Friday briefing: The end of the affair – why we’ve fallen out of love with the cinema
Good morning. Last week, on my way to see Michael Gira’s noiseniks Swans play in Brixton, south-east London, I passed through Leicester Square. It was brightly lit up in pink and green, and nestling among the Christmas market and seasonal ice rink were a throng of people eagerly awaiting a glimpse of the stars of Wicked: For Good at the film’s European premiere. Some say the rise of the second Wicked is a sign that the movie industry is in rude health, but this kind of occasion is increasingly seen as an outlier in an industry that is having something of an annus horribilis. And not just because our film critic Peter Bradshaw is retroactively downgrading some terrible movies to zero-star ratings. I spoke to the Guardian’s film editor, Catherine Shoard, about the state of Hollywood, which recently posted record low box office figures. This newsletter is about how studios have got themselves into the doldrums, and the factors that are preventing them pulling in peak post-pandemic audiences to theatres. Here are the headlines. Five big stories Covid | The UK’s response to Covid was “too little, too late”, a damning official report has concluded, saying the introduction of a lockdown even a week earlier could have saved more than 20,000 lives and there was a “toxic and chaotic” culture inside Boris Johnson’s Downing Street. Nigel Farage | Cabinet ministers have detailed multiple allegations of teenage racism by Nigel Farage as “repulsive”, with both science minister Liz Kendall and Welsh secretary, Jo Stevens, calling for answers from the leader of Reform. Gaza | Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed 33 people and injured many more, according to medical officials, in one of the most serious escalations of violence since the US-backed ceasefire came into effect last month. Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he will negotiate with Donald Trump on a US-backed peace plan that called on Kyiv to make painful concessions in order to end the Kremlin’s invasion of his country. NHS | Record numbers of overseas-trained doctors are quitting the UK, leaving the NHS at risk of huge gaps in its workforce, with hostility towards migrants blamed for the exodus. In depth: Films such as Wicked are hits because there’s already a built-in fandom On the night of the premiere, fans in Leicester Square were dressed up as characters from Wicked, and I spoke to one person who said they had gone to see the first instalment 12 times. A couple I spoke to had already been queueing for a couple of hours to grab a prime spot to see its stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, in person. But beyond the glitter of Leicester Square, Catherine Shoard says Hollywood is staring at one of its bleakest financial years in decades. “These are the diehards,” she told me. “Wicked has that Broadway-level fandom that turns up in costume and wants to be part of a moment. But they’re not representative. For a lot of the audience, going to the cinema just isn’t a habit any more, unless it’s an event – something they have to see with other people.” *** Why is the film industry concerned? As Andrew Pulver recently reported, excluding the months when theatres were shut due to the pandemic, box office earnings in North America crashed in October to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend being the worst of the year so far. “It’s been a weird year. March and April were surprisingly strong,” Catherine says. “You had these oddball hits like Sinners coming out of nowhere, and the more predictable success of the Minecraft movie. “But the summer was weak, and then the autumn has been dire. It’s the worst run in decades. And Halloween is normally a banker, because horror is one of the few genres people still show up for en masse, but even that flopped.” She sees all of that as catastrophic: not just for the business of cinema, but for those of us who want there to be a variety of good new films about. *** Vanity projects don’t put bums on seats Catherine says that the kinds of films studios are choosing to back isn’t helping. Those studios have massively overestimated how much audiences care about stars in Catherine’s view – building entire films around the perceived popularity of someone such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or Sydney Sweeney, only to find that those movies bomb at the box office. “The Smashing Machine cost almost $100m and didn’t connect with anyone,” says Catherine says of Johnson’s mixed martial arts drama, which was released last month. It’s almost hard to overstate how dire the gap between prediction and reality at the box office has been: with Francis Ford Coppola recently reduced to selling his watches to cover his (perhaps ill-advisedly self-funded) Megalopolis vanity project. “Studios have been indulging these prestige vanity projects. They cost a fortune, they’re meant to burnish reputations, but they’re simply not films anybody actually wants to go to the cinema for,” Catherine told me. *** Where does that leave awards season? I’ve become quite a keen cinemagoer