This Week in Gossip #26

Box office woes, Superman returns, the Met Gala’s theme confuses, and Baby Reindeer gets too real.

1. With The Fall Guy Underperforming, How Will the Summer Box Office Look?

We’re officially in the summer season, or at least we are when it comes to the box office (if someone would let the Scottish weather know it’s a new season, I’d really appreciate it because I am freezing!) This is meant to be the period where Hollywood makes the big bucks, enough to tide it over if Christmas doesn’t pay off. The industry has been far too dependent on the summer blockbuster model for decades now, and we’ve seen in recent years how it isn’t always the safest bet. Sure, last year we were blessed by the magic of Barbenheimer, but we’re also at a time when even Marvel can’t guarantee a hit. Lockdown exacerbated a lot of trends with the cinemagoing experience that we knew would happen but thought would take a decade or so, not two years. It feels like every film with a $100m+ budget is now a tester for the secure future of the film industry.

So, the news that The Fall Guy only premiered to a $28.5 million domestic opening made some people panic. The film seemed to have everything going for it: it's a familiar IP, an action comedy with wide appeal, it has Ryan Gosling in the lead, and the reviews were very good. But it couldn't even earn the paltry $30 million that Universal predicted for it. With a reported $140 million budget, it faces a steep climb to breaking even.

We complain a lot about the unoriginality of Hollywood, how it only cares about franchises and familiar brands over creating something new. I’ve also been banging on for years about the too-big-to-fail approach to making these films, which are so expensive but don’t even have the decency to look nice (hello, the fifth Indiana Jones film, which cost over $300m but looked like PS2 cutscenes in parts.) There’s so much pressure on everyone to make a hit and we’ve no true guarantees of what will work. Sure, nobody expected Barbie to flop but that $1bn gross wasn’t ensured. That happened because the film was great, it had immense rewatch value, and audiences had organically created a hype-train of memes and anticipation because it came out the same day as Oppenheimer. That’s not something you can reverse engineer, although they’re certainly desperate to do so.

2024 is not only a post-lockdown summer; it’s a post-strike one. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes pushed back a lot of releases and led to a near-total reorganization of the 2024/5 calendars. Things that were supposed to define this summer are now absent. Deadline wrote that various distribution insiders were projecting an $8 billion domestic final box office for 2024, $1 billion off from last year. There are still plenty of big releases that seem like surer bets. Deadpool & Wolverine feels like the one movie I would put money on getting to $1bn (yeah, it’s R-rated but people love those characters and Ryan Reynolds is going to work that greased pole of the promo cycle into a tizzy.) I’d also turn to Pixar’s Inside Out 2 for another big opening. Disney doing well with an animated movie and a superhero sequel? Groundbreaking.

We could talk about the quality of the offerings. Certainly, I’m interested in Furiosa, although my most anticipated stuff of the season is not blockbuster-related (Fancy Dance, The Bikeriders, Kinds of Kindness, Janet Planet.) But there’s also a more practical reality. It’s bloody expensive to go to the cinema, especially if you’re taking your kids. We’re all broke and working overtime to barely pay the bills. Many multiplexes don’t prize the cinematic experience, so it’s depressingly common to sit in your seat and have your night ruined by people talking and filming themselves for social media. We’re all paying so much money every month for the endless number of streaming services that demand our attention. If you’re torn between a film you might like and staying at home, is it any wonder so many choose the latter? I adore going to the cinema but I’m also a singleton whose job requires it. I am not the average customer. That person goes to the cinema less and less with each year. If they’re a Gen Z-er then they’re even less motivated to head out.

I think that’s also made some people a little defensive. People online, when asked why The Fall Guy has done so poorly, seem eager to lay out their finances as a justification. It’s okay, guys, we’re all in the same boat! And it’s exhausting that the onus for industry-wide change is so thoroughly on the shoulders of audiences who just want to see a fun film and enjoy themselves. This is one of the reasons I so thoroughly hate the modern streaming model of #content. It’s way too much pressure to have to marathon-watch 13 hours of TV in one go, otherwise the views don’t count towards the platform’s data and they’re likely to cancel it in three or so weeks. There’s a reason audiences seem to be embracing the return of the week-to-week release model with stuff like Shōgun and Interview with the Vampire (season two is so good!) The new ways were fun for a while but we’re tired and like what we’re used to. This is probably more a generational thing than anything else, of course. If you were raised with the binge-watch model, it’s more your bag.

But back to the summer box office. There’s no Barbenheimer and Hollywood has to accept that. There were lessons to be learned from that lightning strike but I doubt they’ll choose the right ones. No, we don’t want more films based on toys. We want striking filmmakers with unique voices to have the canvas they deserve, and we want something thematically tactile to latch onto. I’m not sure streaming is the answer either, certainly not when it comes to original films, an area where they remain spotty at best. But the cinematic experience also has to be worthwhile. I’m fortunate to be in a city with both two well-maintained multiplexes and an excellent arthouse theatre, but I’m in the minority. The cinematic experience is just not a priority for a lot of people, and that was a change happening before COVID and the cost of living crisis.

2024 won’t be like 2024, but I do think we’ll get at least one $1 billion gross. As I said above, my money is on Deadpool vs. Wolverine (although I also wouldn’t rule out a non-Summer release, Joker: Folie a Deux.) As for The Fall Guy, I have to agree with my colleagues who described it as this year’s Dungeons & Dragons: a fun and better-than-expected action-comedy spectacle that deserved better from audiences.

