Another week in the great disruption. A lot of tectonic plates shifting, signs of disorder under the heavens. Molehills become mountains. Mountains come tumbling down.
What’s it all mean? Let’s take a look at recent events, and the events crystalizing into “narratives” taking on lives of their own.
Indie’s Icy Winter
A big narrative hardening to the point that it’s soon going to be an unshakable article of faith is the death of the indie sector, or the grown-up films sector, or the specialty sector. Whatever you want to call it.
This narrative isn’t coming from nowhere. There’s plenty of reason buy into it. Beyond the DOA openings of wave after wave of specialty releases, falling before an uninterested public like the soldiers of the Great War charging up from their trenches.
Look at the opening of She Said, to name one example — there are plenty of others — and one can be forgiven for feeling like the specialty audience didn’t just not show up, they packed up and relocated to Pago Pago, leaving no forwarding address.
Then you’ve got the survivors. Here is the complete list of the major releases that can be called grown-up, non-IP, non-action films, that grossed more than $25M in 2022:
The Menu
Don’t Worry Darling
And that’s it. There’s the list.
Throw in, I’ve heard estimates that 40 percent of specialty screens have shut down in the last years. That’s home to an indie ecosystem gone forever.
So… not great, Bob.
Thanks to all that, a feeling is taking hold, a narrative, that the adult market is kaput. Which, if it sinks in, will become a self-fulfilling piece of defeatism as it poisons greenlights for films targeting a dead sector.
On the flip side: you can say: for a dead sector, it still produced two winners. Corpses don’t typically wake up and dance the hora even two times a year.
To put it another way: if this sector is so dead, why was Searchlight able to score a victory with The Menu?
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