Vacation, all we ever wanted—especially now that travel is starting to feel safe again. So great is the thrill of drawing up an itinerary for the first time in 16 months that it might plunge us into denial of what we know deep down: that vacation is no panacea. It’s a break from work, sure, for those who can actually log off. But our real troubles, the ones that infect our most precious relationships, can’t be checked at the front desk of any five-star hotel. They follow us to our destinations, reframing our every experience, like human remains in the cargo hold of a plane packed with tourists.
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This grim metaphor constitutes the opening scene of The White Lotus, a darkly hilarious, existentially terrifying HBO miniseries from writer, director, actor and occasional reality-TV star Mike White. In a Hawaii airport, a tourist couple interrogates a somber-looking man (perennial rom-com boyfriend Jake Lacy in spoiled-frat-boy mode) about his honeymoon at a resort called the White Lotus. “Our guide told us someone was killed there!” the woman exclaims. Yes, says the groom; the body is, just now, being loaded onto the plane they’re about to board. Then it occurs to the couple to ask where his bride is. “No offense,” he replies. “Leave me the f-ck alone.”
Though it’s tempting to draw conclusions, the show takes its time returning to the question of who died and how. Flashing back to a week earlier, it follows a handful of VIP guests—including Lacy’s Shane and his marital acquisition, struggling journalist Rachel (Alexandra Daddario, recently seen in The Girlfriend Experience)—at the resort. If the newlyweds have dragged along their fundamental incompatibility as baggage, then weepy, disarmingly honest Tanya (an astounding Jennifer Coolidge) has only her loneliness and her mother’s ashes to declare. Rounding out the fancy bunch are powerful executive Nicole (a smartly cast Connie Britton), her emasculated husband Mark (Steve Zahn) and their screen-addicted teen son Quinn (Fred Hechinger from The Woman in the Window) and snarky socialist daughter Olivia (Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney), who’s brought her college pal Paula (Brittany O’Grady of Little Voice). Scathing, hilarious and hypocritical (Olivia on Hillary Clinton: “She was a neolib and a neocon”), the girls are some of the sharpest Gen Z characters I’ve seen.
Mario Perez/HBOJennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett in ‘The White Lotus’
Coordinating the downstairs to this messy upstairs is resort manager Armond (Looking’s Murray Bartlett). Smooth with guests and exacting but also weirdly philosophical with staff, he starts to unravel when a new hire goes into labor on her first day. Armond’s idea of good service is aptly infantilizing; guests, he says, “get everything they want, but they don’t even know what they want.” No one understands this better than genuinely caring spa director Belinda (Natasha Rothwell of Insecure), whose quiet compassion makes a profound impact on the emotionally needy Tanya.
Yes, this is a hell is other people story. What makes it not just fresh, but thrilling is the way that Sartrean conceit gets filtered through the distinctive tragicomic sensibility of White, who wrote and directed every episode. Like his last HBO series, the cult classic Enlightened, The White Lotus (note the creator’s surname, as well as the extremely loaded invocation of the lotus, whose literary lineage will come up eventually) is uniquely attuned to characters’ internal conflicts as well as their varying level of self-awareness, and how that inner turmoil shapes their interactions. Shane has no idea what a nightmare he can be. Tanya, by contrast, is a disaster, but she knows that and tries to be honest about it. Staff at the resort don’t have the same—or, really, any—freedom to blurt out their own private thoughts. It’s when the hopes, appetites and resentments they’ve repressed come to the surface that life at the White Lotus spins out of control.
There are political elements at play here. Class differences aside, while the guests are almost all white and straight, the staffers we meet are Indigenous or Black or queer. And, as in Enlightened, the lofty principles characters espouse tend to dovetail conveniently with their own self-interest. Olivia’s Hillary-bashing is clearly meant to rile up her high-achieving mom. Would she or any of the guests really choose to give up their privilege, though, if given the chance?
