AUGUST 13 — The post-Covid years of cinema-going have been very unpredictable in terms of box-office hits.
Even though the “simultaneous release on multiple platforms” experiment by major Hollywood studios have seemingly vanished from our memories (remember when this was a big deal when Trolls World Tour and Wonder Woman 1984 did this?), the increasingly shorter release window between cinema and home video have meant that a lot of expected blockbusters ultimately ended up being box-office duds, with even previously untouchable genres like superhero movies and franchise films falling to ignite at the box-office.
It’s almost the norm now for films to be released on digital platforms only a month after it first plays in cinemas, which surely has an effect on a film’s box-office performance, especially when it comes to international/worldwide collection as it still takes time for a film to reach cinemas in other countries.
When a film does become a box-office hit, it really is cause for celebration because as much as I love my Blu-ray and DVD collection, not to mention watching films on streaming platforms as well, I’d loathe to see the day when Hollywood gives up on making films for cinema release and put all their focus into making films for streaming platforms because, like it or not, the cinema is still the best way to experience a film.
The last few weeks have been a win for the cinema experience as two very different films prove that there is still money to be made from showing films theatrically.
‘Longlegs’
One of the most talked about horror films of the year, this indie horror flick has become one of the smash hits of the summer movie season, banking almost US$69 million (RM308 million) at the US box-office and around US$88 million worldwide from a budget of under US$10 million.
Even its opening weekend gross of US$22.6 million surprised many, and to put that into context, only 15 indie studio releases in the past decade opened above US$20 million, which makes Longlegs an undeniable financial success.
Enough about the numbers, how does this new film from horror auteur Oz Perkins (who made The Blackcoat’s Daughter and the visually stunning Gretel & Hansel) fare as a horror flick?
The answer is, pretty good. It’s definitely not the scariest movie of the year as the internet hype will have you believe, but it’s a completely involving, gripping and unsettling psychological horror experience.
Starring Maika Monroe (of It Follows fame, which makes her at least the new “elevated horror” scream queen?) as the “half-psychic” FBI agent Lee Harker, who’s roped in to help with investigations on a series of murders spanning decades involving a killer who calls himself Longlegs (a wonderfully wacko Nicolas Cage), this plays a bit like a Perkins riff on The Silence Of The Lambs, which means that it intentionally feels “off” as Perkins takes plenty of liberties with the film’s editing strategies and, most outstandingly, sound design.
Maybe not the best horror film of the year, but definitely worthy of the amount of money it’s managed to pull in so far, and a freaky little wonder all its own.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’
Now only behind Inside Out 2 in the worldwide box-office charts for 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine has already crossed the US$900 million mark and is expected to hit US$1 billion this weekend.
Give it a few more weeks, who knows if it could even surpass Inside Out 2 as the box-office champ of 2024?
What’s even more remarkable is that it’s done all this as an R-rated film, which means that people under 17 aren’t allowed to see it without an accompanying parent or adult guardian, which is an audience segment that’s fully accessible to most films, especially Inside Out 2.
Proving that the much talked about superhero movie fatigue only applies to movies that adhere strictly to the tired superhero movie formula, Deadpool & Wolverine is practically the movie that will save the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not only in terms of box-office, but also in how it sets the stage for whatever fresh new direction that the people at Marvel and Disney are going to take the next phase of movies MCU into.
By now playing with the concept of the multiverse and time-travel as if it was Play-doh (or plasticine for us Malaysians) when we were kids, the movie sees Deadpool getting into contact with the Time Variance Authority (aka TVA) from the Loki series, resulting in him trying to save his timeline (the one in which Logan aka Wolverine died) by trying to get a Wolverine, any Wolverine, from one of the other timelines to replace the dead one from his timeline.
With this kind of freewheeling set-up, it’s definitely the perfect excuse for director Shawn Levy to throw in plenty of meta moments, unexpected cameos, fabulously hilarious gore and irresistible tongue-in-cheek jokes.
In short, this blockbuster is a total blast, especially when experienced in the cinema, laughing together at the screen with total strangers.
Don’t believe it when people say that the cinema experience is dying. It’s films like this that will remind people why they loved going to the cinema in the first place.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
