On the menu today: Yes, Devon Archer contended that Hunter Biden had only sold “the illusion of access” to Joe Biden to his business partners, although putting them on the phone with him sure as heck sounds like access, not an illusion of access. But today, let’s turn our attention to the multiplexes, and how three films that aren’t preestablished gargantuan movie franchises — with toys and action figures and merchandising — are bringing audiences back into the theaters in large numbers.
Cinematic Lessons
This column is not going to be about what critics or I thought about Barbie, Oppenheimer, or Sound of Freedom. Lord knows you can find plenty of discussion about Barbie from Kathryn Lopez, Haley Strack, Armond White, Luther Ray Abel, Phil Klein, Jack Butler, and Rich Lowry; discussion of Oppenheimer from Ross Douthat, Rich Lowry, Phil Klein, Armond White, Jack Butler, and Neal Freeman; and discussion of Sound of Freedom from Maddy Kearns and a short section in The Week section of the July 13 issue.
Whether you loved all three, hated all three, liked one or two and didn’t like the others, or haven’t seen all three, these three movies are turning into the surprise hits of the summer. And they come at a time when Hollywood actors and writers are on strike, film production has slowed to a crawl, and the stability of the movie industry has been shaken by the rise of streaming services and some once-reliable movie franchises such as Star Wars and the Marvel movies not being quite so appealing as they once were.
As of this morning, domestically, Barbie is already the fourth-highest-grossing movie of the year, collecting $351 million dollars at U.S. movie theaters. Oppenheimer is ninth with $174 million dollars. Both movies came out a little more than a week ago, on July 21. That puts them ahead of well-established movie blockbuster brand names that came out earlier this year, including Indiana Jones and Transformers.
Sound of Freedom is already the 13-highest-grossing movie of the year at $149 million. That sum puts this “little movie that could” ahead of other established movie blockbuster brand names that came out earlier this year, like the latest offering from the Fast and the Furious series, Pixar’s Elemental, the latest Mission: Impossible movie, and The Flash.
But Hollywood is an international industry, and what studios really look at are the worldwide box-office numbers.
So far, globally, Super Mario Brothers: The Movie is the year’s champion, at $1.3 billion, a sum that will be difficult for any movie to surpass; the Marvel sequel Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Three is in second place at $845 million. But Barbie is already the third-highest-grossing movie of the planet this year at $780 million, and as mentioned, it’s only been out for a bit more than a week. If ticket sales remain strong in the coming weeks, maybe Barbie will move into Mario’s neighborhood.
Oppenheimer is nothing to sneeze at in its global movie-ticket revenues, ranking in eleventh place already with $405 million. (For obvious reasons, releasing this movie in Japan presents its own unique challenges, and it is not yet certain that the film will get a theatrical release in that country.) Sound of Freedom hasn’t been released anywhere but the United States so far this year, but its domestic gross ticket sales are still high enough to currently rank it 19th on the list globally.
Movie theaters shut down in March 2020 and many gradually reopened in 2021, but audiences were slow to return in their pre-pandemic numbers. Some big-name films such as Disney’s live-action Mulan remake, Marvel’s Black Widow, and Pixar’s Soul shifted to release on streaming services. Audiences got used to watching movies from the comfort of home, and once the pandemic ended, some previous moviegoers grew reluctant to get into the car and drive out to the multiplex if the film would be available to stream for free in a few months. (If Hollywood is still stumped as to why people don’t go to the movies as often as they used to, let them examine those ticket prices. Taking the family to the movies on a weekend afternoon or evening is a bigger financial commitment than it used to be.)
When the strike ends and Hollywood gets back to making movies, a lot of people will be studying what made people get off their couches and drive to the multiplex for Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom. Whether or not they’re triumphs of filmmaking, they are triumphs of getting people to buy tickets to watch a movie in the theater.
I’ve heard some people describe the Barbie movie as a Rorschach test. Some viewers see a happy, fun, silly, musical romp that made their favorite toys from their childhood years come alive. (You could say it envisions a brighter fuchsia for both men and women.) Others see a harsh, bitter, man-hating screed that aims to shovel a lot of ideological propaganda into young minds.
I would note that whether you perceived Barbie to be a feminist screed, it was not marketed as a feminist screed. From the trailers, the story was sold as one part Toy Story (“Barbie comes to life as a real flesh-and-blood woman”) and one part The Lego Story (Will Ferrell is once again playing a bumbling, buffoonish villain who is more silly than menacing. Margot Robbie is playing the title character as a naïve ingenue, Ryan Gosling is playing the perfect empty himbo, and they stumble around “the real world” with all its messes and complications). It’s not that different from Elf, Splash, or The Last Action Hero — a fish-out-of-water story about a person from a fantasy world who enters the real world and must learn to adapt, but along the way makes the real world a brighter place by sharing the cheer and optimism of their previous fantasy life. There’s also a bit of winking self-awareness where the title character is given the Morpheus-style blue-pill-or-red-pill choice of remaining in the fantasy world or answering the call to adventure and riding over the horizon to see reality. Barbie instantly rejects the call to adventure and wants to stay in her comfortable, familiar old life, and the wise mentor character curtly explains that she doesn’t really have a choice. Without the decision to head out over the horizon, there is no story.