Mario Perez/HBOJake Lacy and Alexandra Daddario in ‘The White Lotus’
Fortunately, White never gets so earnest in his arguments that he forgets to make the show fun. The White Lotus is still a summer-vacation romp. It uses the lovely Polynesian backdrop—traditional music as well as pristine beachscapes—to its fullest; in a luau sequence, the drums and dancing heighten both the intensity and the absurdity of each dinner conversation. The performances only heighten the pleasure. While Coolidge is bound to be the breakout, Zahn, Bartlett, Rothwell, Lacy, Sweeney and Daddario also hit career highs. Much of the humor comes from the creation of characters so specific and vivid that we can sense when they’re struggling to maintain outward calm while raging internally.
It’s an approach HBO subscribers impatient for the third season of Succession will surely appreciate. If the butt of that show’s jokes is corporate decadence, then White, who brings a touch more empathy to his satire, has equally profound things to say about the politics of leisure. Even better: he never makes getting to those revelations feel like work.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Pennsylvania’s highest court threw out Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and opened the way for his immediate release from prison Wednesday in a stunning reversal of fortune for the comedian once known as “America’s Dad,” ruling that the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor’s agreement not to charge Cosby.
Cosby, 83, has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence after being found guilty of drugging and violating Temple University sports administrator Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era.
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The former “Cosby Show” star was arrested in 2015, when a district attorney armed with newly unsealed evidence — the comic’s damaging deposition testimony in a lawsuit brought by Constand — brought charges against him days before the 12-year statute of limitations ran out.
But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that District Attorney Kevin Steele, who made the decision to arrest Cosby, was obligated to stand by his predecessor’s promise not to charge Cosby. There was no evidence that promise was ever put in writing.
Justice David Wecht, writing for a split court, said Cosby had relied on the former district attorney’s decision not to charge him when the comedian gave his potentially incriminating testimony in the Constand’s civil case.
The court called Cosby’s arrest “an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was forgone for more than a decade.”
The justices said that overturning the conviction, and barring any further prosecution, “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.”
A Cosby spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Nor did a Steele representative, Constand or her lawyer.
“FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted — a miscarriage of justice is corrected!’ the actor’s “Cosby Show” co-star Phylicia Rashad tweeted.
“I am furious to hear this news,” actor Amber Tamblyn, a founder of Time’s Up, an advocacy group for victims of sexual assault, said in a Twitter post. “I personally know women who this man drugged and raped while unconscious. Shame on the court and this decision.”
Four judges formed the majority that ruled in Cosby’s favor, while three others dissented in whole or in part.
Even though Cosby was charged only with the assault on Constand, the trial judge allowed five other accusers to testify that they, too, were similarly victimized by Cosby in the 1980s. Prosecutors called them as witnesses to establish what they said was a pattern of criminal behavior on Cosby’s part.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices voiced concern about what they saw as the judiciary’s increasing tendency to allow testimony that crosses the line into character attacks. State law allows “prior bad acts” testimony only in limited cases, including to show a crime pattern so specific it serves to identify the perpetrator.
But the court declined to say whether five other accusers should have been allowed to testify, considering it moot given the finding that Cosby should not have been prosecuted in the first place.
In New York, the judge presiding over last year’s trial of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose case had sparked the explosion of the #MeToo movement in 2017, let four other accusers testify. Weinstein was convicted and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He is now facing separate charges in California.
In May, Cosby was denied paroled after refusing to participate in sex offender programs behind bars. He has long said he would resist the treatment programs and refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing even if it means serving the full 10-year sentence.
Prosecutors said Cosby repeatedly used his fame and “family man” persona to manipulate young women, holding himself out as a mentor before betraying them.
Cosby, a groundbreaking Black actor who grew up in public housing in Philadelphia, made a fortune estimated at $400 million during his 50 years in the entertainment industry. His trademark clean comedy fueled popular TV shows, books and standup acts.
