2014 Box Office

The summer of 2014 was one of the least competitive in more than a decade, with only 12 “blockbusters” being released in the United States. More notably, this represents a full 33% drop from a year ago. In this context, is it really so surprising that total receipts plummeted year-over-year?

The reduction is explained by key – and largely unintended – omissions:

• 2014 was the first summer since 2006 without a Pixar film, after creative troubles drove the studio to move The Good Dinosaur from a May 2014 release date to late 2015. Over the past three years, Pixar’s films have sold an average of 28M tickets – which would have represented more than 10% of the summer box office in 2014

• The accidental death of Paul Walker also led Universal to delay Fast & Furious 7 from July 2014 to April 2015. Given last summer’s entry, Fast & Furious 6, represented a franchise high in both critical and financial terms ($240M, or ~30M tickets), the delay was bound to reduce year over year revenue

• Less than two months before its release, Jupiter Ascending, a $175M picture starring Channing Tatum & Mila Kunis and created by the Wachowski siblings, was pushed from its July 18th release date to February 2015. As the 11th hour postponement and revised date suggest, the film was unlikely to be a big draw at the box office – in fact Jupiter Ascending had already been pegged as the summer’s biggest bomb. The Wachowski’s last film (also a sci-fi epic), Cloud Atlas, didn’t even clear 30M domestically. However, Jupiter Ascending could still have ended up a sleeper hit – especially given the relatively uncompetitive season. We shall see.

More context from Liam Boluk here. The movies business does face many challenges, but looking at the absolute theatrical revenue decline from 2013 to 2014 and proclaiming the end of the film business without delving into the details is just intellectual laziness.

Who would've thought Guardians of the Galaxy would be one of the movie business saviors this summer? I remember seeing the trailer and thinking we'd finally passed the comic book movie adaptation peak. I still can't bring myself to see it.

All eyes turn towards Interstellar November 5. At the New York Film Festival, Paul Thomas Anderson, who has seen Interstellar, was asked about it. He said it was “fucking incredible” and recommended, “Brave the line. See it in IMAX.”

I will Paul. I will.

Ricky Jay

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”

“The three of hearts.”

“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.

It's been a while since I've seen one of those lists of articles to peruse from the New Yorker's temporary open archive. This profile of Ricky Jay from 1993 is one of my favorites.

While I was living in LA, I saw him perform live twice. This description of Jay from the profile is perfect: “He has a skeptically friendly, mildly ironic conversational manner and a droll, filigreed prose style.”

Two Recommendations (both involving a Gyllenhaal)

Two things that entertained me this month, both highly recommended, each starring a Gyllenhaal.

The Honorable Woman

This 8-part miniseries is the best thing TV I've seen on TV in 2014 so far. I first tried watching it on the Sundance Channel on DirecTV, but the channel has yet to switch to HD so I ended up purchasing the miniseries on iTunes.

The plot hangs loosely off of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but what I loved most is the spy story at its heart. As a hopeless devotee of Le Carré, I can't resist stories that slowly peel away the dozens of layers that build up around deep political secrets. These types of dramas offer the sweet pleasure of a mystery yarn with the smoky, bitter overtone of political jousting. It's a television Manhattan, and I drank a glass each night before bed over one pleasurable week.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is the cryptic beating heart of the series, but she's surrounded on all sides equally great performances. I could spend hours longer with Stephen Rea's droopy hangdog face. His quiet line readings recalled Alec Guinness's amazing performance in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, still my favorite Le Carré adaptation ever. Someone build a recurring TV series or miniseries around Rea as an aging spy! Remember how fantastic Mirren was as in great recurring miniseries The Prime Suspect? Rea could fill similar shoes.

Nightcrawler

On to the other Gyllenhaal. At TIFF this year, I had two tickets each to two movies playing at the same time. One was Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, and the other was The Drop. I couldn't choose between the two so I let the other three folks pick, and I ended up with a ticket to The Drop. I wasn't unhappy about that. While I've always struggled with Jake Gyllenhaal's past work, never really feeling that inner life that reads on screen as charisma.  

I didn't love The Drop. It's a Dennis Lehane crime drama set in Brooklyn, but it doesn't feel authentically Crooklyn. Lehane's Boston films are filled with local flavor, but The Drop lacks geographic authenticity. I recognized only tropes of Hollywood pulp. It's not entirely bereft: my parting gifts were the final performance from James Gandolfini, with his drooping eyelids giving away the weariness winning out against his rage, and yet another type of character from Tom Hardy who seems to diversify his portfolio as much as possible with every role.

It wasn't until tonight that I finally caught Nightcrawler (at the Mill Valley Film Festival; who knew?). I enjoyed the movie, and moreover, I appreciated Gyllenhaal's performance.

Nightcrawler is a gleefully savage satire on many levels. Most obviously, it extends the through line of Network in savaging the evolution of the media business and delves deeper into the economics of modern network news.

But it's also an indictment of the soullessness of modern management philosophy and homo economicus, and this is where the movie's humor is at its most dark, bitter, and hilarious. Almost all the characters chase after status and wealth in the most rational manner, and it leads them straight into the darkness of the Los Angeles night, whose garish neon lights have always stood in for a sort of chemical sickness at the heart of it all.

