It was the year Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick soared while the rest of Hollywood trailed smoke in the opposite direction. If three words encapsulated 2022 in cinema they would be, to paraphrase Alan Partridge, “crash, bang, wallop”.
The global box office grew by 21 per cent in 2022 to $37.35 billion. However, that figure is well down on the pre-pandemic $67 billion generated in 2019.
How to explain these disastrous results? It can’t all be blamed on Covid – though rolling lockdowns in China didn’t help. Nor did a blanket boycott by US studios of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
But there is also a more straightforward reason. Hollywood has forgotten how to do the one thing at which the industry once excelled: make hits. The exception was, of course, Cruise and Top Gun, whose $1.4 billion box office was the afterburner that prevented the business from crashing entirely (even without being released in China). But he’s… well, a maverick. As Cruise counts down to 2023 and Mission: Impossible 7 here’s a look back at 10 releases that burned up on re-entry in the past 12 months.
Roland Emmerich used to make deafening, FX-heavy blockbusters brimming with planetary destruction and exploding buildings. He still does – it’s just that nowadays nobody watches them. The losing streak that began with Independence Day: Resurgence in 2016 and Midway in 2019 accelerated in January with Moonfall, a largely independently-financed juggernaut with an eye-watering $220 million budget. That’s a lot for an “indie” – especially considering it made back just $29 million in the US and $105 million in total.
Moonfall stars Halle Berry as a NASA scientist who must take emergency action when the moon is knocked out of orbit and set on a collision course with Earth. A huge disaster from which there is no escape… the film was a metaphor for its own demise. And while some of the rocketing overheads could be pinned on Covid – the last-minute replacement of Stanley Tucci by Michael Peña, for instance – it’s hard not to include that, given Emmerich’s recent track record, Moonfall was destined to crater from the outset.
Halle Berry stars in disaster movie Moonfall.
Death On the Nile
Kenneth Branagh with curly moustache and a dodgy Belgian accent…. What could go wrong? Very little reckoned Disney which was impressed by the $574 million raked in by Branagh’s 2017 adaptation of the Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot romp Murder on the Orient Express (with Branagh shaking his handle-bars as the iconic sleuth).
But the cosy crime craze sputtered when Branagh put to sea with a $141 million retelling of Christie’s Death on the Nile. Overshadowed by the “cancelling” of its star Armie Hammer – whom Disney declined to digitally erase citing time and budget – the film was soon taking on water.
Hammer time was over, with Death on the Nile limping to a global box office of $229 million. That despite a cast that, in addition to Hammer, included Gal “Imagine” Gadot and Russell Brand. Though, put like that, perhaps its failure isn’t that stonking a surprise.
What was a shock was the degree to which cinema-goers had turned their backs on the Poirotverse. The 67 per cent drop in box office from Orient Express to Death on the Nile was one of the biggest ever from original to sequel. Christie’s books are traditionally light on gore. This was a bloodbath.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
If Warner Brothers execs could wave a magic wand, would they make the Fantastic Beasts franchise vanish? Caught up in the flack of the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard libel trial, the studio was probably damned whichever course it followed.
In the end, the suits fired Depp and hired in his place Mads Mikkelsen as evil sorcerer Grindelwald. But with JK Rowling becoming ever more divisive on Twitter and Fantastic Beasts star Ezra Miller involved in numerous controversies, Dumbledore was the Potter prequel nobody wanted.
Conjuring up $632 million on a $316 million budget, it created history as the lowest-earning Potter film yet. Two further Fantastic Beasts are supposedly in the pipeline – but Warner has yet to get the ball officially rolling on a fourth movie, so who knows when – or if – it will appear.
Jude Law in a scene from Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Photo / Supplied
Lightyear
To ignominy and beyond: Lightyear had a disastrous turn at the box office. Photo / Getty Images
Toy Story is the closest thing in Hollywood to a can’t-fail franchise, with a total gross of more than $3.8 billion. Or at least it was. Despite starring Captain America himself Chris Evans as the titular space captain, Buzz Lightyear spin-off Lightyear brought in a piffling $358 million – off its whopping $316 million budget. In the US, its opening weekend was $80 million – compared to the $191 million achieved by Toy Story 4.
That fell considerably short of Disney predictions and raised questions about the wisdom of putting so many of its Pixar films – Luca and Turning Red, for instance – on Disney+ rather than in cinemas. With so many “streaming first” releases, audiences may have wondered why they were being asked to cough up for Lightyear. Replacing Tim Allen as the voice of Buzz – to the displeasure of his Toy Story co-star Tom Hanks, among others – can’t have helped either.
DC’s League of Super-Pets
Cute animals. Super-heroes. Voice talent including Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and John Krasinski. Plus Keanu Reeves – Keanu Reeves! – as Batman. On paper, this animated extension of the DC Comics Universe should have leapt the box office in a single bound and set tills ringing in the process.
Instead, it generated a pitiful $36 million in the US on its opening weekend and $28 million internationally – all against a $141 million budget. Warner Brothers’s humiliation was compounded by the fact that its previous major animated feature, Space Jam: A New Legacy, arrived in the middle of a pandemic and still managed a $47 million opening (despite being simultaneously available on streamer HBO Go).
Scene from DC League of Super-Pets, in cinemas now.
Bros
Trumpeted as the first-ever gay romcom, Billy Eichner’s Bros opened in the US to a $6.7 million box office – less than half the studio projection. Eichner blamed homophobia in conservative parts of the US. “Even with glowing reviews… straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for Bros” the star tweeted. “And that’s disappointing but it is what it is.”
He no doubt had a point. But it’s not clear the gay community was in a rush to see this amusing but rather schmalzy portrayal of a love affair between Bobby (Eichner) and Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) either. And that may be because they, like audiences in general, have been cool on romcoms – straight, gay and in-between – for years. Bros also opened in the dead zone of August – the time when, in the US at least, movies go to vanish.
Amsterdam
Cineaste darling David O Russell and an A+ list cast including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Chris Rock and John David Washington made Gilded Age caper Amsterdam look like the surest of sure things. But amid terrible reviews – “insufferably smug and heinously laboured” said the Telegraph – it never got out of first gear and earned back just $47.8 million of its $143 million budget.
Factor in marketing costs, and Amsterdam, set in late 19th century New York, is headed towards an $157 million loss. In defence of Russell – who has a reputation for onset strops and generally being difficult to work with – many of those overheads were bound up in the pandemic. Production was shifted from Boston to Los Angeles at the last minute and filming then pushed back from March 2020 to January 2021.
Nor were movie star salaries an issue: Christian Bale was so eager to work with Russell he is said to have forgone his going rate of $7.66 million. But with the pandemic wreaking havoc up and up went costs – damning the film before it even got out the gate.
Black Adam
Dwayne Johnson has had rocky patches throughout his career (Doom, The Rundown). Just this year, he stumbled with League of Super-Pets. Still, he seemed a safe bet as the face of Warners’s latest extension to its DC Universe. Alas, despite Johnson’s star power – and a cameo by (now former) Superman Henry Cavill – Black Adam has not fared impressively. With a budget of $383 million, plus marketing costs, the production needed to pull in around $948 million internationally to break even – but has earned just $563 million to date.
A sequel had already been approved by Warner. But in early December Johnson raised eyebrows by unfollowing both the studio and the official Black Adam Instagram account. This amid reports of a shake-up at the DC universe under its new boss James Gunn. A few days later, came the inevitable Black Adam bombshell, with Johnson writing: “James Gunn and I connected and Black Adam will not be in their first chapter of storytelling”. And with that, the franchise faded to black.
Who better to tell the story of Hollywood’s hypocrisy, cynicism and willingness to hide the predators in its midst than... erm, Hollywood. That was the pitch with She Said, a mid-budget prestige film about the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, demon-king of mid-budget prestige films.
Chronicling the work of the New York Times reporters who brought down Weinstein – portrayed self-righteously by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan – the film was reasonably well-reviewed and is regarded as having potential legs at award season. But at the box office, it’s the sort of stone-cold flop that would have whipped Weinstein into one of his notorious rages, bringing in $16 million on a $49 million budget.
Strange World
Has Disney lost its magic touch? Opening at Thanksgiving in the US, this animated feature, inspired by old pulp movies and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Lucy Liu and Dennis Quaid, barely registered at the box office. Disney has had flops before –indeed it already had a huge bomb in 2022 with the aforementioned Lightyear. However, the pitiful $76 million earned by Strange World against a $287 million budget marks it out as a disaster even by recent Disney standards.