He fell from favor in his later years as he lectured the Black community about family values, but was attempting a comeback when he was arrested.
The AP does not typically identify sexual assault victims without their permission, which Constand has granted.
The best books arriving this month dive deep in all different directions. There’s a comprehensive look at loneliness in America—and an equally compelling dissection into why we sweat. One new novel is a thrilling quest to avenge a double murder and another finds its characters investigating their husbands’ dubious moralities. Some narratives expose the harsh realities of everyday living; others seek to uncover the unknown. Here, the 11 new books you should read in July.
The Collection Plate: Poems, Kendra Allen (July 6)
Blending personal narrative and cultural commentary,The Collection Plateintroduces Kendra Allen as a poet to watch. In her debut collection, Allen underlines the common threads between a variety of experiences, from what it means to exist as a Black person in America to the tense relationships between mothers and daughters. Throughout, as she explores girlhood, freedom, sex and more, Allen shines a light on the spaces that connect and divide us, coalescing into an electric portrait of joy and pain.
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Two ex-cons come together to seek revenge after both of their sons, a married couple, are murdered. They don’t have too much in common, but the tragedy has left them unexpectedly linked. As they grapple with their messy pasts amid a violent present in the American South, the men embark on a dangerous quest, which S.A. Cosby captures in gripping and intense terms.
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, Kristen Radtke (July 6)
The latest work of graphic nonfiction from Kristen Radtke pulls apart how loneliness operates to understand why it exists and the forms it can take. Combining history and cultural analysis with personal stories, Radtke argues that loneliness is an epidemic that can be viewed through many lenses. In pages full of haunting illustrations, Seek You prompts readers to look inwards. In forcing us to confront our own loneliness, Radtke makes us feel a little less alone.
Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, Chris Stuck (July 6)
Nine short stories set in cities across the United States, from Los Angeles to Phoenix to New York, examine masculinity and Blackness, and the many ways race and identity intersect. From a Black Republican grappling with a skin disease that’s made him appear white to a biracial man on a visit to see his estranged white father, the characters that populate Chris Stuck’s electric debut collection highlight the complexities of racism and Black life. Often employing satire, Stuck is unafraid to tackle and illuminate the absurdities that accompany how we perceive and react to race.
Buy Now:Give My Love to the Savages on Bookshop | Amazon
Embassy Wife, Katie Crouch (July 13)
Persephone Wilder is living in Namibia where she diligently attends to her duties as the wife of an American diplomat. When the newest trailing spouse, Amanda Evans, arrives in town, she’s quick to show her the ropes. But Amanda’s husband may not have been so honest about his reasons for uprooting their family—and the consequences grow increasingly dire when their daughter becomes embroiled in international conflict. As Amanda fights to save her family and Persephone is forced to confront the cracks in her own life, the two women start to question if they ever really knew their husbands at all.
The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science ofPerspiration, Sarah Everts (July 13)
The science of sweat is complicated and, well, weird. Journalist Sarah Everts explores how sweat works in a book that jumps around the world, from a dating event in Moscow where romantic hopefuls sniff each other’s sweat to an infamous smoke sauna in Finland. Everts answers a range of questions throughout about sweat and our history of wanting to control it, including an analysis of the deodorant and antiperspirant industries.
The intricately plotted debut from Pik-Shuen Fung finds a daughter as she wrestles with questions over her father’s death. For most of her life, he worked in Hong Kong while she grew up in Vancouver and lived with the rest of their “astronaut” family. After his passing, the unnamed protagonist revisits their family history to understand the man she never really got to know. Her search, both complex and devastating, yields revelations about family, grief and the durability of love.
The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix (July 13)
So you’ve survived the worst night of your life—what comes next? The question propels Grady Hendrix’s twisty new novel, which builds off of tropes in horror movies to ask what happens to the people left standing after a massacre. Like its title suggests,The Final Girl Support Groupfollows a group of women who meet with a therapist to discuss their experiences following their traumas and struggles to move on with their lives. Things hit a snag when one of the girls misses a meeting—setting off a narrative that is equal parts thrilling and darkly funny.