2. Why Is It So Hard For Celebrities to Dress On-Theme For the Met Gala?

The first Monday in May means it’s time for fashion’s biggest night. The 2024 Met Gala took place on the green and cream carpet (a bad choice, just stick to red) with Jennifer Lopez, Chris Hemsworth, Bad Bunny, and Zendaya acting as chairs alongside the bobbed queen herself Anna Wintour. It was decent, although I wouldn’t say it was up there with the Met Gala’s peaks (Camp and Catholicism, in my opinion.) I’m not a fashion girlie. For all your Looks commentary, I recommend the always-excellent work of the Fug Girls and Tom & Lorenzo for that. But I do want to talk about one thing I see asked every year: why is it so dang difficult for the Met Gala attendees to dress on-theme?

It happens every single season. There will always be a ton of boring dudes in samey black suits and a few models with basic gowns that could be worn at any event and fit the dress code. You pay all that money to go to this party knowing the world will be watching and you go that basic? It boggles the mind. Come on, I want to see some glamour as I browse my phone while lying in my bed at 2am! I remember the Rei Kawakubo year and how about 80% of all attendees just chickened out entirely with trying to evoke one of the great figures on modern avant garde fashion (Tracee Ellis Ross innocent, however.)

This year, the theme was vague, but there were also two of them. The dress code was "The Garden of Time", inspired by a J.G. Ballard short story, but the actual exhibition was "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion." The latter was centred on combining fashion history with AI and CGI to show the inherently ephemeral nature of the former. The Ballard story is about, according to the BBC, a count and his wife who live in a grand villa where the flowers in their garden are able to slow down the march of time. These are both pretty flexible themes for a gala, but it does seem like some designers saw both prompts and either got puzzled or picked one over the other. A wise choice. Even Anna Wintour had to apologize for the confusion.

That's not to say that everyone avoided trying to experiment with these themes. Certainly, the best looks of the night were ones that leaned into the creative possibilities suggested by nature, time, and their intertwining. Florals in spring is obvious but people like Ayo Edebiri and Zendaya looked stunning in them. Lana Del Rey channelled classic McQueen with her fairy-tale veil. With a dress code so deliberately ambiguous, it’s tempting to play things literally, which risks turning everything into a costume rather than a cohesive look. That’s why I loved choices like Zac Posen’s denim dress for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, which used a timeless and historically crucial fabric in a new way, blending that idea of past and present without being hopelessly exact.

It's worth remembering that many people attending the gala are doing so as guests of a particular designer, and as much as this is a charitable event, it’s an excuse for self-promotion for those fashion houses. If you’re invited by Loewe or Versace, you wear whatever the hell they give you. This is a handy way to see who’s higher up the pecking order than their cohorts. Maison Margiela clearly prized Zendaya, the event's co-chair and woman of the hour, over, say, Kim Kardashian, whose look was admittedly pretty but very samey by her standards and ill-matched with that weird cardigan (also it was genuinely uncomfortable watching her struggle to breathe in that corset. Hot take but I like breathing without impairment.) So, some looked more on-theme than others, which may also say something about those designers’ creativity rather than their celebrity preferences.

The Met Gala is, above all, a fundraising party. It's designed to raise money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, which is home to some of the most incredible archives in the world of fashion. The Centre is named after Anna Wintour so of course it's her baby. This year, tickets for the gala were $75,000 each, a new high for an already obscenely expensive show. Once upon a time, it was $85. I can't be mad at Wintour for getting all of these millionaires to fork over such cash for a museum. If only the entire cultural sector had that kind of command. Of course, with that comes a perennially discomfiting set of optics. It will always be kind of gross to see this kind of party happening for the elite classes when poverty is so high, and especially in a year where Gaza is being bombed into oblivion (activists did protest outside of the event.) There’s a reason people always compare the Met Gala to The Hunger Games. Gilded fashions and five-figure entry fees while the world burns is just too on the nose to ignore.

Fashion is a multi-billion dollar industry that remains curiously scorned by many cultural critics. The Met’s fashion institute exists to place it thoroughly in the historical context of the rest of the art world, and I’m glad we have that. I’d kill for my local museums to be so well looked after by rich patrons who aren’t the Sacklers. But it will always clash up against the industrial side of the equation, complete with slave labour, disordered eating, trafficking accusations, and much more. If the Met Gala is designed to show fashion at its best, how much of the unseen labour behind its creation reveals it at its worst?

3. A Brief Explanation of the Co-Op Live Fiasco in the UK for Curious Americans

One of the bigger stories in UK entertainment has been the fiasco of the Co-op Live Arena. If you're a fan of stories of total jackassery, this one's for you. Co-op Live is an indoor arena in Manchester that is designed to have the largest maximum capacity of any indoor venue in the UK, with about 23,500 possible attendees. The plan was for this arena to be a new hub for entertainment, not just in Manchester but for the whole of the UK. Imagine Madison Square Garden without the history or organizational skills. They wanted it to host music, sports, events, and so on, around 120 a year, and they also had around 32 bars, restaurants, and lounges to make it a truly all-encompassing experience. It would certainly be a good way for the UK, or at least England, to centre themselves in worldwide events. Imagine being able to host, say, worldwide gymnastics competitions then a Taylor Swift concert then the Eurovision Song Contest. In 2022, the estimated cost of the arena was about £365 million. The grand opening was to take place on April 23rd. That did not happen. And it’s only gotten messier from there.