The Odyssey will be the biggest movie of the year regardless of box office |
A while ago, I made a foolhardy bet with a friend: I bet that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey would make more money than Avengers: Doomsday at the global box office. I think I'm going to lose that bet. (Apart from anything else, I forgot that China loves Avengers movies.) But I think I'm going to win the argument.
Film culture has changed tremendously since the last Avengers movie, Endgame, in 2019. The pandemic, the streaming bubble, too much TV, too much Marvel — the superhero industrial complex has, if not collapsed, certainly slumped. Until this week, there have been zero Star Wars movies. There was an unprecedented crisis in theatrical distribution that we are still slowly crawling back out of. It feels like movie culture is forming back into something, but it's going to look quite different to what it was before.
In the midst of all this, the franchise blockbuster machine churned on. The products still work; of course they do. A new Jurassic World or Fast and Furious movie might not make a billion dollars any more, but it will get close. But the Marvel-inspired quest to build out huge, self-sustaining story universes no longer dominates moviegoing culture. These films can still draw massive........