Buy Now:The Final Girl Support Group on Bookshop | Amazon
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura (July 20)
At the center of Katie Kitamura’s piercing new novel is a translator caught in the intersection of a lot of other people’s drama. She’s working at The Hague, and there, her colleagues have somehow embedded her into their private lives. As she becomes more involved in their sagas, the protagonist ofIntimaciesslips into her own when she’s tasked with interpreting for a powerful former president on trial for war crimes. From there, Kitamura’s latest unravels in terms both disquieting and unexpected.
The premise ofNightbitchsounds bizarre and that’s because it is: a young stay-at-home mother begins to notice hair growing where it shouldn’t be, her canines becoming suspiciously sharper and impulses that are increasingly dog-like. Her search for answers about her strange state leads her to a book calledA Field Guide to Magical Women—and the absurdities only pick up from there. The outrageous nature of the plot yields funny and, at times, unsettling results as Yoder’s protagonist navigates her animalistic qualities.
Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health, Leana Wen (July 27)
In her new book, Leana Wen reflects on her career as a public health leader, mapping out the work she’s done and how she got there. The author is unsparing in detailing her rise in the public health field, sharing her experiences as an immigrant from China, her family receiving food stamps and how she went to college at just 13 years old. Beyond her personal history, Wen explains how crucial public health is, from combating opioid addiction to infant mortality to COVID-19.
Those who’ve spent June frolicking in the sunshine—with good reason—may not realize what a peculiar month it has been for TV. There were plenty of great returning shows: Betty, Lupin, Dave, Flack, David Makes Man. Canceled by Netflix just when it was starting to get good, cult cartoon Tuca & Bertie found a new perch at Adult Swim. The series finale of Pose was gorgeous and painful. But few of the highly anticipated debuts lived up to expectations. A-list Stephen King adaptation Lisey’s Story droned on for eight episodes without saying much. Sitcom satire and Annie Murphy vehicle Kevin Can F**K Himself lacked bite. Netflix’s would-be summer scorcher Sex/Life wasn’t hot so much as unintentionally hilarious.
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Thankfully, now that the TV universe is so vast, it’s always possible to find something new to enjoy if you’re willing to dig a bit. This month’s highlights include a modern Masterpiece, an offbeat British rom-com, an homage to Anaïs Nin, a musical comedy about finding oneself in punk rock and the darkly funny origin story of an ’80s aerobics mogul. For more recommendations, here’s a rundown of my favorite shows from the first half of 2021.
Little Birds (Starz)
Don’t get too excited. Starz’s Little Birds is not a faithful adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s erotic story collection, which wouldn’t fly even on premium cable. But with its colorful and provocative transgressions, the six-part drama certainly honors the queen of literary smut.
The series unfurls in the decadent environs of Tangier in 1955. Lucy (Juno Temple at her fizzy best) is an American heiress straight out of a luxury asylum, who’s come to Morocco to marry a broke British lord, Hugo (an anxious Hugh Skinner). Though she radiates free-floating lust, he won’t touch her. What she doesn’t know is that he’s gay; what he doesn’t know is that her arms-manufacturer dad expects him to close deals with Morocco’s French occupiers. Soon to cross paths with this milieu is dominatrix Cherifa (Yumna Marwan, ferocious), who delights in making her “French piggy” clients squeal but is also starting to make the colonial authorities nervous.
Political subtext abounds. Like its inspiration, the show is attuned to sex as an expression of power, though its insights on the topic aren’t entirely new. Better to watch for the escapist pleasure of a jewel-toned melodrama that evokes Fellini and Almodóvar as much as it does Nin.
