movies try to bring back box office revenue | James Cameron

IIf there’s anyone who still knows how to fill a movie theater, it’s James Cameron. After breaking the world box office record in 1997 with Titanic, and then again 12 years later with Avatar, his work has become the pinnacle of the big-screen spectacle.

His latest offering, Avatar: Fire and Ash, arrives under radically different circumstances. With several years between us and the pandemic, it’s clear that the theatrical box office likely won’t go back to what it was: The 2025 U.S. box office total currently stands at $7.6 billion (down from $11.3 billion in 2019); Global revenues are expected to be approximately $34.1 billion, a 13% decline from pre-Covid times. More onus on Cameron’s bloated Smurfs to bring in year-end box office jockeys. And hopefully we’ll provide some further pointers on the magic elixir needed to break Netflix’n’chill’s stranglehold and bring movie theaters back.

Broadcast entertainment has the upper hand. As Netflix and its partners often have a rushed theatrical release, or cancel it altogether, for their major films, traditional studios are under increasing pressure to get their productions to digital platforms. The pre-pandemic 90-day “theatrical window,” during which films were exclusive to theaters, is now 45 days, if they’re lucky. Universal was the first to break with tradition: In 2020, it began releasing films that failed to break $50 million at the box office to premium video on demand (PVOD) after 17 days. Keanu’s collective “woah” was the only possible response to Warner Bros. dumping The Matrix Resurrections — a beloved big-screen IP, if you’ve ever seen one — by releasing it simultaneously on HBO Max in December 2021.

In the face of this digital “content” – excuse me, Silicon Valley – how does Hollywood now decide what is cinema-worthy? What executives are looking for — at least at Sony, according to one of the partner producers I spoke with recently — is “theatricality.” By this term, he says, the company means films that contain “the urgent need to get people to leave the comfort of their homes.” Figuring out the meaning of urgency — or “theatrical intent,” to use marketing parlance — is Hollywood’s current obsession.

For example, Tom Cruise interprets urgency literally, relying on personal risks in the form of old-fashioned, non-computer-programmed stunts to attract gamblers. It worked for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, the No. 2 film worldwide that year ($1.5 billion), but not so much for the underperforming final two installments of the Mission: Impossible series (both earned less than $600 million worldwide). His preaching of real thrills in real cinemas is one way of defining the play – although the danger is in an approach that relies solely on fading muscle memory of blockbusters’ past. But Cameron’s version of technology-driven cinema is no foolproof guarantee – especially for sequels, such as Fire and Ashes, which generally produce diminishing returns for US audiences.

With their recent successes rooted in established lineages, both men appear to be the exceptions that prove the new rule of box office volatility. Ironically, the on-screen exception is the canon of blockbuster filmmaking in the heyday of the 1980s and 1990s: exceptional faces (A-list stars) engaged in extraordinary feats (can’t-miss story), creating demand through scarcity (exclusive cinema release).

The hype around something like Harrison Ford’s thriller “The Fugitive” seems quaint now — but it was the definition of an expensive event movie in 1993. Framed as a criminal and put into extreme, unrelenting danger, good old Harrison Ford, with the short, sharp shock of Tommy Lee Jones, was a must-see show. The film retains enough verve to make it a consistently streaming catalogue. But its 21st-century equivalent – ​​something like Ripple Ridge – could be considered lacking in theatricality.

The various traditional engines — IP, superior visual effects, stars, sharp storytelling — can still collectively generate a play. But this is becoming more difficult, as many of these pillars appear to be individually shaky. Much of the intellectual property rights have gone through several washes, although some pristine areas remain (Warner has worked effectively with the Dune films and this year’s blockbuster – $1 billion worldwide – Minecraft movie). The ubiquity of visual effects, and the artificial appearance of much of the action, detract from the miraculous appeal that it should ideally serve. The shock and awe revealed by the Brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park seems so far away.

On the star front, the post-’90s conundrum persists: There’s no guarantee that newer celebrities, like Margot Robbie and Timothée Chalamet, will enjoy any consistent box office appeal when they’re not playing established entities like Barbie or Harley Quinn, Paul Atreides or Bob Dylan. At the level of blockbuster films, Hollywood now only trusts its employees when they are protected by the right intellectual property; The setup that made Spider-Man: No Way Home reunites the web-slingers ever in Spider-Man: No Way Home, with Tom Holland teaming up with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, one of the biggest theatrical hits of the pandemic era (nearly $2 billion worldwide).

