“I don’t want to remember how it used to be to go to the cinema”
A beautiful sentence by one of my friends Ondra, an enthusiastic cinephile, appeared today under a very nicely recovered topic by Jirka Pospíšil on MovieZone. Hollywood conditions are beginning to change. The common viewer will feel the echoes of small and large waves behind the scenes with a delay of several years, you will read about them today. However, before we go to the theaters for the “other” blockbusters of the 2026-2027 seasons, moviegoers will first have to live until 2025. At least that’s how most of them understood it this year. Comic Con was full of smiles and hope, but with the end of the month comes the relentless reality of paying bills. And a number of cinematographers simply have nowhere to go.
Customer behavior has changed. In large numbers, they primarily go to event blockbusters and in other cases stay at home. Rivals will demonstrate, or rather not demonstrate, if you attract the youth to the stars of social networks, who have to spend twenty, thirty dollars per head at the cinema box office for admission and popcorn. But we don’t have to wait for the result of the full-length tennis match, because the rather tepid results of winter and spring horror movies indicate that Netflix & Chill are definitively taking over the movie theaters. Anyone who doesn’t have a clever marketing campaign attacking the target’s chamber is leaving empty-handed.
The hangover is experienced not only by the studios themselves, which prepared for it after last year’s strikes and decorated the slots with various re-releases, but above all by the cinematographers. Record low attendance and reluctance to buy overpriced snacks is turning their business upside down. Some offer season tickets, but in order for such a thing to pay off, you have to go to the cinema three or four times a month. And the youth – drowning in the fragmented media pond – do not have enough time to kill time like this. And the older generation is happy to go to the multiplex three or four times a year. So this late trump card won’t save the chains.
Fortunately, the malls, their primary lessors of space, are quite lenient with them. Why not, when there is no other way to use the huge halls with stadium seating, expensive ventilation and high ceilings. I remember a similar situation in Prague’s Hostivař, when Ster Century and later Palace Cinemas asked for a lower rent, relying on the fact that the owner of OC Hostivař would not find a use for the vacated space anyway. This bet on a discount worked out for a while, but in the end, some multiplexes had to undergo a demanding reconstruction and, for example, half the capacity was turned into a fitness center, etc. On Novodvorská, which is a famous place where the multiplex was closed in record time due to poor attendance in Prague (how happy I used to go there, I lived only a few hundred meters from there!), you wouldn’t recognize the original premises today – there is Datart, a children’s zone and a modest food court instead. One way or another, this is proof that sooner or later someone will patch up the money hole with that mortar.
Be like my friend Ondra and go to the cinema sometimes. So that one day you don’t just have to remember how it was once upon a time.
Ford Mustang: 60 years on the silver screen
In the spring of 1964, the Ford Mustang was introduced to the general public, and the sixty-year era of the American icon began. When you think of an American wagon today, most people unmistakably think of the Ford Mustang. This is a car whose first generation came to the market at the right time. Lee Iacocca pioneered the production of a small light car at a time when Ford was concentrating on big heavy (read luxury) cars with big engines. They were called muscle cars. The Ford Mustang was supposed to be different, more compact, more agile and, above all, more affordable. It was a car that even those who made it with their own hands could afford. Although Ford presented it as a pony car, a compact car for secretaries and wives, Iacocca knew from the first sketches that the youth and working people would fall in love with the Mustang.
Different generations of the car have starred in more than 3,000 films and series. Often in the lead role as in the films 60 Seconds, Diamonds Are Forever, Need for Speed, Me, Legend or The Race Against Time. However, the most famous role of this iconic car remains the movie Bullitt Case, where it was ridden by Steve McQueen in 1968. The Ford Mustang made its film debut in the French comedy Chetník ze Saint-Tropez and also in one of the first Bond films (Goldfinger). In both films, it was driven by women, because with its bestseller Ford aimed not only at young families in general, but especially at women who also needed their own car when living in the suburbs. However, the success of the car on racing tracks, its more powerful variants sanctified by the car company itself in the interest of fighting the competition and other film roles shifted the marketing of newer variants towards the male audience.
This brings me back to the Bullitt, which was certainly the closest in its symbolism to the Mustang as we perceive it today. Road movies, aka films in which the car is a tool for self-discovery on a long journey (road trip) for a specific or undefined goal, embodied the seemingly endless freedom of the American dream, the ability to go anywhere at any time and seek happiness there. The car was an instrument of emancipation and democratization. On the silver screen, in the 60s and 70s, fast cars represented a definitive departure from westerns to the related genre of modern detective fiction. The sheriff’s star was replaced by a police badge, the Colt was replaced by a pistol, and the trusty steed was replaced by an automobile. One of the pioneers of this transformation of nostalgic cowboys into contemporary detectives was the detective Frank Bullitt in the film The Bullitt Case, who is a lone cowboy who defies rules and authorities (later TV detectives almost always operate in pairs so that the disparity of their characters stands out in the serial narrative), but he always knows he can rely on his fast sports car. Thanks to this, the Bullitt case is one of the milestones in the history of cars on the silver screen.