Physical (Apple TV+)
Physical, a new black-comedy series, chronicles the rise of a ’60s radical turned ’80s workout-video queen. No, it’s not a biography of Jane Fonda. The show’s fictional protagonist, Sheila Rubin, is a far less endearing character. Played with gritted-teeth intensity by Rose Byrne, she’s a frustrated San Diego housewife with a Berkeley degree, a young daughter, an eating disorder and a relentlessly critical inner monologue. When her husband Danny (Superstore‘s Rory Scovel), a philandering hippie academic, loses his job and proposes using their savings to fund a state assembly campaign, she panics. The problem is, she’s already spent that money on furtive, ritualistic binge-and-purge sessions whose secrecy she ensures by checking into a local motel.
Instead of coming clean, she discovers an aerobics gym at the mall, operated by a bleach-blonde, Spandex-clad speed freak named Bunny (British actor Della Saba). When it comes to group exercise, it’s love at first step-touch. Despite Bunny’s rightful mistrust, Sheila starts teaching classes in an attempt to replenish the Rubins’ savings. Eventually, she gets the idea to shoot a workout video. And the deeper she gets into aerobics, the less she seems to need her binges. [Read the full essay on Physical and the end of pop culture’s girlboss obsession.]
Starstruck (HBO Max)
It’s a fantasy so common as to be practically universal: a glamorous, charming, desirable celebrity—the kind of person who is the object of thousands, if not millions of crushes—picks you, a mere mortal, out of a crowd of admirers. A fairy-tale courtship ensues. Romance blossoms. You ascend to your rightful place in the cultural and socioeconomic firmament, all because that famous person saw something extraordinary in you that you hadn’t yet discovered in yourself.
Starstruck, a clever British rom-com from comedian Rose Matafeo (Horndog), takes a somewhat more realistic approach to this scenario. One drunken New Year’s Eve, Jessie (Matafeo) and Tom (Nikesh Patel) meet-cute in the men’s bathroom of a club. He’s a mild-mannered movie star frustrated with the shallowness of his industry. She’s a brassy New Zealand expat living in East London, holding down two unfulfilling jobs and nearing the end of her 20s but nowhere close to finding a direction in life. And unlike seemingly everyone else in the world, she has no idea who Tom is by the time they get back to his place that night. So apparently mismatched are they that, when Jessie sneaks out the next morning, the paparazzi assume she’s his cleaning lady. The opposites-attract romance that plays out over the following year probably won’t change your life. But it’s funny and tender and not at all cloying, with a perfect ending that feels earned and effortless at once.
Us (PBS)
A husband and wife arrange a three-week family tour of Europe as a grand sendoff for their son, who’s about to leave for university. A lovely parting gift, right? But one night in bed, shortly before they’re scheduled to depart, the wife blindsides her husband with the announcement that she’s going to leave him. As she sees it, the trip will be a sort of farewell tour for their family; for him, once he’s agreed to go ahead with what will surely be an emotionally taxing adventure, it’s a chance to win her back. Meanwhile, the boy—like every teenager ever—would much prefer partying with friends his own age to traipsing around world-class museums with parents whose growing unhappiness he can sense.
This is the rich premise of Us (not to be confused with the Jordan Peele horror movie of the same name), a four-hour Masterpiece miniseries adapted from David Nicholls’ acclaimed 2014 novel. And while the European locations—Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, the beaches of Spain—alone would make it worth watching, the show’s greatest strength is the depth it gives the three main characters. Douglas Petersen (the great Tom Hollander) is a high-strung, left-brained, stickler-for-rules scientist who has trouble valuing perspectives that differ from his own. An artist in her youth, his wife Connie (Saskia Reeves, a wonderful, underrated British actor recently seen in Belgravia) is the kind of unconventional woman you’d be tempted to call a free spirit if she wasn’t so clear-eyed and grounded. In poignant, if sometimes contrived, flashbacks to their early years as a couple, director Geoffrey Sax (Tipping the Velvet) demonstrates what brought these two very different people together—and, at times, threatened to tear them apart. Their brooding son Albie (The Dark Tower star Tom Taylor), an aspiring photographer who takes after his mum, has his own reasons for withdrawing from the family unit. As a trio, the Petersens generate some of the most insightful character-driven drama on TV this year, in the context of an emotional story that raises novel questions about what makes a successful relationship.
