Hollywood is torturing itself over this simple question: What’s happened to the audience? Why have movies batted .000 with its 25 wannabe hits this fall?
Many theories are being advanced, but I favor simple answers: Movies have gotten lost because there’s too much else going on.
Analyzing the confusion demo by demo, let’s start with mine: Now thoroughly digitized, the senior demo is obsessing over video games like Hades II instead of sampling movies or streamers. We’re also furtively feasting on MrBeast or Adam W on YouTube rather than checking out the neighborhood multiplex. Or sampling Boggle Party or the other myriad games exploding across Netflix (yes, that streamer company).
Meanwhile the other major demo – the kids – seem to be sidelining TikTok to discover suddenly resuscitated shopping malls. Some are even shopping – or at least sampling goodies from Apple, like headphones projecting virtual travel.
The ubiquitous Netflix is also on hand at the mall to offer a 200-seat screening room (the Tudum Theater) exhibiting random live events (sports) plus a mini restaurant dispensing “streamer bites.” Some kids, too, are even consulting their chatbots for possible tips on jobs; AI is hiring – or maybe firing.
To be sure, Hollywood’s movie mavens would prefer if their distracted demos were engaging in a more traditional November routine: Searching film openings and even pondering award candidates. Week after week, however, audiences seem torpid rather than tempted when scouting the megaplex offerings.
The overseers of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have their own demo to un-distract. Its ranks have been vastly expanded to 11,100 prospective voters worldwide, 25% outside the U.S., and all are being prodded to focus on those movies wider audiences tend to ignore.
Award campaigns in past years were energized by private screening parties, most now banned, and by fiercely competitive promotional campaigns, now discouraged. Further, the distribution of DVDs had fostered a community of Oscar speculation; that technology since replaced by an Academy Screening Room, revealing its own advantages and glitches.
The studios pay $25,000 or so to become “listed,” giving them the right to determine their screening schedules. Thus Jay Kelly from Netflix, starring George Clooney, is still invisible in the Academy Screening Room yet available at select theaters (not easy to find) and ultimately December 5 on your home sofa.
Members opting for the Academy Screening Room can rig their own sound and subtitles, but occasionally find their movies interrupted mid-show by warnings that “you have been logged out.”
Will this year’s award candidates spark a positive reception? A Wicked revisit will be welcomed, but some early releases have been dismissed by audiences as too cerebral (After the Hunt) or too arty (Bugonia). None has been stigmatized as too sexy (Anora in 2024) or too teary (CODA in 2021).
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in ‘Wicked: For Good’
Universal Pictures/Everett Collection
As an Academy member who is still also an occasional ticket buyer, I feel sorry for those filmgoers who abjure the theater experience. It seems insensitive to see a movie like Nouvelle Vague on your sofa when the essence of the experience is about shooting, editing and hanging out in theaters.
And consider Jay Kelly: It’s a movie about a Clooney-like star, played by Clooney, whose movies have been hits at the box office and at festivals. But the Jay Kelly release strategy demands that most of its audience see it on their couches.
I really liked the movie but felt it played better on the big screen, even devoid of Netflix Bites.