Well-Reviewed Indies Are Dying at the Summer Box-Office; Blame the Critics?

People are starting to panic about the complete and total failing of indies at the summer box-office. The list of critically-acclaimed movies that weren’t supposed to bomb is significant: “Late Night,” “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” “Booksmart,” and “The Souvenir.” Then again, although well-reviewed, I don’t particularly find these to be movies that wholeheartedly deserved a wide audience, not even Joanna Hogg’s critically acclaimed ‘Souvenir,’ which has, according to multiple accounts, become a walkout favorite for movie audiences nationwide. There’s a lot of virtue signaling going on, in case you didn’t notice from that list of films— these are movies that are just not as good as the reviews claim them to be. American audiences have caught on to that, if these were good films then maybe the grosses would be higher. Simple as that.

IndieWire’s Tom Brueggemann has all the numbers in his, as usual, excellent assessment of box-office performance. Suffice to say, it’s just been an off-year, the quality of movies this year, quite frankly, stinks. Yes, I have a list of 15 or so movies that I would highly recommend, but I watch a lot of stuff, I’m not the average moviegoer, also mainstream critics tend to dictate a lot of the indies that will become successful based on their glowing rave reviews, but this year critics have been, err, off in their herd-like assessments. The stuff that has been actually good has just not been getting the attention it deserves, it’s been mostly inclusivity, inclusivity, inclusivity for film journos. In an ideal world a movie such as Craig Zahler’s “Dragged Across Concrete” would be a hit and something that would be stirring up conversation and debate — yet, it was all but ignored by the mainstream.

You want smaller movies to make money again? Well, how about you start concentrating on stories instead of all the movies being pushed around by critics solely due to their knack for “virtue signaling.” People don’t want to go to the movies just because a film has the thematic resonance to “fit in” with what agenda-driven journalists perceive as “justice” and progressiveness in 2019. I’m all for movies directed by women, people of color and any other minority groups, but the crop of well-reviewed indies dying at the box-office this year are not deserving of the raves they’ve been getting. Word-of-mouth travels fast, the people that went along and bought tickets to these movies, based on the reviews, are telling their friends not to go. That’s how it usually works. If an indie film isn’t being well-received by the crowds seeing it then they sure as hell won’t break out as hits. Instead, let’s all calm down, admit to ourselves the year stunk and only justifiably complain when something in the quality realm of a “Get Out,” and “Lady Bird” fails to ignite. U unsurprisingly, those titles were major hits because, you know, they were actual good movies.