Dear Hollywood: Have You Tried Not Sucking?

"Behind closed doors, the industry is quietly collapsing," Luke Riether noted back in June. "Freelance jobs are drying up, streaming is slowing down, AI is replacing humans, and production is leaving Los Angeles altogether."

So 2025 has come and almost gone, and you don't have to be a Hollywood insider to know that it's been another dismal year for movies. That New York Times report pointed out that this summer "was the least attended since 1981, after adjusting for inflation and excluding the COVID-19 pandemic years." And Critical Drinker called it "The Year That Broke Hollywood," bemoaning "a summer of disappointing remakes, sequels and outright flops, a massive downturn in production, and the worst October in 30 years."

October is no joke, or at least not a funny one. "Theaters in the United States and Canada collected $445 million across all titles in October," the NYT reported. That's "the lowest total on record, after adjusting for inflation and excluding 2020, when the pandemic darkened screens."

But other than that, how did you enjoy the shows, Mrs. Lincoln?

This year's three worst big-budget losers — Snow White, Tron: Ares, and Thunderbolts* — lost an estimated $280 million between them. And that's before marketing costs, which probably added another (gulp!) $250-$300 million in red ink. We're talking losses of at least half a billion dollars on pictures that only got greenlit because they were "known" intellectual properties, and not because of any commercial interest. And artistic merit? Fuggidaboudit. CGI dwarves and virtually unknown superheroes ain't exactly Oscar-bait. 

The year's ten worst flops lost an aggregated $750 million, or well over a billion after marketing.

I don't have to remind you that Snow White could have been a hit with a $100 million budget, but was doomed by bad casting, worse publicity, endless reshoots, and a terrible script that not even reshoots could salvage. Tron: Ares was the second inexplicable sequel to a minor flop from 1982 that absolutely nobody asked for. And the asterisk in Thunderbolts* isn't my invention. Disney did that as a wink-and-a-nod that left would-be ticket-buyers asking "WTF?" before not buying any tickets. 

But those are just the most obvious flops extruded by the Hollywood content machine. 

And Another Thing: One positive thing of note from 2025 is the breakout of Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell into (almost?) the A-list. They both have an abundance of charisma, they both have generally solid taste in roles, and a movie with both of them would get my wife and I off the sofa and into the theaters. Are you listening, Hollywood?

There's a story from the early 90s — perhaps apocryphal — when Sony bought Columbia Pictures, becoming the first foreign firm to own an American studio. When the Sony execs flew in from Japan to confab with their new employees, a Columbia exec explained to them how things work in the motion picture business.

"Let's say we produce 10 pictures a year. Three are hits, three are bombs, and the rest do OK."

A Sony guy is then supposed to have asked in total earnestness, "Why don't you just make the hits?"

I mention this anecdote because while it may or may not be literally true, it contains an important truth: Hollywood's bread and butter was those four movies in the middle they could rely on to return modest profits — which brings us back to that New York Times report, because it focused on those mid-budget flicks:

Some were heavily marketed. Many were championed by critics. Most had star power.

But not one of the 25 dramas and comedies that movie companies released in North American theaters over the past three months has become a hit, certainly not in the way that Hollywood has historically kept score. Some have played to near-empty auditoriums, including “After the Hunt,” starring Julia Roberts; “Christy,” with Sydney Sweeney; and “Die My Love,” featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.

Christy is obvious Oscar-bait that was never going to draw a large audience, not even with Five O'Clock Somewhere mascot Sweeney in the title role. The others? They left so little impression that I don't even remember reading about them.

More: 

While success at the box office is always correlated to how much it costs to make a film, Hollywood has historically used $50 million in ticket sales (over an entire run) as a benchmark for a “widely seen” drama or comedy.

By that measure, “After the Hunt,” with Ms. Roberts playing a college professor combating cancel culture, is a catastrophe. It cost an estimated $70 million to make and collected $3.3 million in the United States and Canada after playing for a month.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna, cost roughly $30 million and managed only $1.6 million in ticket sales over a month.

Two questions: Where was the audience demand for a Kiss of the Spider Woman remake, and how the hell did they spend $30 million on it when the 1985 strictly art-house original cost less than $5 million in today's dollars?

The only pictures making money this year seem to be genre fare like Weapons and Predator: Badlands that still draw younger audiences to the theaters.

It's the older audiences — even if just slightly older — that aren't showing up. In fact, my wife and I were just talking about that conversation we never have anymore. Maybe you and yours remember it. It used to go like this:

"Hey, you wanna see a movie tonight?"

"Sure, what's showing?"

Then you'd look in the paper (or more recently, on the internet) to see what grabbed your fancy. I'm not sure couples still have that discussion. I'm less sure how Hollywood can get them having it again. 

Between the high cost of going out and the comfort of streaming at home, why would we? It's just nicer to snuggle up together on the sofa with some wine and fire up an old favorite on Plex. With the death of Hollywood's bread-and-butter movies it's either that or blow a hundred bucks on a remake of something that wasn't great the first time around.

More importantly, until Hollywood remembers that it's in the business of producing popular entertainment, why should we?

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P.S. Actual thing my wife said when I showed her that Florida Man Friday headline: "Every part of that is awful and it's even worse when you put them all together and I don't want to know about any of it." She said it without commas, so that's how I typed it.