If Hollywood Tries to Make Regular *Movies* Again, Will Moviegoers Bother to Show Up?

A pivot away from all-consuming tentpoles is only half the battle. Audiences have to be retrained to show up at the theater for "just a movie."

AMC CEO Adam Aron credited Taylor Swift and Beyonce for saving the fourth quarter at the box office. While that may have hurt the feelings of William J. Wonka and Fred Fazbear, it makes sense for the theater chain to highlight the concert docs when discussing a decent Q4 earnings reveal. After all, AMC distributed those concert films themselves, and giving the musicians credit is a way to A) make AMC look super-duper bright and B) entice the next A-level musician (Olivia Rodrigo, Lady Gaga or Weird Al Yankovic?) to skip the middle man if and when they offer up a concert doc for exhibition.

And yeah, the massive earnings for The ERAS Tour ($180 million domestic and $261 million global) and the good-enough grosses for Rennessaincé ($34 million/$44 million) certainly gave AMC (and other participating theaters) a major boost both amid strike-delayed titles and (most importantly) severe underperformance from The Marvels, Wish and (comparatively) Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. As Hollywood figures out which of the 2010s franchises and brands still pull audiences off the couch, we may be in a situation where the surprise hits like Sound of Freedom, Anyone But You and Godzilla: Minus One act as proverbial tentpoles when stereotypical tentpoles like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Madame Web and The Flash don’t measure up.

I kinda-sorta wrote about that in May of 2014 as Universal’s obscenely performing Neighbors helped mitigate a lower-than-hoped performance from Sony's Amazing Spider-Man 2. However, that was back when audiences actually showed up for studio programmers (including… gasp… star-driven comedies) on the regular. It’s bemusing that, judging by this past week’s earnings calls, Hollywood has “figured out” that studio programmers which don’t have to break records to break even and aren’t intended to launch or sustain a multimedia interconnected universe can work in theaters. But remember, the audience left those films to die before the industry did. It was a slow-motion horror show that I watched play out week by week years before the pandemic.