Penske Searches for Cash in All the Wrong Places
It's back to the Mideast! And this Sunday, Deadline's Contenders event will feature an anti-trans filmmaker who calls gay parent surrogacy 'human trafficking'
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of quick(ish) takes on the industry’s passing parade. Below, we’ll get to the latest stop on Jay Penske’s global tour of authoritarian countries. But first, let’s visit the box office:
Movie Threesome Shocks Hollywood
Now it’s a throuple! Imagine that, three movies doing well at once. Like it’s a real business or somethin’.
So it’s time to add a third name to the Glicked mashup. Mowickiator? Gladianed?
How long are we going to have to act like it’s some kind of supernatural phenomenon deserving of meme-ification every time more than one movie does well at the same time? Barbenheimer was a unique (and highly oversold) viral event in which people thought it was hilarious to attend back-to-back screenings of a whimsical comedy about a doll and an intensely serious biopic of a nuclear physicist — and took pictures of themselves doing it. (Then the press attributed both films’ entire runs to that brief event.)
Nothing remotely like that happened with Glicked, let alone with Mowickiator.
When two films do well, it’s not some crazy internet event, it’s called having options. Like customers do in any other business. There is no other business on earth — breakfast cereal, mattresses, banking, sports, television — where consumers have only one choice. Until a couple of years ago, that was never the situation in film either.
But we were all so gaslit by the tech utopian narrative that movies are dead, that with all the choice in streaming and cheap soundbars, why would anyone want to leave their homes ever again to go to dirty multiplexes?
So are we going to have to spend the next 50 years being shocked every time there’s proof that people will go to the movies? So stunned that we have to come up with an annoying portmanteau every time it happens?
Perhaps it’s time to stop studying how people “gave up on the movies” and turn our attention to how the media-analyst demo over-indexes with introverted, very wealthy people who have really big homes and home theaters and can’t imagine leaving those to be in the proximity of the unwashed masses. And how they took their license as analysts as an opportunity to impose their preferences on the world.
Yet under the spell of the tech utopianism that colored so much of the High Streaming Wars era coverage, we all believed them. (While we’re at it: What happened to all that “creativity has moved to the small screen” talk?)
Yes, three films are doing well, all at once. How about discussing a world where we make that the norm again rather than a once-a-decade lightning-strike freak of nature?
The Week in Penske: Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Back on the globe-trotting adventures of Hollywood’s leading distressed asset merchants, Jay Penske and Todd Boehly: another week, another phony-baloney event in a foreign capital adjacent to all kinds of potential investors (this after passport stamps in Egypt and Turkey).