So if you feel that easily identifiable shimmer when you look at a Ford Mustang, you probably watched a lot of detective stories and had a lot of English people in your childhood. Welcome to the club.
The biggest TV hit of the year is…
According to surveys by the Nielsen agency, the new procedural Tracker is currently the most watched series on American television, which seems to have fallen out of a generator fed by the series projects of Stephen J. Cannell and Donald P. Bellisario (google it, the memories will come back). Judge for yourself: Colter Shaw is a professional tracker, a bit like Bear Grylls, who can survive anywhere and track down anyone. He drives around the US with a camper trailer looking for missing persons, for which he always collects a cash reward. He has a hacker friend and a lawyer friend, a traumatic childhood, a natural charisma that breaks the knees of policewomen in all precincts, and solves (and solves) a new case every week.
CBS ordered this series during the last few months (instead of the previously usual 70-80 pilots, barely a dozen are ordered today!), which is not surprising, because it meets all the requirements of the cable bosses. She even believed in the adaptation of the book by the prolific master of the genre, Jeffery Deaver, so much that Tracker started right after this year’s Super Bowl. It’s hard to imagine a better springboard, but even two months after its premiere, Tracker confirms that the 50+ audience wants to see “a white guy with a gun do justice.” Unless he’s subscribing to Prime, where all these dudes live, he needs to tune in to CBS. And there are obviously several million such “non-payers” in the US every week.
It’s not great math, just an attack on the lowest impulses in the spirit of “give the people what they want to see”. Perhaps the time has really come for the reboot of The Running Man (Arnie will be replaced by Glen Powell, Edgar Wright will direct) so that we can look into the TV mirror in the cinemas.
In the meantime, we seniors will remember the Apostate with Lamas…
Sequelitis peaks
My favorite data producer, Stephen Follows, once again locked himself in his office and combed through weeks of databases to answer a crucial question. Are there really more sequels than ever? He realized that there aren’t nearly as many sequels as there were in the late 1980s or 1990s, but…before you jump out of your skin…today’s sequels grab significantly more media space and, as a result, money. While in the 1990s sequels accounted for some 12% of the US box office, in the last decade it has been between 40 and 50%.
This soaring curve says it all, and something tells me it’s been better, so if you feel that any of the big studios will want to claw their way back to pre-covid profits in any way other than through sequels, then you need to read a little more in our newsletter between lines. On the other hand, sequels make better money for cinematographers, because they can screen the previous parts again. And because of that, cinemas survive. In other words, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and eat the broccoli in addition to the meat and sauce. Or you risk that the next dinner simply won’t fit on the plate anymore!
In one sentence…
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has unsurprisingly already reached 120 million in China. Well, not when Legendary paved the way for her nicely. However, Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron also exceeded 100 million, which is a big hat off even in the context of the fact that anime feature films are generally successful with the Chinese audience (the aforementioned Suzume also earned 114 million dollars here).
Korea’s Bud Spencer, Don Lee, is heading to home theaters with another crime action thriller from The Roundup series. The picture with the subtitle Punishment may be the last in the series, so there is also a record advance sale (840 thousand tickets), indicating a mammoth opener. Would this legend in which Don gives out “stamps” finally make it to Czech cinemas? Hope dies last.
Participant Media is ending for good. For two decades, billionaire Jeff Skoll’s production label poured money into important but unprofitable projects like An Inconvenient Truth, Fast Food Nation, Murderball, Contagion, Good Night and Good Luck, Spotlight, or Green Book. 135 films, 73 Oscar nominations, 18 statuettes, but also hundreds of millions of dollars spent that will never be returned. Skoll always joked that he would come to Hollywood a billionaire and leave a millionaire. Hundreds of people worked in his company in comfortable warm places. However, all good things come to an end.
Dan Stevens shines in theaters as the sellout Gosling in both Godzilla and Abigail. Who would say that to an actor who had his chance ten years ago in The Guest, then tried it in the TV series Legion and rather waved from afar in Netflix’s Eurovision? He’s back and I’m glad because I’ve always been a fan of him. End of reporting!
Tags: imf Hollywood Cinematographers stumble sequelitis advances Ford Mustang celebrates
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