in recent years, after spending most of my life curmudgeonly thinking movies generally last too long and it is annoying that you can’t press pause. On Falling, Honey Don’t!, Sketch and The Courageous have all hit the mark for me this year. Catherine, though, thinks we are heading into a dismal Oscars season, as there just haven’t been that many great films on offer. “There are exceptions – people are raving about Hamnet – but broadly it feels thin. Partly that’s the hangover from the writers’ strikes two years ago, and partly it’s because the mid-range adult dramas that used to fill out awards season just aren’t getting financed.” *** Is this all just the impact of streaming? The answer is both yes and no. Netflix, in particular, has leant in to hiring auteurs and giving them complete creative freedom. “They’ve secured big names by giving them two-week cinema windows and essentially the final cut,” Catherine said. But there are also downsides to that model: “Nobody is giving them notes, and you can see the results on screen.” She used the example of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which has been criticised for its ableism and lack of subtlety. “It badly needed someone to say, ‘No, this bit doesn’t work.’ That’s true of a lot of Netflix’s prestige films – they are incredibly expensive, and theatrically they bomb because everyone knows they can just wait two weeks to watch it at home.” Sometimes the industry doesn’t help itself. Catherine cites the most recent Bridget Jones movie. In the UK, it performed well at the box office. But in the US? It went straight to streaming. “That was considered a normal choice,” she says, “because in America anything that isn’t deemed cinematic just goes straight to streaming. But, of course, Bridget Jones is actually also one of those films that people do like to see with their girlfriends or other half as an event, and potentially more than once.” *** Whither Barbenheimer? In 2023, the industry was basking in the glow of the Barbenheimer hype – with people making it a mission to see the contrasting Barbie and Oppenheimer movies amid all the attendant cultural and media excitement around it. Catherine thinks that Barbenheimer worked because it was an event. “People wanted to be part of something. Horror does that. Musicals do that. But studios haven’t figured out how to recreate it. They’ve lost the mid-budget films that keep people going to the cinema regularly, and the big tent poles aren’t good enough to carry a whole year.” “The only things that seem to work now are the films you absolutely have to see big – Avatar-type spectacles – things where you absolutely can’t recreate the experience at home.” Contrastingly, films such as Wicked are such a hit at the box office because there’s already a built-in fandom. Which is perhaps why none of this “cinema is dying” chat seemed to be on the minds of the fans waiting for the stars in Leicester Square. They queued right next to the spot where a lifesize statue of Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones was recently erected, joining the likes of Paddington, Harry Potter and Charlie Chaplin. The sculptures are part of Westminster council’s Scenes in the Square scheme, cementing Leicester Square as the centre of film in London. Perhaps film studios have something to learn from those fans: that the magic of the movies hasn’t gone – they just may have to try a little harder to bring it to the big screen. What else we’ve been reading Simon Jenkins is interesting as always on the hold-up of the assisted dying bill in the Lords. “Second chambers are a good idea,” he writes, but “They should not be able to overturn clear decisions reached by a democratic chamber. Least of all should they be free to impose their own moral views on the lives of British citizens.” Charlie Lindlar, newsletters team Think you’d do a better job on the budget than Rachel Reeves? Why not play our thoughtful interactive game to find out? I managed to keep the pollsters and markets happy and land the country in surplus on my attempt, plus spare a little cash for a pre-speech whisky. Rachel, I’ll wait for your call. Poppy Noor, acting newsletters editor There are few greater guarantees of a wild read than an interview with Boris Becker, who turns 58 this weekend. Donald McRae’s sitdown with the former tennis wunderkind covers tons of ground, from becoming a father again soon to a memorable birthday in prison in which “three inmates had somehow obtained the ingredients to make him three cakes in their kettles”. Charlie The reader interview with Keira Knightley was pretty good yesterday, not least because it earmarks her as a potential future manager of my local football club, West Ham. Poppy Line of Duty will be back for a seventh series, and Michael Hogan has some ideas of what we need to see on our trip back to AC-12 (genuinely good twists, more Ted-isms and many, many more acronyms). Charlie Sport Cricket | Test cricket’s oldest rivalry resumes on Friday inside Perth’s 60,000-seat thunderdome and with it, mercifully, comes fresh fuel for the ever-raging fire. For all the latest from the start of the Ashes, click