Dune and gloom
"Dune: Part Two" probably won't be the biggest movie of the year, but it's the first movie event in a year that may not have many. Is the "event movie" changing?
Happy Oscar Sunday! Here’s a special pre-show post for you. As a reminder, I previously wrote about the Oscars and “Oppenheimer” here.
“Dune: Part Two” isn’t your typical blockbuster. Yes, it is a sci-fi epic based on popular source material with an ensemble cast of both a new generation of stars and veterans. But it is also dense and sometimes complicated. It’s not the latest entry in a long-running, crowd-pleasing franchise like “Star Wars.” Its main protagonist isn’t so much a Hero’s Journey archetype like Luke Skywalker as he is a “cautionary tale” of would-be prophets, as director Denis Villeneuve said in an interview with The New York Times.
Yet, the movie earned $82.5 million in the US last weekend, doubling the debut of its 2021 predecessor. In its second weekend, it dropped only 44% to $46 million, according to Comscore, an impressive hold. Sure, the first “Dune” was released to theaters in the thick of the pandemic and as such streamed simultaneously on what was then called HBO Max. But the momentum for “Part Two” seemed real leading up to its release, thanks to stellar reviews and a memorable press tour. It comes at a time when movie theaters have been starved of content; what has been dumped into cinemas has been rotten even by January and February standards (looking at you “Madame Web”).
It’s safe to say that “Dune: Part Two” is the first movie event of the year — and there may not be many more to come. I can count them on one hand: “Deadpool and Wolverine,” “Despicable Me 4,” and “Wicked” spring to mind. The former is the only Marvel Studios release this year; like the rest of Hollywood, the studio is recalibrating after not only the writers’ and actors’ strikes that brought the town to a standstill, but also after a year of, quite frankly, creative bankruptcy. I’ve written at length on this topic, so I won’t spend much time on the past. “Dune: Part Two” is about the future; not just a fictional future centuries from now where space travel is made possible by a spice found only on a desert planet, but the future of cinema.
Maybe that’s hyperbolic. I don’t think “Dune: Part Two” will be the biggest movie of the year. But I do think it’s emblematic of a hopefully new Hollywood, one that doesn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on garbage-looking schlock that’s just a recycled version of something we’ve seen dozens of times before. Even Disney CEO Bob Iger has acknowledged, after a series of commercial misses including “The Marvels,” that “quantity in many ways can destroy quality.”
Maybe quality really will, finally, trump quantity. Further, maybe Hollywood’s definition of an “event” movie is shifting.
The big Hollywood pivot
I started this newsletter thinking about the intersection between fandom and the business of Hollywood, and for a long while, Hollywood thought it had fandom pinned down after seeing how the Marvel Cinematic Universe dominated culture. But there are many corners of fandom, and Hollywood is starting to realize that superheroes, while still lucrative, aren’t the only thing that the masses are interested in.
For starters, anime and video games — two pillars of pop culture — are becoming more common for movies and TV to mine for IP.
Game adaptations are having a moment, from HBO’s “The Last of Us” to the Mario movie, and there are plenty more to come, including “Fallout” on Prime Video this year and “Borderlands” in theaters. And Netflix specifically, without its own IP library to fall back on, has been throwing live-action anime adaptations at the wall to see what sticks (“Cowboy Bebop,” no. “One Piece,” yes). There’s good reason for the interest.
According to data provided to me by research firm Ampere Analysis, enjoyment of anime on streaming services has increased considerably in recent years. 41% of those aged 18-24 report enjoying anime in Q3 2023, up from 33% in Q1 2019. Streamers have seemed to take notice: according to Ampere, Prime Video increased its anime content hours 84% from Q1 2019 to Q3 2023, and Netflix by 39% in the same time period. Pluto TV even saw a 67% increase in anime content hours in that time, and more recently launched a 24/7 channel dedicated to content from Crunchyroll, an anime-centric streamer that a Variety headline recently called “a Rare SVOD Success Story.”
For Hollywood, the anime market is still vastly untapped, and studio execs are probably seeing similar data as what I’m seeing and twirling their mustaches. According to Parrot Analytics, a research firm that measures content “demand,” the top 10 anime series in the world right now include “Jujutsu Kaisen,” “Attack on Titan,” and “My Hero Academia,” none of which have gotten the live-action treatment.
As for video games, while experts expect a slowdown this year, it’s a massive business. Game content sales in the US hit $48 billion in 2023, up from $47.5 billion in 2022. It’s not entirely a fair comparison, but the North American box office was at $9 billion last year.
As with any trend in movies and TV, game and anime adaptations risk oversaturation. And it’s hard to adapt properties that were made for a specific medium for another medium, as past failed attempts at anime and game adaptations have shown. But we seem to be entering a new era for both, at a moment when Hollywood is in desperate need of fresh and exciting franchises that haven’t been rebooted or sequal-ized ad nauseam, and that appeal to young people in the way that superhero movies of the 2010s did. If Hollywood really is in a transition period, there will be trial and error. But my guess is that moviegoers would rather be treated to interesting missteps than headscratching what-the-fucks.
But don’t just take it from me. “Madame Web” star Dakota Johnson said it best in a new interview with Bustle: “My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit.”