Is Anybody Watching Movies Anymore in 2023?
The problem is not a lack of great art, but a lack of people who care it’s there.
Movie-wise, 2023 was a year of questions. Not all are easily answerable.
- Wouldn’t it be fun if Wes Anderson and Zack Snyder swapped scripts?
- So new Julia Roberts movies just kind of show up now on Netflix? This would not be allowed if Premiere magazine was still around.
- Did you at any point think, “Did I watch Creed II?” If so, it was for the best you skipped Creed III.
- Between Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, is Sandra Hüller the most terrifying actor working today?
- How many M3GAN movies are they going to make now?
- When is Faber & Faber’s “Directors on Directors” series going to add Gerwig on Gerwig?
- How exactly did Dicks: The Musical get made? Not complaining, just asking.
- Doesn’t David Fincher seem bored with what he’s making?
- Didn’t anybody else see [fill in the blank]? Seriously? Nobody?
Maybe most importantly: Where did the audience go?
In 2019, people bought about 1.2 billion movie tickets. By the time 2023 is done, a little over 800 million tickets will have been sold. That’s an improvement over the COVID years. But it’s still about a third less — and that’s with the gloriously bizarro phenomenon that was Barbenheimer. What is happening?
The Problem is Not on the Screen
For a few years, people from cinephiles to cinema owners complained about Hollywood’s glut of sameness. In other words: too many comic book flicks, not enough adult dramas and dirty-minded comedies. Gone are the days when theaters could just put the new Avengers on six screens simultaneously, pack people in, and let the disgruntled huff off to stream Gilmore Girls on Netflix.
That was not the case in 2023. Marvel and DC went back to their old tricks but nobody was interested in Blue Beetle or The Marvels. Instead, moviegoers had a strong slate of movies where nobody has superpowers. Ben Affleck’s Air delivered a decent Jerry Maguire riff anchored by a stellar Matt Damon; Jennifer Lawrence went mostly raunch in the post-post Farrelly brothers’ comedy No Hard Feelings; Sherry Cola went full raunch in Joy Ride; Ayo Edibiri went fuller raunch in Bottoms; and Kenneth Branagh brought back the mustache for his third Poirot mystery A Haunting in Venice.
Neither masterpieces nor abject failures, these were just the kind of middle-range grown-up movies people had been asking for. Those wanting non-superhero genre movies could try Gareth Edwards’ gorgeous A.I. epic The Creator or the inexplicably fun Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which showed Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez are a weirdly good comedy team.
Notice that none of the movies listed above are even the “good” movies that get released late in the year or social media-stocked buzzy phenomena like Barbie and Oppenheimer. These were just the things you might find playing at a random multiplex on a Tuesday in April. They had variety, flair, and more originality than you would think. In other words, what people say they want to see. And yet, in many cases, audiences have not shown up.
If this goes on long enough, there may not be much left to show up for. But maybe people are okay with that.
People Are Missing Out
In 2011, critic Dave Kehr published When Movies Mattered, a collection of reviews structured as a memory of the grand days of high auteurist criticism in the 1970s. Sure, this was a world confined to arthouses, certain magazines, and people with very strong opinions about Pauline Kael and the repertory schedule at Film Forum. But Kehr was on to something when he diagnosed a lessening of cinema’s importance and a dwindling number of fanatic defenders.
Was that a good time? Do we need or want to go back to a period when differing views on Bergman’s breaking of the fourth wall in Persona could lead to harsh words and maybe an angrily thrown espresso? Arguments still froth at what’s left of Film Twitter and various subreddits. But cinematic discourse is overall a more genteel thing these days. It’s characterized more by well-curated Letterboxd lists than long exegeses in Film Comment or Cineaste on, say, whether Beau is Afraid was a misunderstood masterpiece of post-COVID anxiety or a dumpster pile of showoff nonsense.
More broadly, movies as a social event or conversational peg (“seen anything good?”) seem increasingly a thing of the past (again, the fluky greatness of Barbenheimer aside). While that’s partially due to the prevalence of quality streaming TV, it’s also the industry’s fault.
