“The explosion will happen the day three or four films of this huge budget fall”: In 2013, Spielberg already predicted a disaster at the box office.

Of course, Barbie is swimming in bliss and counting her $1.05 billion worldwide box office; The second feature film of 2023 to achieve this, after Super Mario Bros., and the forty-third since Titanic took the ball and reached the mark in 1998.

Oppenheimer also shouldn’t be ashamed of his excellent performance with his nearly $570 million. A challenge given the film’s length and its tough subject matter, beyond its five-star cast. Going back a bit, of course, Avatar 2 came out late last year, destroying everything in its path with $2.32 billion.

Fighting superheroes

But these undeniable and glaring successes are a bit like the tree hiding the forest when you can barely zoom out to get an overview. Superhero movies, which have so often and so long cannibalized the box office, have honestly struggled for a while, aside from the planetary hit Spider-Man no Way Home that came out in the middle of the pandemic and didn’t deliver. Just under $1.92 billion.

More new superheroes all the time, a general decline in the quality of the scripts, hellish production rates to push the special effects makers of these movies to unionize to pay better and cater to the public fatigue that was quite demanding. And nice to the Marvel and DC teams…

Shazam! Rage of the Gods, a devastating failure for Warners, only made $133.8 million at the box office. Rachel Zegler, who plays Anthea in the film, didn’t seem completely sold on the film itself and explained why she joined the DC Universe. “I needed a job… I’m very serious” When he fell on the red carpet…

Although Dwayne Johnson can’t stop crying and laments the painful failure of his Black Adam, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a hit with critics and the public, grossing just over $476 million at the worldwide box office.

Excitement? Led among other things by the romance surrounding its headliner Ezra Miller, the film grossed only $268 million. Considering the sums involved in the creation and marketing of such steamrollers, these are not triumphs for the Marvel and DC stables…

By expanding the spectrum, other would-be box office behemoths have received violent backlash. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was a disappointing failure, grossing less than $370 million at the worldwide box office. Given the notoriety and aura of such a license, it’s a slap that has the vigor of an uppercut.

Even the last part of Mission Impossible failed. While Tom Cruise was endlessly spinning around in his plane with Top Gun Maverick’s planetary cardboard, dead reckoning A month after its release, it still hasn’t crossed the $500 million mark. The studio went to great lengths to evangelize the crowd, however, bombarding audiences with the actor’s jaw-dropping stunts months before.

And what about Pixar’s latest film, Elementary , which had the second-worst start in studio history by failing to gross $30 million in its opening weekend?

Stephen Oracle

It is in light of these observations of a severely battered box office and increasingly fierce competition from streaming platforms that we should re-read Steven Spielberg’s words just a decade ago, playing oracles about America’s uncertain future. at the cash registers.

In June 2013, in front of students from the University of Southern California (USC) Film School invited to speak with George Lucas, they had already cooled their support, expressing pessimism in the face of rising production costs. Prices and screen reproduction.

“do it for money” Lucas said. “So their views get narrower and people get bored.” Lamenting that these studios would rather produce a single $250 million film than pursue several original and personal projects, Spielberg said: “There’s going to be an explosion that day when three or four or even half a dozen of these big-budget movies drop and the pattern changes again.”

It would bring it home just two years later and herald the decline of superhero movies. In an interview with The Associated Press as part of the release of Bridge of Spies, he predicted a similar fate for Westerns.

“We were there when the genre died” he explained. “There will come a time when superheroes will go the same way as Westerns. That doesn’t mean that Westerns won’t have a chance to return or that superheroes won’t return.

Of course, superheroes are alive and well today. But in popular culture, these cycles have a limited lifespan. A day will come when mythological stories will be replaced by another genre, which all of us young directors are currently thinking of exploring.

Maybe it’s time…