For the Second Time in Three Years The Academy Award Nominations Have Shown That Movies For Grownups Can Be Artistic and Profitable. Will The Industry Listen?

 

 

To this point whenever I criticize Hollywood it is to criticize the performers and my fellow critics all of whom seem to have forgotten that movies and TV are a business first and that art is far down on the concerns of those who greenlight the projects.

Today I'd like to turn it around and do something I really haven't done and criticize the business model. Specifically when it comes to the movie industry and the making of films.

For the first half century of the history of the Oscars it was far easier to argue that a classic movie could be a box office success. For the last half century it has become nearly impossible to make that argument and the industry itself is to blame for that fact.

This is based on the idea that ever since Star Wars debuted and particularly in the 21^st century Hollywood has basically based its entire business model on appealing to 12 year old boys. We see this involving every franchise from Star Wars to Star Trek to Transformers and so many other action movie films and for the purposes of this article, comic book films.

Now strictly from a business standpoint I can't entirely blame the industry: it is a business and the job of any business is to make a profit. It's the decision to focus almost all of its efforts on adolescents and teenagers I question because that has always seemed ridiculous for so many reasons, of which I'm just going to give what I consider the three most obvious ones:

1. No one stays a teenager forever.

 2. Where do you think teenagers get most of their money from?

3. No two teenagers are alike and they can't all love the same things.

These are reasonable questions that I truly wonder if anyone ever dared as a studio executive. I think the answer is no because increasingly I've found the executives in Hollywood not only acting like thirteen year old boys (even the girls) but treating the audiences of the world and everyone in the industry as though they were in perpetual adolescence and that they had to follow the orders of the popular kids.

To all adults in the world their attitude is: "You want to see a movie that's mature? Too bad! We are going to flood every theater with comic book movies of superheroes you've never heard played by actors you've never heard of. And if there's a film you might want to see, we'll stick in a theater at 5:30 pm in the middle of nowhere if you're lucky! Suck it!"

To all of the actors and creative forces in the industry: "You want to do an art house project about the struggles of Mongolian farmers? Tough! You can choose between which role in a comic book franchise you want to do. And if you do enough of them, maybe we can talk about your film about the struggles of Mongolia farmers! Suck it!"

And then every Oscar season: "Oh, you spent years sweating away on blockbuster films that millions of Americans came to see? Well, too bad! We're going to give all of our award nominations and prizes to movies nobody got a chance to see! That we released in December in theaters in New York and Los Angeles and almost nobody in the rest of America saw except film critics and film festivals!"

And then the punch line: "You have to show up at the theater to present awards to these movies and we're going to all pretend this is what Hollywood is really about and that all the films we forced you to do are beneath our industry. And you have to smile and say how happy you are about all the films you wanted to do but we wouldn't let you! Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah!

I should clarify I'm not the kind of elitist snobs who thinks comic book films have no value in the world nor do I judge those who enjoy them and do like them. They are not my cup of tea but I don't blame those who pay money to see them. You do you. Where I do have a judgment is to whether so many actors and creative forces in Hollywood really want to spend their time doing these movies and to be clear in recent years we've gotten signs some of them have not.

I've always felt these decisions are made by a case by case basis and from what I can tell many of the actors in the MCU and the DC films clearly do seem to be enjoying themselves. Robert Downey Jr and Samuel L. Jackson have always loved what they're doing and actors like Chris Pratt and Tom Hiddleston would not be who they are without them. In some cases I do think they are essentially holding some great actors captive and I don't truly believe many of them had much choice. I find it impossible to believe Brie Larson's first choice after winning Best Actress for Room was to star in Captain Marvel and considering all of the abuse that's been heaped on her ever since I really wonder if was worth the candle.

And if I think this of the actors I can't imagine what's it been like for some of the directors recruited. If you want to be an auteur a comic book film is almost certainly not the place to do it. I find it difficult if not impossible to believe that Patty Jenkins or Kenneth Branagh wanted to direct comic book films of their own free will. I also think that with the sole exception of Batman, comic books film don't leave much room for an imprint and anyone who thought Chloe Zhao could do something brilliant with Eternals was deeply deluded in that fact.  Going from Nomadland to this could not have bene her first or tenth choice.

The combination of  the industry focusing on box office movies designed for children while choosing to recognize independent films for adults in the 21^st century has to have been a factor in why the ratings for the Oscars have been flatlining throughout the decade. I don't deny many of the small independent films that have been nominated and won were great movies but they were also movies most of America couldn't see.  And while the Oscars have expanded the number of nominated films each year by and large what they haven't done is change the overwhelming number of films that are nominated and win.

To be sure there have always been blockbusters nominated over the 2010s, a Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian here, Black Panther there and they've been more than generous to Dune parts one and two. But every year I watch the Oscars I think the viewer has a basic understanding: the blockbusters will get technical awards at best but the big prizes will go to a small independent film that few of us get a chance to see. And basically that's because what used to be a bigger deal for Hollywood – a big budget film for grown-ups that did well at the box office has become fewer and much farer between.

That is until 2023.