Studios once understood the importance of scarcity. They still do, but only with tentpoles. Oppenheimer and Barbie opened theatrically in July and are just now hitting streaming and DVD. More common was what happened to Alexander Payne’s excellent and underseen The Holdovers. A wry yet touching comedic drama with a clutch of killer performances (Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph deserving all the praise thrown their way), it’s the perfect kind of smaller yet broad-appeal flick that should play all through the wintry months, and provide something everyone can agree on seeing after Christmas. But it opened in late October and was on VOD only a month later. With tickets averaging around $12, why disincentivize possible theatrical viewers by rushing movies so quickly onto digital platforms?
All release schedule carping aside, the quality of the actual movies being released remains shockingly good and varied. For all the people complaining about Marvel taking over the theaters, now that things like Ant-Man and the Quantum Darkness Whatever Whatever aren’t hanging around so long, there is room to see what else is on offer.
The Good Ones
Since there are more movies released each year than most people can track (maybe part of the problem?), here is a highly unscientific précis of the year’s greatest:
- Past Lives — Celine Song’s stunner of a debut is a tender, heart-wrenching story of two childhood friends brought back together decades after one emigrates from South Korea. Resonates less for the will-they-won’t-they of the climactic reunion than its questioning of how much we control the trajectory of our lives.
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline — This close-to-the-bone thriller about a band of activists planning eco-sabotage uses sharp background vignettes to establish a strong emotional core (though not valorized, each saboteur has very real and personal reasons to take violent action) to what is already an impressively taut and immersive procedural.
- American Fiction — A tart comedy of errors about publishing, race, and the dumbing down of everything which is somehow both playful and bracingly on-target. Jeffrey Wright’s hilariously pretentious yet endearing turn as an author stuck in a trap of his invention is the best work he has done in years, meaning it’s some of the greatest acting anybody has done in years.
- Happer’s Comet — Only about an hour long but feeling like it encompasses the world, Tyler Taormina’s exploration of one quiet night in suburbia is one of the simplest yet most lovingly constructed films of recent years. Sharing some tendencies with Tim Sutton’s atmospherics (Dark Night, especially) Taormina creates a lush, narcotic mood that would likely be described as “poetic.” But the gorgeous normalcy of these images is less arcane than that, just following these sleepless people as they putter about in the night, listening to music or roller-blading down deserted tree-lined streets, finding beauty in expertly captured normalcy.
- Oppenheimer — Though Christopher Nolan could have whittled down the tragic conclusion (there is a limit to the drama that can be wrung out of security clearance hearings), this history of the Manhattan Project remains an epic of eye-popping visual grandeur and sharp philosophical inquiry. Cillian Murphy’s ghostly portrayal of Oppenheimer as a conflicted academic trapped between overlapping priorities (state security, philosophical inquiry, moral quandaries about the use of the atom bomb) is appropriately wrenching.
- Leave the World Behind — The year’s best Jordan Peele movie was not made by Peele. Somewhere between warning, satire, horror, and outright comedy, Sam Esmail’s nervy and ever-so-slightly surreal adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s haunting novel puts two families into a gorgeous Long Island mansion and watches them come apart as a potential apocalypse unfolds just out of sight. The overlapping of Julia Roberts’ misanthropic ad executive, Ethan Hawke’s charmingly clueless and entitled academic (he seems born for the role), and Mahershala Ali’s preternaturally cool consultant makes for a roiling and uneasy clash of worldviews even as the world collapses in weird and unnerving ways.
- The Pigeon Tunnel —Nothing that the late David Cornwell (aka spy novelist par excellence John le Carré) says in this latest immersive interrogation documentary from Errol Morris can be trusted. Of course, Cornwell — a one-time spy and full-time fabulist raised by a con man — is the one who tells you not to trust people like him. So who do you believe?
- Honorable Mentions: Blackberry, Maestro, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Manodrome, You Hurt My Feelings, Shortcomings, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Dumb Money, Bottoms, Barbie, The Lesson, Dicks: The Musical, Against All Enemies, Golda, The Teacher’s Lounge, The Taste of Things, The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Reality, Anatomy of a Fall, Saltburn, The Disappearance of Shere Hite
2023 was a better-than-expected year for movies, all in all. There were more surprises, eye-openers, and near-masterpieces than even the most die-hard critic was able to take in.
It’s a good problem to have.