We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)
For any band formed outside a boardroom, the disastrous first gig is a rite of passage. KISS debuted to an audience of fewer than 10 in Queens. The Velvet Underground regaled an incredulous New Jersey high school with their classic song “Heroin.” And in a new comedy series from Peacock, a fictional London punk act called Lady Parts takes the stage for the first time in a neighborhood pub filled with Union Jacks and jeering white guys. “Your husband let you out the house tonight, did he?” one man cracks when the all-female, all-Muslim quartet takes the stage. They launch into a noisy but triumphant rendition of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” trading looks of pure, astonished joy as the crowd remains bemused.
The scene has infectious energy. Yet what’s remarkable about it is that although it takes place two-thirds of the way through We Are Lady Parts’ electrifying premiere season, it constitutes the show’s first substantive depiction of misogyny and Islamophobia. That’s not to say that the five young women at the center of this show live in some untroubled fantasy-land, or that they don’t struggle over how to navigate their hybrid identities. But creator Nida Manzoor, who wrote and directed the entire six-episode season, understands that it’s possible to tell a culturally specific story without reducing the experiences of so many discrete characters to a constant confrontation with politicized adversity. [Read TIME’s full review]
Movies are back! F9, the latest installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, shattered pandemic box office records this weekend with a $70 million debut—the biggest box office opening since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in December of 2019. A Quiet Place Part II had held the previous pandemic record, raking in $48.3 million during its opening weekend in late May.
Notably, both F9 and A Quiet Place Part II debuted exclusively in theaters rather than simultaneously in theaters and on streaming. Their success seems to suggest that audiences are hungry to return to theaters and that the strategy some studios, like Warner Bros. and Disney, have adopted of releasing a movie both in theaters and on VOD could already be out of date.
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Still, entertainment conglomerates have more to consider than box office success: releasing movies like In the Heights and Cruella on streaming services the same day they hit theaters could drive subscriptions to streaming sites, which in some cases may be as valuable to the company as straight ticket sales. And there are exceptions to the theaters-only model: Godzilla v. Kong saw surprising box office success back in March even though it was also available on HBO Max.
One things is clear: franchise films are flourishing in theaters as Americans return to the cineplex. Here’s what that means for this summer’s movies and the future of film beyond the next few months.
Franchise movies will continue to rule theaters
ParamountEmily Blunt in A Quiet Place Part 2
Movies like F9 exist to be seen in theaters. The stunts are absurd yet awe-inspiring. The jokes land best when you’re surrounded by dozens of other people laughing at the ridiculousness of strapping a rocket to the top of a Pontiac Fiero. What is the point of watching Vin Diesel drive his car off a cliff on a tiny phone screen?
Universal Studios knows this to be true. F9 was one of the first movies to delay its release by an entire year when the pandemic struck. That wound up being a prudent move. F9 even beat the debut of the 2019 Fast & Furious spinoff, Hobbes & Shaw, which had a $60 million opening weekend, though it didn’t quite reach the $98.8 million high of 2017’s Fate of the Furious. So far, F9 has made $405 million globally.
Any other year, F9′s success would have been all but guaranteed. In the last decade or so, movies featuring superhuman acts have been the safest bets for studios when it comes to box office sales—particularly those like F9 that boast diverse casts and globetrotting plots. Still, the most pessimisticprognosticatorspredicted we would not be able to tear ourselves from our couches to return to movies post-pandemic: Netflix would have spoiled us too much.