here for our liveblog. Football | The spoils were as Ewa Pajor cancelled out Ellie Carpenter’s opener to give Barcelona a 1-1 draw with Chelsea in the Women’s Champions League. Formula One | Felipe Massa’s £64m claim against Formula One, its governing body the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone over Lewis Hamilton’s first F1 world championship in 2008 can go to trial, a high court judge has ruled. Something for the weekend Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read, play and listen to right now Music Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer | ★★★★☆ Tranquilizer is constructed from a cache of old sample CDs – prepackaged collections of royalty-free sounds that used to be sold to musicians and producers in the 90s and early 00s – that Daniel Lopatin found uploaded to the Internet Archive. An extra frisson came when, after bookmarking the page for future use, he discovered that it had been deleted. It subsequently reappeared, but it underlined the shakiness of the assumption that everything is preserved for ever in some corner of cyberspace. For all the calm its source material was ostensibly intended to provoke, Tranquilizer seems unlikely to help you calm down. It’s too kaleidoscopic and restless, too crammed with sounds: an album that demands – and repays – your full attention, rather than simply drifting by. Alexis Petridis TV The Black Swan | ★★★★★ It would be an understatement to say that The Black Swan made an impact on Danish viewers. Half of all Danes watched it when it aired in 2024, and it sparked a string of police investigations, as well as a tightening of the laws around money laundering and gang activity. For film-maker Mads Brügger, the mob lawyer Amira Smajic is a “once in a lifetime” source who – he says – could “force us to rethink Danish society”. Smajic has spent years acting on behalf of some of the country’s most infamous criminal gangs, and is now exposing their activities as part of this major investigation for the state-owned broadcaster TV 2. Crucially, it’s not just the criminal underworld that Smajic is laying bare, but also their white-collar accomplices. Hannah J Davies Film The Ice Tower | ★★★★☆ An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. Marion Cotillard plays a diva-ish movie actor called Cristina, who is the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which is being filmed on a soundstage in a remote and snowy spot in late 60s France. Clara Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenage girl in a foster home nearby, stricken with memories of the death of her mother, whose bead necklace she keeps. It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff edge of disaster. Peter Bradshaw Art Harold Offeh: Mmm Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet | ★★★★☆ The sound of Harold Offeh humming and ummming fills the lobby of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. He up-speaks and mumbles and wrings a whole world of feeling out of this disembodied overture. The title of Offeh’s show, including that Mmm, is a quote from a song on Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy. The show blares and jostles with life, with song and dance, with skits and routines, with public moments and private performances on the loo and in the bathroom. Offeh is compelling to watch, even when he is lying in the bath or just standing on the pavement, the world swirling round him. He is happy to objectify himself, I think, even as he questions what it means to be a queer, Black body. Eddy Frankel The front pages “Too little, too late: Tory response to Covid crisis damned in report,” is the splash on the Guardian today, of a story that dominated the UK headlines. “Johnson’s ‘toxic’ leadership blamed for 23,000 deaths,” says the i paper, “Betrayal of our children,” writes the Mail, while the Independent opts for: “Elect a clown, expect a chaotic circus.” “Inexcusable’ pandemic delay cost 23,000 lives,” is the splash at the Times, “The £200m Covid ‘I told you so’” at the Telegraph. “Toxic, chaotic, calamitous,” says the Metro, while the Daily Record runs with: “Boris covid blunder cost 1000s of lives.” “Give kids chance of freedom like’ unstoppable’ Robyn, aged 4,” says Friday’s Express. “Migration overhaul offers big earners three-year pathway to settled status,” is the lead story at the FT. Today in Focus Nazi salutes and racism: the allegations about Nigel Farage’s school days Former pupils at Dulwich College have made shocking claims about the Reform leader’s behaviour at school – which he denies. The Guardian’s chief reporter Daniel Boffey reports. Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Our Feast newsletter is always a one-stop shop for must-try recipes. But this week’s issue feels more vital as ever, as Georgina Hayden guides you through soups, stews and more to get you through this cold snap. Irish stews, laksa made with your roast chicken leftovers, “sociable” fish stews … there’s something for everyone. And do make sure you sign up here to get future editions straight into your inbox every Thursday. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply
