A New Wave at the Box Office

A new Tom Hanks movie opened in more than 3,000 theaters this weekend. Did you notice? Don’t worry, no one else did either.

Hanks’s The Circle, an adaptation of the Dave Eggers novel of the same name, was nearly as anonymous as Hanks’s last Eggers novel adaptation, A Hologram for the King, which was released almost exactly one year ago. That performance was poor, rendering it largely invisible and already forgotten. It’s an odd echo for Hanks, and a signpost for American movies. Fifteen years ago, Hanks starring in the adaptation of well-regarded or well-known source material — like Road to Perdition or The Green Mile — was a guaranteed $100 million return, quality be damned. But things have changed at the movies, radically.

This weekend, The Circle earned $9.3 million in 3,163 theaters. That isn’t good; for context, The Boss Baby did almost exactly the same business in just 500 more theaters, in its fifth week of release. The Circle will likely challenge 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities — another well-known adaptation, mind you — as the worst-performing wide release of Hanks’s career. And anyone who has read Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy — the best on-set chronicle ever written about a movie slowly melting down in the making — intimately understands the fiasco of Brian De Palma’s Tom Wolfe adaptation. The Circle, directed by James Ponsoldt, isn’t quite the woebegone bungle Bonfire of the Vanities is, but it commits similar sins. It’s unsure of how cynical or redemptive it wants to be, and how much fealty to the novel — which tracks a Jobsian tech mogul and the young apprentice who joins his company — it wants to maintain. It has other problems, including a scattershot “Is this funny or scary?” tonal swing, and the misuse of two talented veterans of the IP wars — Harry Potter survivor Emma Watson and Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ John Boyega. Critics noticed: The movie has a 17 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. But Hanks’s fading currency, filmmaking blunders, and strategic misfires are not at the heart of The Circle’s failure. In hindsight, there was a more obvious force in play: who’s going to see movies.

The Fate of the Furious, even in its third week, was always going to be a problem for Ponsoldt’s movie. The franchise is a problem for every movie for the foreseeable future. But the two other week-one releases that topped The Circle tell us a lot more about what’s happening in movies than many people know. How to Be a Latin Lover, the directorial debut of comic actor and writer Ken Marino, was the inverse of The Circle in many ways: presented in two languages, Spanish and English, the movie stars Eugenio Derbez, a massive Mexican comedy star making a slow incursion into America (you can also find in him Adam Sandler’s latest Netflix cinematic junket, Sandy Wexler, and later this year in Dean Devlin’s weather-disaster movie Geostorm). It features a bevy of American comic actors, including Kristen Bell, Rob Lowe, Michael Cera, and others, as well as a role for the nation-bridging star Salma Hayek. It also features a cute kid, a broad premise — an aging lothario who’s spent decades seducing older women must confront reality — and was marketed specifically to an underserved Latino audience. Guess what? They showed up. The movie’s $12 million haul and $10,750 per-screen average, under normal circumstances, would have been a massive story. Derbez is now a bona fide movie star and Marino has a low-budget hit on his hands. But it isn’t the most shocking result from the weekend.

Baahubali: The Beginning is the biggest movie in India’s history. The 2015 Telugu-language epic fantasy directed by S.S. Rajamouli is India’s Lord of the Rings — and now with the sequel, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, it has its The Two Towers. Earlier this year I wrote about the struggles of certain Chinese films to break through with American audiences; one of the biggest success stories in recent movie times is called The Mermaid. It made $550 million abroad, but when it was released last year in America, it appeared in just 100 theaters and grossed little more than $3 million. Strategies differ from production company to production company, from country to country. The original Baahubali opened in 236 theaters and went on to make nearly $7 million in America. For the sequel, there were lessons learned: It opened in nearly twice that number of theaters and went on to make what I’d describe as a genuinely shocking $10 million. It’s already the highest-grossing Telugu-language film in American history, after three days.

Last week, I talked with Ringer staffers about the curious choice by the major Hollywood studios to punt on the weekend. This Friday announces the summer movie season with a proper would-be blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. So this past weekend seemed as ripe as any for one of them to push out a romantic comedy or a horror movie under the gun, before Baby Groot comes for all the receipts. Perhaps they were scared off by the ever-hurtling Fast and Furious franchise. But it’s unlikely anyone with predictive responsibilities saw Baahubali 2 coming. Box-office trackers didn’t; the movie doesn’t even appear on this group’s top-10 forecast for the weekend. The movie does not have a Rotten Tomatoes score because it was not screened stateside before release, and, furthermore, no American critics have reviewed it yet. This is a shadow success, relying entirely on itself and its core target. We’re entering unprecedented territory.

Movies, dwindling in the consciousness as they may be, are a mathematically rigorous business. There are unpredictable flops and soaring successes, but it should not be underestimated how much effort and analysis goes into the release of a single film. So what do the successes of these two movies mean? The lessons are surprisingly similar and familiar, if differently told.

1. Consider the mirror effect. These movies — like The Fate of the Furious — do not have white leads. That doesn’t mean white audiences have abandoned the movies or that white stars are not bankable. But it does mean that underserved consumers — as we’ve seen over and over and over and over again with African American audiences — will show up when it’s made clear that a movie is for them, or features performers that look like them, or better yet, put an experience on screen that is familiar to them. Diverse movies tend to succeed. The Fast and the Furious franchise — famously and repeatedly championed as the most diverse blockbuster cast — is all the proof needed to affirm that notion.

2. There is no middle in American movies. Which means anything coming from below can succeed in uncommon fashion. Consider Get Out, a movie with a story that has been covered ad infinitum at this point. That it is the fifth-highest grossing American movie of 2017 — behind the prepackaged, prefab quartet of Beauty and the Beast, Logan, Fate, and The Lego Batman Movie — should tell you just how sharply it pierced the consciousness and how much it resonated. It’s not that there haven’t been small movies rising and finding an audience in the past; that’s the story of independent cinema full stop. Instead, this is about a widened gap. Despite an onslaught of viewing options, there’s more room for How to Be a Latin Lover to penetrate the consciousness than ever before. People wanted a movie like this at this time, and so when they got it, they paid to see it.

3. Targeting matters. According to The New York Times, Baahubali 2 had strong showings in New Jersey and Michigan, areas with large Indian populations. This is geotargeting orchestrated by Great India Films, recalling the roadshow-style releases of the 1940s. Conversely, I observed a commercial for The Circle during several NBA playoff games. This isn’t bad strategy, per se, but it is the kind of pro forma, big-top move that once worked in an effort to lure as many people to the show as possible. The Circle will likely resonate most deeply with curious, paranoid types who might respond to ill-informed William Gibson rip-offs. What’s the geotarget for such a viewer (other than Reddit)? Either way, the days of the broad sweep are over, unless the product is The Avengers or Moana.

Get Out struck a nerve with black audiences — but it did the same with all audiences. That’s a difficult bar to clear. Perhaps the achievement of The Shack is more approachable. Heard of The Shack? At the quarter-year mark, it’s the 13th-highest grossing movie of 2017. Its genre is listed as “Christian.” (You can imagine who saw it.) Like The Circle, it’s based on a best seller and also has a sub-20 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. The difference? Its 83 percent audience score, versus The Circle’s 24 percent. Despite never cracking 3,000 screens, it’s earned $57 million, and for a simple reason: It knows its audience. And like this past weekend’s surprising successes, it sought to serve them rather than cast about for an unknown viewer. There’s too much available, too many distractions, too much consumption, too much stimulation for commercial art that can’t easily define itself to succeed. One of the key themes of paranoia in The Circle — we’re being watched — feels cruel, especially now that we know why the movie isn’t.