But it turns out people are eager to leave their houses, especially for an action-packed romp. In all likelihood, studios will see the success of these movies and double down on tentpole franchises, for better or worse.
The evolution of the Fast franchise mirrors the evolution of the box office
UniversalBrian O’Conner and Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time, not so long ago, when studios made more than action movies. When mid-budget adult dramas were sure-fire box office bets. When adaptations of John Grisham novels like The Pelican Brief and The Firm, epic stories totally devoid of superheroes like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan and comedies like Home Alone and Austin Powers, would bring in the big bucks.
Indeed, there was even a time when Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto had fewer muscles and couldn’t punch his way through hundreds of bad guys. Way back in 2001, Fast and Furious was a straightforward cops-and-robbers crime drama. But with each installment the franchise got bigger and the stunts more absurd. The drivers went from racing cars on the streets of Los Angeles to jumping cars from one Abu Dhabi skyscraper to another to driving cars through outer space.
At this point, the Fast movies are essentially indistinguishable from superhero films, though director Justin Lin, who has helmed several installments of the franchise, is always winking at the audience about the impossibility of the team’s antics: there’s an ongoing gag in F9 in which the characters debate whether they are invincible given how many ridiculous stunts they’ve survived. It’s hard to imagine the Fast and Furious of 2001 scoring this big of a box office in 2021.
As the Fast and Furious movies got bigger, so did the industry’s concept of a successful film. In 2001, Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded remake of Ocean’s Eleven as well as the Ben Affleck vehicle Pearl Harbor were two of the highest-grossing movies internationally, and eventual Oscar winner A Beautiful Mind and rom-com Bridget Jones’ Diary weren’t far behind. Fast and Furious didn’t even crack the top 15.
But the two highest-grossing movies of that year hinted at the franchise frenzy to come: They were the first installments in two epic franchises, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. It would be another year before the first Spider-Man movie would hit theaters and another seven years before Iron Man would kick off the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the most profitable franchise in movie history.
By 2019, all 10 of the highest-grossing movies of the year were franchise films, be they superhero stories like Avengers: Endgame, Disney remakes like The Lion King or entries in the Star Wars saga. Meanwhile, non-genre films have largely migrated to streaming services.
Now, in the pandemic era, that trend is only intensifying: Studios invest more heavily in superhero fare, and often prioritize its marketing and release in theaters. And, as a result, those tend to be the most successful films.
Studios could abandon their streaming strategy for the biggest films
Warner Bros.Timothée Chalamet in Warner Bros.’ now delayed sci-fi epic ‘Dune’
Several studios, anticipating that hesitancy to return to movie theaters would last a bit longer, declared that they would be releasing some of their biggest, most expensive movies simultaneously in theaters and on streaming services for the rest of 2021.
The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Widow, will debut on Disney+ the same day it hits movie theaters, though it will cost $30 on top of a Disney+ subscription via Premier Access. Warner Bros. has said that Suicide Squad, Dune and The Matrix 4 will all premiere on HBO Max the same day they premiere in theaters with no extra charge if you have a subscription. And there’s still some question after Amazon’s acquisition of MGM Studios whether the long-awaited James Bond movie, No Time to Die, will stream on Amazon Prime the same day its releases in theaters or shortly thereafter.
Studios don’t seem to agree on whether streaming services are cannibalizing box office numbers. When many critics suggested that Warner Bros.’ strategy of releasingIn the Heightson VOD and in theaters at the same time depressed its ticket sales, Warner Bros. head of domestic distribution Jeff Goldstein told the Associated Press, “Our experience, which is backed up onIn the Heights, is that if the movie hits a high level in theaters, it hits a high level on the service. If it hits a low level in theaters, it hits a low level on HBO Max.” HBO Max doesn’t actually release it’s streaming numbers, so it’s impossible to know whether that is true.