I saw Oppenheimer in an Imax screening that July. It was two weeks after the movie had come out but my friends and I had to buy tickets in advance. Even then we were lucky we found four seats in the theater as far apart as we did and we had to buy them nearly a week in advance of the screening.

I have always been a great fan of Christopher Nolan's work ever since I rented Memento from Blockbuster in January of 2002.  Nolan's films are an outlier among most filmmakers in that he makes his movies for grownups. I don't mean that their 'R' rated, I mean that he respects the intelligence of his audience to follow the intricate plots he's designed and to stay in the theater during runtimes of nearly three hours. Sometimes he overreaches (I never got into Tenet) but you have to respect a man who is this bold and brave with his visuals and the mind.

Oppenheimer was slightly atypical: the narrative was basically linear on both timelines and the viewer could follow it clearly between the flashbacks. And unlike almost every Nolan film since Insomnia it didn't build so much to a climax but to two separate denouements in its storyline. I'm not sure it's my favorite Nolan film (it ranks behind Memento and The Dark Knight right now) but it is an incredible movie.

More to the point there's no way this film should have become one of the highest grossing films of 2023. This is a three hour biopic of a nuclear scientist, played by Cillian Murphy in what was his first leading role in a big budget film. It is extremely dialogue heavy and there's only one explosion in it. We spent most of the film watching narration from two government hearings, one in an office, one in a Senate floor and most of it is spent in flashbacks. With the exception of Spielberg I don't know any other filmmaker other than Nolan who could have gotten this movie made, then released it in July. I remember reading about it in the winter of 2021. Every Hollywood magazine thought this would be the last time any studio gambled on something like this and the movie was going to bomb.

The movie is now ranked 127 all time on imdb.com. It made $330 million dollars domestic and nearly a billion dollars worldwide. It is one of the highest grossing R rated films of all-time and it was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards and won seven including three for Nolan.

I'm old enough to know these kinds of movies don't get made in the summertime anymore; the last adult film of this kind that had this level of box office and critical success was Saving Private Ryan in 1998.  And the fact that people were not only seeing these films but willing to see it and Barbie in the same day should have been the biggest message possible to Hollywood that maybe people who were older than thirteen might go to see a movie in the summertime or indeed any time.

It's not clear yet if the fallout (to coin a phrase) has fully registered in Hollywood in yet. It's not like, say, Martin Scorsese has been greenlit to do a three hour bio-pic of Niels Bohr with Leonardo Di Caprio in the title role and given a July release. (Note to Hollywood: please do this even if Scorsese has no plans to do so.) What is clear is this past spring we got an even louder and clearer message with a film that couldn't be more different than Oppenheimer except in quality.

As we all know the biggest story at the box-office in 2025 was Ryan Coogler's Sinners an incredible mash-up of genres from musical to period piece to horror to gangster. The film's box office was so big and so immediate that many studio heads tried to cover how successful it was even as it became the highest grossing non-IP film in fifteen years.

I won't pretend that race wasn't a factor in hiding the box office numbers of the film so much of the fact that it was an original idea with no IP involved that was rated R. The success of a film like this is, even more than Oppenheimer, a wakeup call to the industry that they might possibly have been following the wrong model when they started aiming all their movies for teenagers. Sinners is, anything, more deserving of an R-rating than Oppenheimer (though I have no doubt a fair amount of thirteen year olds did see it), with the notable exception of Michael B. Jordan doesn't have a single bankable name connected with it. Ryan Coogler, like Christopher Nolan, is just as capable of reinventing formats: he did so with Black Panther and Creed. And much as Nolan has done with such standout films as Inception and Interstellar Sinners is the kind of film so brilliantly original that it's almost impossible to imagine anyone trying to imitate it.  It doesn't contain nearly the mind bending twists of a Nolan film but it has a heart and soul than is equally missing from most blockbusters. That's even harder to duplicate.

And earlier today the Academy Awards decided to reward Sinners in a way no other film has before. It broke the all-time record for nominations for a movie with 16, two more than the previous leaders: All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land. One Battle After Another got thirteen -  the same number Oppenheimer got two years ago – and is still in second place.  That film remains the front runner for Best Picture despite that fact – it has already swept the major awards at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards -  but it doesn't change that Sinners has a place in Oscar history that it's very difficult to imagine any other movie surpassing.

Some could say that both Oppenheimer and Sinners appeal to different audiences and while there is truth to that, one can't pretend what they have in common. They are both brilliantly original R-rated films that succeeded beyond the expectations of their studios at the box office and have now been rewarded with more Oscar nominations than all the other contenders. Both were helmed by writer-directors who cut their teeth in independent films before moving on to completely reinvent first the comic book film and then blockbusters entirely. And in both cases audiences and critics responded to them in a measure almost unheard of these days particularly in the era where so many movies are sent to streaming almost immediately.

There's an argument a large part of the reason for the decline of movie is because the industry has spent so much time and energy wooing thirteen-year old boys they've ignored the demands of the grownups entirely. Three years ago Christopher Nolan fired the biggest explosion to that idea (sorry) and last year Coogler delivered another one. The grownups have shown in a big way that we want to be entertained. I'd argue its time for the studios to stop acting like teenagers and listen to their parents.