The Rorschach-test comparison may be quite fitting, as the trailer promised, “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” The film promised viewers something they were familiar with — Barbie toys — mixed with something a little strange and new and different — the Mattel corporation is chasing a flesh-and-blood woman and trying to “put her back in the box,” and a dense, cheerful Ken is trying to convince a woman surgeon that he’s qualified to perform an appendectomy just because he’s man.
The trailer for Oppenheimer is, from where I sit, something of masterpiece, in taking something that the audience ought to know a little about — the Trinity test in Alamogordo, N.M., in 1945 — and making it seem suspenseful and threatening and new. After a few ominous loud clicks of a Geiger counter and some close-ups on sparks, in just a few sentences of dialogue, Christopher Nolan establishes the stakes: “This is a national emergency. . . . We’re in a race against the Nazis, and I know what it means if the Nazis have a bomb. . . .” “They’ve got a twelve-month head start.” “Eighteen!” A few moments later, another bit of dialogue effectively tells the audience why they should care about this movie:
“Why would we go to the middle of nowhere for God knows how long?”
“Why? Why? How about because this is the most important thing to happen in the history of the world?!”
Now whether you think the detonation of the first atomic bomb is the most important thing to happen in the history of the world — some of us would put the resurrection of Christ higher, others might argue the discovery of America, or the invention of electric light or the automobile — splitting the atom probably makes the top five or top ten. If you’re going to pay a movie-theater ticket price to watch a historical drama, you might as well pick one about a truly consequential historic event.
Most of the audience probably knows a little bit about the first atomic test and how Fat Man and Little Boy ended World War II, but we realize we don’t know that much about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind the bomb. And Cillian Murphy’s gaunt face and haunted eyes make a compellingly mysterious figure, and a solid interpretation of the real Oppenheimer; you can see him discussing the decision to drop the atomic bombs in a 1965 interview with CBS News here.
Oppenheimer promised viewers something they were familiar with — World War II-era America, a high-stakes race against the Axis powers — mixed with something a little strange and new and different: scientists as the heroes, a sense that something profoundly dangerous was being unleashed upon the world, and an act that was simultaneously saving the world and further endangering it.
Did you see the trailer for Sound of Freedom, or any commercials on television? This was the unusual film for which I saw no trailers before any of the other blockbusters; it was instead advertised on podcasts like the Three Martini Lunch. Its producers and marketers determined that there was a vast, underserved audience out there, hungry for a film with themes of patriotism, faith, and protecting the innocent, and that they could convince people to see it through a completely different method than the usual advertising.
Jim Caviezel is not the biggest star in Hollywood, but I suspect because of his work on The Passion of the Christ, a lot of Christians in the U.S. feel particularly warm toward him. It is unlikely that it is coincidental that his character declares in the trailer, “God’s children are not for sale.”
The irony is that Sound of Freedom, visually, doesn’t look all that different from the “lone wolf hero takes on South American cartels” thrillers that we’ve seen since Miami Vice. We see shadowy hideouts, narrow South American streets and alleys, boats in rivers in the jungle, dodged bullets, a sweaty Department of Homeland Security bureaucrat behind a desk telling the hero he’s out of his jurisdiction, and ominous dialogue like, “It is the fastest growing international crime network that the world has ever seen.”
But the fact that this story is about child smuggling instead of drug trafficking makes everything feel different, with much higher stakes. Americans have very divided feelings about the war on drugs. The evil and the brutality of the cartels is indisputable, but the whole system is driven by Americans’ desire to experience highs through the drugs that the cartels produce and distribute. If our deeply troubled relatives, friends, and neighbors struggling with addiction could clean themselves up, the cartels would have no customers and go out of business. As the character Pogo said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
But it’s impossible to have mixed feelings about kidnapping and child smuggling. And the filmmakers contend that by raising awareness about the scourge of child trafficking, they and the audiences are helping fight it. In the extended version of the trailer, Caviezel says to the potential audience, “Sound of Freedom is one of those films that can legitimately change this world. So we want to ignite a fire in audiences and open their eyes to the dark reality of millions of children that need our help. Let’s make this film a historic event, and the start the end of child trafficking.” Whether or not Sound of Freedom actually reduces the number of children trafficked in years to come, it undoubtedly makes audiences feel good to think that they’re helping in some form.
Sound of Freedom promised viewers something they were familiar with — an American hero goes down to South America and takes on bad guys — mixed with something different: child trafficking.
You’ve probably picked up on this recurring theme — Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom are breakout hits because they promised audiences some unexpected and intriguing combination of the familiar and new. The Star Wars movies, the Marvel movies, the Fast and the Furious movies — at this point, a lot of established franchises feel like they’re stuck in a rut, offering stories that are just slightly different from what came before. If and when Hollywood gets back to work, studios may well be willing to be a little more experimental and creative, because the right combination of the familiar and the unexpected can stir audience curiosity.
ADDENDUM: Stephen in the NR Plus Facebook group — think of this as your usual reminder to subscribe to NR Plus if you haven’t already — succinctly articulated the dividing line in the Republican Party in this era. On one side are those who are still invested in the system of American government as it existed or exists — with constitutional limits, checks and balances, laws, rules and norms — and who simply want better people to be working in that system. On the other side are those who have lost all faith in that system and effectively want to “burn it all down” — with little unity about what or should replace it. Some want an even more imperial presidency, some want integralism, and some are casually calling for a “kill ’em all” policy toward their domestic political opponents.