Flops for Dummies
I point fingers at the finger-pointers shaming the failures we desperately need to find the next big successes
I’m returning to the subject of flops after briefly touching on it last week and during The Ankler podcast, because the drift of how we talk about films and entertainment has gotten wildly out of whack, illustrating how screwed up our priorities have become.
In this slow news period for the industry (read David Poland’s great overview of how the sky continues to not fall these days), this “weak piping time of peace” as The Bard would say, the principal occupation of our industry analysts, the leading narrative you might say, has been to cry bloody murder at the box office failures of Joker: Folie à Deux and Megalopolis.
Beating up on a studio when it’s down, looking for scapegoats for a big project gone wrong, is a pastime as old as Hollywood. The list of great careers brought down by a big-budget fiasco would would be longer than The Avengers end credits. In a town where power is seen as a zero-sum game and anyone else’s failure is your victory, schadenfreude and finger-pointing are our great civic pastimes. Where other cities play basketball in the park or cricket, we play Throw the Producer Under the Bus.
But the current round of the blame game surpasses the usual search for a victim.