The summer of 2014 confirms it: Hollywood is dying. By “Hollywood,” I mean the industry that produces mainstream, conventional movies that are made and distributed by big studios. This summer was a great disappointment for the business, with total ticket sales down 15 percent from the year before: the “Worst Summer Since 1997,” declared the New York Times. Some say it’s because several would-have-been hits were delayed (a Pixar film, especially). But the truth is, it’s far worse than that. Summer 2014 has definitively exposed a secular trend that has been underway for nearly a generation.
The number of tickets sold in the United States has floated between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion since 1996. This year, Hollywood will be lucky to make it to 1.2 billion. But here’s the thing: In 1996, there were 270 million Americans. In 2000, 282 million. In 2007, 301 million. In 2011, 311 million. In 2014, there are an estimated 319 million. Hollywood has sold the same number of tickets every year, give or take, while the population has grown by nearly 20 percent.
The conventional wisdom in Hollywood says that 2014 has been flat because audiences are rejecting “more of the same,” as Brooks Barnes said in the Times. Too many superheroes, too many sequels, too many old faces. Boring. But there’s nothing new about the sameness: The biggest ticket-seller of 1995 was Batman Forever, which was both a comic-book superhero film and a sequel to a sequel.
Perhaps the reliance on such fare was what created the trend. But sameness in popular culture is far less of a problem than you might think. The Tin Pan Alley wordsmith Gus Kahn once quipped that every popular song says “I love you” in 32 bars. Golden Age Hollywood was nothing but sameness—westerns and musicals and romances, all with pretty much the same plots—and still, in 1946, 90 million Americans went to the movies every week.
In any case, there’s a reason Hollywood repeats itself obsessively, and it’s not because financiers and studio executives are desperate to tell the story of obscure comic book superheroes like Ant Man (the name of an actual picture that will open next year). They make such movies because, in a business in which bosses are constantly being fired, the usual fare is a safer bet than anything else.
The story of 2014 is not that people are tired of the usual fare; it’s that the usual fare can’t just be usual. The year’s biggest hit, Guardians of the Galaxy, has been a spectacular success because it’s a comic-book superhero movie that takes its inspiration from the Bill Murray comedies of the 1980s. It’s fast and colorful and very, very funny—with a dazzling star turn by a previously all-but-unknown actor named Chris Pratt. But it stays firmly within the conventions of its genre.
The second-biggest hit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, is nowhere near as good—but it, too, plays variations on the form by evoking the paranoid leftist thrillers of the 1970s, like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor (down to having that movie’s star, Robert Redford, play the villain part).
Both Guardians of the Galaxy and The Winter Soldier were made by Disney—the only filmmaking machine that seems to have a strategic sense of what it’s doing. It made last year’s mega-hit, Frozen. And it made Maleficent with Angelina Jolie, another of this year’s rare box office triumphs. It recently paid $4 billion for the rights to the most successful franchise in movie history and next year will release the seventh Star Wars film—which will almost certainly be the biggest hit of 2015, with the next Pixar (also owned by Disney) release, The Good Dinosaur, a likely second.
What is it about Disney that has given it such a command of the American pop-culture psyche? The answer is that its movies are straightforward and unironic. Both Frozen and Maleficent are very earnest fairy tales. Even Guardians, which is basically a comedy, has nothing campy or self-mocking about it. Pixar has always distinguished itself by refusing to go for cheap laughs, which is why it has become a beloved brand in a way that DreamWorks (which began around the same time) never has. DreamWorks is Shrek—a jokey pop-culture put-on. Pixar is Toy Story—funny, moving, original.
In trying to tell stories straight, Disney finds a way to connect with its audiences. The same is true of James Cameron, who made the two most successful movies of all time—Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009)—even as the business was in such decline. Maybe that’s why Americans are increasingly giving up on the movies: They know Hollywood, as a general rule, is just going through the motions.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
