We already went through all the 2022 Oscar movies failing at the box-office. Some even thought Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” would have legs, but it clearly doesn’t.
As it currently stands, Spielberg’s Oscar hopeful has barely made a dent with just $8.7 million grossed. It’s already on VOD so I don’t expect that number to go that much higher in the weeks to come. Streaming-wise, it is #4 at Vudu, #5 at iTunes and is not in Google Play’s top ten.
In fact, according to IndieWire’s Tom Brueggemann “Bros” and “She Said” have had better VOD numbers than ‘Fabelmans.’ We can now say with certainty that America couldn’t care less about Spielberg’s personal story — in fact, we should have expected that since it doesn’t really have any big stars and the story itself wouldn’t strike one as being meaty enough for optimal mainstream curiosities.
An analysis of Oscar hopefuls by the NYT has these numbers behind every critically acclaimed title:
Armageddon Time $1.9 million ($30 million budget)
TÁR $5.3 million ($35 million budget)
She Said $5.3 million ($55 million budget)
The Fabelmans $8.7 million ($40 million budget)
Triangle of Sadness $4.8 million ($15 million budget)
The Banshees of Inisherin $8.8 million ($15 million budget)
The more I think about the plight of these prestige Oscar films failing domestically, the more I start to wonder if it’s not necessarily audiences who have a lack of interest in paying to watch a great movie, but, rather, it’s the films themselves that might also be the problem.
There is no way to say this in more certain terms, but this year’s been a weak one for these type of arthouse movies. At least compare it to a pre-pandemic year, most notably 2019, and you realize that maybe this year’s crop of films just weren’t enticing enough for general audiences.
In 2019, you had films like “Uncut Gems,” “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood,” “The Irishman,” “Marriage Story,” “Parasite,” “Little Women,” “Joker,” “Jojo Rabbit” and “1917” piquing the interests of the mainstream. This year, there haven’t really been any comparable titles that had the package to lure audiences out of their homes.
Add in the fact that the pandemic changed the way people viewed movie theaters and it’s an absolute perfect storm of negative effects that inevitably seeped through the moviegoing industry. There are clearly cracks in the dam, but will it get worse?
The ‘Smile’ franchise has a new director. David Bruckner, who made “The Night House” and the 2022 “Hellraiser” reboot, has been hired to direct “Smile 3” for Paramount.