At the same time, accurate storytelling is arguably being sacrificed in favor of the intellectual property packaging that the film industry prefers to trust to generate heat for theatrical releases. Too many blockbuster plots — sprawling over endless extensions or referencing the wider extended universe — now devolve into daytime soap-level convolutions, rather than delivering indelible events on screen.

The endless double-crossings and alliances of the “Fast & Furious family,” the equally disturbing office machinations in Ethan Hunt’s “Mission: Impossible Squad,” and the brooding post-mortem group therapy in Avengers: Endgame after the snap of Thanos’ finger — very little of this feels significantly purposeful or cruel in the context of blockbusters like Back to the Future or Mad Max: Fury Road. The incentive to bloat a series – prolong it with flabby stories and unnecessary sequels, like The Hobbit or Mission: Impossible – is very tempting.

As Hollywood struggles to define the right elements for cinema, there is a growing recognition that live theater streaming is not a zero-sum game. To put it bluntly: “The better it does in theaters, the better it does on streaming,” Joe Early, head of Disney+ and Hulu, recently told the New York Times. That’s why, for example, Amazon showed its $250 million Dwayne Johnson comedy Red One in 4,000 theaters in the United States; Although it didn’t break even ($185 million), its long marketing period helped propel it to become the No. 1 film in the streaming world. Two-thirds of the top 10 English-language movies weekly on Netflix since 2022 have been released in theaters.

This is all the more reason why the industry needs new sources of play. The first is to redefine event films as those that make a novel event like a cinematic journey, a strategy that a number of successful post-pandemic films have exploited. The “choose your camp” juggle between Barbie ($1.44 billion worldwide) and Oppenheimer ($975 million) that launched on the same weekend in July 2023 — and which was dubbed Oppenheimer — was a win-win situation for both.

Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.3 billion) used a different approach to audience engagement, with radiant levels of bantering banter drawing moviegoers into the on-screen party atmosphere. Capitalizing on the participatory atmosphere of live entertainment is the goal of the Broadway-adapting industrial complex, hoping to release the energy of musical theater into cinema; The two villain films have grossed an impressive total ($759 million/$223 million and counting) this way.

But these are isolated events. Fortunately, children’s movies released during the holidays still seem untouchable, as confirmed by Zootopia 2’s record breaking Thanksgiving weekend. What else could help secure the future of cinema? Properly serving theatrical audiences means a wider reach for releases — and the likes of Sinners ($90 million budget) and Weapons ($38 million) this year reminded us that mid- and middle-budget contenders, if sharply conceived, can still achieve awareness as capable as tentpole releases.

There are signs that this renewed adventure is extending to lower budgets as well. Instead of smaller streamers flooding in as loss leaders to get subscriptions, there’s a growing desire to let less expensive streamers turn a profit in theaters (although studios only get a 50% cut there, versus 80% from PVOD). Paramount in particular has been more vocal than most studios about its commitment to a broader slate of theatrical releases. For example, the 2022 horror film Smile was intended for online streaming, but after outperforming in demos, it earned $217 million on a $17 million budget in theaters.

More diverse offerings are good news, of course, and enhance the overall appeal of cinemas. But sustaining such a reach means tightly controlling budgets: $42 million made the remake of The Naked Gun viable (and profitable); Battle After Battle – although a masterpiece – seems reckless at $130-175 million.

Movie theaters were once palaces of dreams, full of dramatic curtains and lighting, with names like Million Dollar Theater, Lou Rialto, and Kino Bubble. I went there to walk in Fantasia. Recapturing that magic seems like a long shot in an era where movie theaters are mostly Haribo-covered industrial sheds where people rerun their favorite OnlyFans while Rocket Raccoon screams for their attention. But the community remains its true highlight, the legacy of the era in which the entire community came together. Whether it’s stars, a festive atmosphere, or a series of stories that touch people’s lives, cinema’s greatest hope now is to keep human beings in sharp focus.