But it’s difficult to look at the success of films like F9 and A Quiet Place Part II and not believe there’s some advantage to forcing fans to pay for movie theater tickets to see these films. By contrast, Cruella, Raya and the Last Dragon, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and In the Heights—all of which were available both in theaters and on demand—all had decent but not spectacular box office showings over the lat few weeks.
Perhaps studios have been prioritizing premiering films on streaming services that they never thought would perform all that well in theaters in the first place. After all, Paramount made nearly as much money as they did in 2019 offloading movies like Lovebirds, Coming 2 America, Without Remorse and Trial of the Chicago 7 to streamers—none of which were likely to be box office juggernauts based on genre (sorry, rom-coms) or critical reviews. In other cases companies like Disney and Warner Bros. are making the calculation that sacrificing ticket sales is worthwhile in order to try to beat Netflix in the streaming wars.
But if theater-exclusive movies like F9 continue to consistently perform well at the box office, it’s possible that studios could reconsider their strategies around releasing sci-fi films like Dune, designed with an IMAX screen in mind, to services like HBO Max.
Movies theaters aren’t out of the woods yet
Marvel StudiosSimu Liu in Shang-Chi
F9‘s victory doesn’t necessarily bode well for theaters this summer. Most of the major blockbusters set to release this year will have a simultaneous theatrical-VOD release, including Black Widow, Space Jam: A New Legacy and TheSuicide Squad. If, indeed, streaming availability keeps audiences home, theaters could struggle over the next few months to reach pre-pandemic attendance levels.
It’s possible some franchises that historically haven’t quite topped Marvel and DC movies at the box office, like the latest entries in the G.I. Joe or Purge franchises, could see a box office surge because they’ll only be available in theaters. A movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s Old or the Matt Damon starrer Stillwater could make waves at the box office simply because they’re premiering exclusively in theaters.
But the next major test of a theater-only movie will be Marvel’s film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which will premiere on Sept. 3. Marvel will go on to premiere two more superhero films in 2021 exclusively in theaters: The Eternals and Spider-Man: No Way Home (the latter of which was co-produced with Sony). Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage will also throw its hat into the superhero arms race this fall.
Theater-only smaller films will be a big test of audience appetite
There’s a glut of highly anticipated movies that are coming this summer and fall, many of which were delayed from last year. A24, the independent studio behind hits like Moonlight, Lady Bird, Uncut Gems, Midsommar and Hereditary, plans to release its movies, including the tweet-thread-inspired drama Zola and the creepy Dev Patel Arthurian Legend film The Green Knight, exclusively in theaters.
Those premieres will serve as an intriguing test of audiences’ willingness to support smaller dramas in theaters. While at first blush, those movies may seem perfect candidates for streaming services, distributors like A24 tend to appeal to the exact cinephiles eager to support filmmakers by attending screenings of their work.
Candyman from Nia DaCosta and Last Night in Soho from Edgar Wright will test the waters of audiences’ eagerness to pay to see specifically horror films on the big screen. The low-budget genre tends to perform very well at the box office. Directors like DaCosta and John Krasinski (who helmed both A Quiet Place movies) have made direct appeals to fans to see their horror movies in theaters, where they can react to twists, jumps and surprises together—which was clearly a compelling argument for the fans who made A Quiet Place II a box office winner.
With the first evidence of the resurgence of the movie theater industry in the rearview, it’s becoming clearer that the pandemic likely exacerbated trends that were already in place before it began—big movies get the big bucks, and the gap between independent films and superhero fare grows. The dramas that once resided in the middle will head to streaming, or viewers will scratch that itch with television shows like Mare of Easttown.
Still, perhaps there will be enough audience enthusiasm over the next several months to win over studios that are waffling on whether to invest in giving a film like Zola a big theatrical debut. It seems that enthusiasm for the cinematic experience isn’t dead just yet. After all,as Vin Diesel would tell us, there’s nothing quite like the movies. Let’s hope that love extends for many years to come to even the ones without rocket-loaded Fieros.