None of them is as determined and ruthless as Jake Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom, a thief of a bizarre ambition who finds his calling as a nightcrawler, a person who listens to the police channel on a radio and races to crime scenes with a camcorder to capture garish footage to sell to local network news channels. Bloom speaks like an MBA, but not a natural one. Instead, he mouths the usual management platitudes as if he read about them in a book, as if it's he's trying the language and ideas on for size. We know from his background that this is a second language for him.

He brings on an assistant to read off directions while he drives, and the appropriation of corporate HR language, motivational jargon, and branding to what amounts to a two-man operation run out of a car is a blunt but effective way of magnifying its emptiness.

Lastly, it's a sly jab at filmmaking itself. Bloom directs his assistant to capture additional footage that will cut well with Bloom's own footage later on, and at times Bloom moves props and even bodies around crime scenes to clarify the narrative and pathos of his footage.

If it bleeds, it leads. If a successful capitalist enterprise is all about giving customers what they want, at all costs, then Lou Bloom is one possible outcome for modern network news: an underpaid freelancer as focused on creating the news as reporting on it.

History of the Michelin Man

Many of the posters from the early 20th-century depict him as a somewhat sinister figure, large and bespectacled and chomping permanently on a cigar. Initially he was shown drinking champagne, which linked to the Latinate toast, and this was reinforced by a strangely worded tagline that had been first mentioned in 1893: "À Votre Santé Le Pneu Michelin Boit L’Obstacle!" (The Michelin tire drinks up obstacles!). The poster apparently led to the character being known for a while as the "road drunkard," an image that would be abhorrent to any car-related company today. But the Michelin Man learned to change with the times. In the 1920s he discarded his pince-nez eyeglasses, and also gave up his cigar (at the dawn of the motor age these appendages had helped him appeal to the very small, wealthy section of society that had the power to buy a car). The white tires remained, however, as an important visual throwback to his 19th-century origins. When Bibendum was originally sketched out, tires were light in color, and black versions only appeared in 1912 when a preservative, carbon black, was added to the manufacturing process.

By the 1950s he had become a more rotund figure, and was even depicted gaily rolling a tire along the road; a further 20 years on and he had transformed into a true cartoon, in one iteration dancing euphorically beneath the slogan "I’m clinging in the rain." The 21st-century Michelin Man has slimmed down, and is even a touch macho-looking, perhaps in a reaction against Bibendum’s ongoing association with a larger than life existence.

From a Fast Company excerpt from TM: The Untold Stories Behind 29 Classic Logos, on the history of the Michelin Man, nee Bibendum.

The original “road drunkard” version of the Michelin Man seems more suited to represent a company that hands out Michelin stars to high end restaurants than the current version of the logo who looks like more of a fast food lover. And now that tired are black, as noted above, shouldn't the Michelin Man have an inverted color scheme?

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April 1898

Economic moral inversion

Alex Tabarrok with a thought-provoking post on the stark difference in evaluating actions based on intention versus outcome. The real world example: Evan Thornley, founder of LookSmart, admitted he hired more women because of the market inefficiency for their talents.

“Call me opportunistic; I thought I could get better people with less competition because we were willing to understand the skills and capabilities that many of these woman had,” Thornley said.

…Thornley went on to say that by hiring women, he got better-qualified employees to whom he was able to give more responsibility. “And [they were] still often relatively cheap compared to what we would’ve had to pay someone less good of a different gender,” he concluded. To illustrate his point he showed a slide that said: “Women: Like Men, Only Cheaper.”

As you might expect, his comments were met with outrage. Tabarrok believes the outrage comes from judging Thornley on an intention-based heuristic. Looked at from an economist's consequentialist perspective, Tabarrok feels Thornley was judged too harshly.

If we judge actions by consequences, however, Thornley should be encouraged, perhaps even praised. Accepting for the sake of argument the truth of the story, it’s Thornley who has overcome prejudice (his or his society’s), recognized the truth of equality and taken entrepreneurial action to do well while doing good. It’s Thornley who is broadcasting the fact of equality to the world and encouraging others to do likewise. Most importantly, the consequence of Thornley’s actions are to increase the demand for women executives thereby increasing their wages.

Women’s wages aren’t pushed down by employers who hire women but by employers who don’t hire women. So why does Thornley get the blame? Instead of denouncing Thornley, whose actions push up the wages of women he hires and the wages of the women he does not hire, why not ask, How can we encourage employers not to overlook talented women and minorities?

For those wanting to break the bonds of discrimination whether they be women, blacks or Dalits, lower wages and a competitive market aren’t the cost of discrimination but the cure. It’s the lower wages that give employers an incentive to overcome prejudice, seek out talent, and experiment with new ways of doing business. And it is the self-interested pursuit of profit that is the surest means to increase the wages of the unjustly ignored and overlooked.

I'm sympathetic to both sides. On the one hand, a free market economy can be a natural corrective to many forms of discrimination when the discrimination happens to be economically inefficient.

On the other hand, let's not fit Thornley for a saint's cap. In this day and age, especially in the U.S., I don't perceive a huge societal retaliation threat for paying women equal pay for equal work. It's not as if Thornley was coming out against slavery in the Deep South when slavery was at its height. He clearly states that he believed the women were doing not just equal work but better work. So why not do the right thing and just pay them commensurate to their value as he saw it? I'm hesitant to laud someone for just being a smart business person, a rational economic actor.