Here are the seven trailers we sat through before seeing Spiderman No Way Home this past week. If each trailer runs two minutes, that's almost 20 minutes of coming attractions before the feature starts. It didn't used to be this many, did it?
The Batman - As Mrs. Cheese Fry asked, "Why is Batman always so grim?" It's fairly amazing that Warner Bros. continues to make Batman movies. But if the audience keeps paying to see them, why stop? After a successful run with Christian Bale, we cycled to Ben Affleck and now to Robert Pattinson. We have to admit, as completely familiar and repetitive as this one seems to be, we find ourselves fairly intrigued as it seems to push the gritty, grim darkness to new depths, dialing all of that even past Chris Nolan levels. Lots of rain, fire, loud creepy music, and Bruce Wayne barking "I don't care what happens to me!" Very cool. Sigh. We're part of the problem, aren't we?
Ambulance - The action-movie premise seems solid: desperate military veteran agrees to help a buddy pull a heist, then everything goes sideways, a cop is shot, hostages are taken, he's in over his head, yadda yadda yadda. Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II are always magnetic. So far, so good. But then you'll start to notice the movie's style - it's all swooping cameras, quick cuts, artfully photographed destruction - and realize that it's directed by Michael Bay. A few of his movies are fun, like The Rock, so you're trying to maintain optimism. But then comes the title. Ambulance. Presumably titled after the getaway vehicle in the movie. It's laughably obvious and unimaginative in a way that calls to mind a fake trailer on "Saturday Night Live." Imagine Speed if it were called City Bus.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Nope. We missed the first one and surely will be unable to follow this second chapter. We hope James Marsden was well paid.
Death on the Nile - A sequel of sorts to Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express (which was pretty good), it doesn't seem to be a particularly exciting movie. The marketing department won't like hearing that. But the A-list cast is stacked, the Agatha Christie name carries the promise of a sophisticated plot, the setting seems exotic and luxurious, and no one will be shooting lasers.
Crypto.com - So Matt Damon (we hope he was well paid) is telling us with a straight face that the bravery of mountain climbers, astronauts, and - get this - the Wright Brothers is very much the same sort of bravery needed to invest in the volatile emerging market of cryptocurrency, which is mostly for now a way for rich people to get richer. Got it.
Uncharted - We're just happy to see a big budget thriller that isn't an adaptation of a Marvel comic book or 1990s video game.** It certainly looks it's trying to emulate the treasure-hunting heroics of the Indiana Jones movies, but who knows? We're told that Mark Wahlberg can be polarizing, but we certainly like him. The trailer ends with an amazing "how will he get out of that?" cliffhanger moment that makes a huge impression.
**Update: we have since learned that this movie is indeed based on a series of video games. But of course it is. So then, our only non-adapted film from this group is... Ambulance?
Morbius - At the risk of sounding like an old man hunched in a lawn chair yelling at tween skateboarders, this is what's wrong with Hollywood (or, to be fair, what's wrong with moviegoers). Another obscure Marvel character, another tedious origin story, another superpower action movie with a too-big CGI effects budget. Further demerits because it looks like the hero (antihero, whatever) is a vampire. Please, no one go see this. And yes, we certainly see the irony of our endorsement of the new Batman reboot all the while trashing this one. We're not proud of that.
To further explore this question of audiences only responded to movies based on existing IP, we looked at domestic box office for 2019 - we won't look at 2020 or 2021 since the pandemic disrupted everything. And yes, we know Hollywood now turns on worldwide box office, but for the sake of argument, let's only consider American audiences. As the great film journalist Scott Mendelson likes to say, audiences who complain about comic book movies need to actually, like, pay to see non-comic book movies when they get made. Hollywood responds to what audiences pay to see. Be sure to go see the movies you want to see more of.
So in 2019 you'd have to go all the way down to Jordan Peele's Us (#12 at the box office, earning $175 million) to find a movie not based on either a comic book or a previous movie. After that, it's Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (#18, $141 million). So out of the top 20 movies, only two were original, though one could argue that Peele and Tarantino are sort of a brand of their own. In which case, there's Knives Out at #21 earning $115 million.
