Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
Let’s start off with a link to Sonny’s It review. It’s tremendous. There’s zero chance that I’m ever going to watch this movie, yet Sonny’s essay is engrossing. Go read it.
On the subject of horror movies, I mentioned this briefly on the show, but I want to tease the idea out a little bit: Horror movies are the cockroaches of cinema. They will survive everything, even streaming and the internet.
That’s because they’re bottom-feeding, low-cost, high-ROI enterprises that appeal to both a deep niche audience (horror fans) as well as to the broad general quadrant (teens and young adults looking for thrills). And as a consequence, they can be marketed cheaply.
Horror movies don’t need stars. The effects they rely on tend to be inexpensive. And when they hit, they can bring the kind of returns that simply don’t exist anywhere else in the industry. Have a look at this list of the biggest returns ever on horror and it’ll make your eyes pop out. Paranormal Activity made $200 million on a $15,000 budget.
Go ahead and do the math in your head. I’ll wait.
Crazy, right?
Substandard buddy Gabriel Rossman (a data-driven sociology professor at UCLA and author of an excellent book on radio airplay, Climbing the Charts) went and checked the math for us and it turns out that horror movies, as a class, are far and away the most profitable genre. Have a look:
Gabriel Rossman
I’ll just close out by making the point that if Hollywood cared about making money, they’d churn out nothing but horror movies from female directors. #patriarchy
We made a brief digression to talk about the two forthcoming tennis movies and I mentioned that it’s now commonly accepted that the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes” match in 1973 was fixed. Riggs threw the match because he was in deep with the mob and they forced him to. That Don Van Natta deep dive has all the particulars, but everything you need to know is this: Four months before he “lost” to Billie Jean King, Riggs beat Margaret Court 6-2, 6-1. Court was the #1 player in the world at the time and is an all-time great. Billie Jean King couldn’t carry her racket bag.
And yet somehow people were supposed to believe that the (supremely overrated) Billie Jean King beat Riggs in three straight sets, on the level? Right.
What’s especially pathetic is that at this point the only one who still believes that Billie Jean King won for real is Billie Jean King.
You know who is a hundred thousand times better than Billie Jean King and never gets any credit? Mary Carillo.
Carillo might be the smartest and most interesting professional athlete—any gender, any sport—ever. She’s a national treasure. But because she’s not a social justice warrior, she doesn’t have a national tennis center named after her.
Finally, this whole episode is something of a shoot, to be honest. Which reminded me of the greatest wrestling shoot of the last ten years, C.M. Punk’s Smackdown meltdown of 2011. Enjoy.
