Box office blues: Why the future looks dismal for 'non-mainstream' movies

It's bleak times for any movie without a forgetful fish or someone dressed in spandex, writes Geoffrey Macnab

Alice Through the Looking Glass made $270m earlier this year, a paltry figure compared to the $1 billion for Alice in Wonderland

At the start of this year, as Star Wars: The Force Awakens rocketed its way to a $2bn (£1.5m) box-office haul, film industry analysts were making very bullish noises about the enduring power of cinema. The evidence suggested that audiences everywhere were still prepared to pay premium ticket prices to watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters on the biggest screens possible. Even in an era of TV box sets and with films available more easily than ever before to stream and download at home, film-lovers still cherished the cinema experience.

2015 had been a bumper year, with hits such as Jurassic World, Fast and Furious 7, Inside Out, Minions and Spectre all doing roaring business. As the receipts mounted, it seemed that the corporations that owned the Hollywood studios had found a failsafe way to guarantee profits, namely producing remakes, sequels and spin-offs.

True, the market was polarised. The same handful of movies topped the box office charts in almost every country in the world. They were so dominant that there was very little space for any other fare. That was as true of the UK as of anywhere else. A total of 853 films were released in British cinemas last year but the top 10 of these accounted for almost 40 per cent of all ticket sales.

Alongside the monster successes of 2015, there were hundreds of titles that died miserable deaths at the British box office. According to trade body Film Distributors’ Association, 269 releases in the UK last year (a third of the overall total) made £10,000 or less from their cinema releases.

The recent outcry over the political thriller The Colony starring Emma Watson was instructive. As the British media were very quick to point out, The Colony took just £47 (roughly the cost of a family outing to a West End cinema) at the UK box office on its opening weekend. This followed on from the equally dire performances of such films as Misconduct starring Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins (which made £97), and Momentum starring Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman (which made all of £46). Distributors could console themselves with the thought that these films would find their audience on VOD but the figures were still dismaying and, for big name stars used to appearing in Harry Potter movies, humiliating too.

More worrying, from the US studios’ point of view, is the creeping suspicion this summer that franchise fatigue may be setting in. A number of very big budget films have been tanking recently at the box office. Alice Through The Looking Glass has made $270m at the box office worldwide, a figure that seems very paltry by comparison to the $1bn that Alice In Wonderland earned. The woeful Independence Day: Resurgence has underperformed badly as has the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel. Deadpool, the leanest, most original and irreverent Marvel spin-off in recent years, was more successful than anticipated but many of the other blockbusters this year simply haven’t lived up to expectations.

Modern-day Hollywood is built on the idea that repetition breeds affection. In industrial terms, each film has always been a prototype. Its makers have no idea whether it will work or not. It is very hard to build a business around the manufacture of prototypes. That is why Hollywood now clings so tightly to the familiar – and why the studios make so many superhero sequels. They’re as close as it comes to a sure thing.

The international box office will often account for the bulk of the revenues Hollywood tentpole movies earn. That is another reason why such movies are become blander. They need to be accessible to many different kinds of audiences.

Writing recently on industry website Deadline, former studio executive Peter Bart quoted an unnamed former studio boss who pointed out that “today’s corporate players are obsessed with quarterly earnings. As a result, they are risk-averse. They want product for theme parks, not theatres”.

Some are welcoming Hollywood’s recent travails at the box office. If the superheroes are losing their allure in the eyes of the public and the latest cartoons about woolly mammoths no longer charm the kids in quite the same way they once did, the studios may be forced to make more original movies.

Prognosticating about the box office is a perilous business because the film industry is so contradictory and so cyclical. Things change very quickly. Sometimes all it takes to turn an ailing studio’s fortunes around is a single successful movie. It is instructive to look at the topsy-turvy recent fortunes of the cinemas too. Take Odeon Cinemas, the celebrated British chain sold earlier this month to US exhibition giant AMC (which itself is now Chinese-owned.) Two years ago, attendances at Odeon’s sites across Britain and Europe were falling dramatically, the chain’s credit rating was downgraded and several of its top executives left the company. The real problem, in hindsight, was nothing to do with the running of the chain but was simply the absence in 2014 of big, popular tentpole movies. In 2015, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Spectre to boost the bottom line, Odeon enjoyed spectacular success.

It remains to be seen whether the box-office blues felt at the start of the summer are going to linger. Perhaps this has just been a temporary blip, a case of a few pictures that didn’t capture the public’s imagination in the way that had been anticipated. There are plenty of superhero and animated blockbusters in the pipeline (Suicide Squad and Finding Dory among them) that are capable of arresting the decline long before the release of Star Wars: Rogue One in time for Christmas. What won’t change, though, are the dismal box-office prospects for what are called the “non-mainstream” titles but are in fact the majority of films released – that’s to say, any movie not featuring a forgetful fish or someone dressed in a spandex suit.