In normal times, I don't care about box office returns.
There have even been times when I've thought about lobbying against our running weekly box office reports in this section. My feeling is this is an arts section, not a business section, and there's no correlation between how worthy a movie is and how well it performs for its investors.
But I understand that some people follow the box office like other people follow sports. They're interested in what movie "won the weekend" and whether a given film's alarmingly large budget will be made back. The box office results are kind of like the pop charts used to be -- maybe looking at them can tell us a little bit about what kind of nation we are.
Besides, I am told, we really ought to anchor a feature above the TV grid we run on page 2. Some self-contained regular feature that readers can grow accustomed to and come to expect. And a long time ago, we decided that would be the weekly box office reports compiled by the wire services. I never looked at it except to proofread it (which was pretty much unnecessary since it had already been massaged by our excellent copy chief and sometimes contributor Joe Riddle, who does have an interest in box office standings), but I came to appreciate it as a reliable element. One less thing I needed to worry about.
Then came the pandemic, and the theaters closed. Which meant no box office to report. So no box office report. So for a time, we moved Karen Martin's weekly column on DVD releases to the top of page 2, where it stayed for a while, until theaters began to open again and we started getting box office reports again. Sometimes.
But then there were other weeks when we didn't get any box office reports from our wire services. For the past couple of months, every Monday morning Joe and I have had brief exchanges about whether or not we would have a box office report that week.
But now, 93% of the theaters in the country are open. (I read that in this week's box office report.) "Godzilla vs. Kong" is in more than 3,000 theaters. A lot of people went to see the movie -- in theaters, even though it was also available on HBO Max. They're now saying that every adult in the U.S. will be eligible for a covid-19 vaccine before the end of April. It looks like box office is back.
That should make us all happy, even if we don't particularly care for suspenseful legal dramas involving litigious giant lizards and apes.
I kid, I saw the movie. I watched some of it on my iPad and some of it on the Roku TV. And I think this one actually would benefit from being watched on a giant screen in a communal setting, sitting in the dark with strangers. Watching it at home was fine, I guess, but it's probably like watching a basketball game at home versus watching one in a crowded arena. There is a charge of something, adrenaline or dopamine, that you don't get at home. Often that feeling is more a reason to go than the product produced for the occasion.
While there were plenty of good films released last year, if you look at the nominees for this year's Best Picture Oscar, I see only one that I think would have benefited a lot from the larger screen (I would have liked to see Chloe Zhao's "Nomadland" in a good cinema). Most of this is because a lot of those bigger, so-called "movie movies" were held back last year by studios that understood they needed to play theatrically to succeed artistically as well as commercially.
Now, with almost all our theaters that are coming back online (there must have been some attrition, some of those picture shows will not re-open), it's becoming commercially (and artistically) viable to release those films. And our cultural lives will be richer for that, even if we're not all that het up over watching the cavortings of superheroes and monsters.
So yeah, I'm glad the box office is back, and I'm going to try to pay it more attention from now on.
Email:
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