“There will be an implosion the day three or four of these films with huge budgets will crash”: in 2013, Spielberg was already predicting the disaster at the box office

Sure, Barbie is swimming in bliss counting her $1.05 billion in worldwide Box Office receipts; second feature film of 2023 to achieve this after Super Mario Bros., and fifty-third since Titanic got the ball rolling and hit that mark in 1998.

Oppenheimer also does not have to be ashamed of his great performance with his nearly 570 million greenbacks. A challenge given the duration of the film and its austere subject, beyond its five-star cast. Going back a bit, there is, of course, Avatar 2 released late last year, crushing everything in its path with $2.32 billion on the clock.

struggling superheroes

But these undeniable and dazzling successes are a bit like the tree that hides the forest, when you take the trouble to zoom out to get an overview. The superhero films that have so often and for a long time cannibalized the Box Office have been frankly struggling for a while, if we put aside the planetary hit of Spider-Man no Way Home released in the midst of a pandemic, which had raised no less than $1.92 billion.

Always more new superheroes, an overall decline in the quality of scripts, hellish production rates to the point of pushing the creators of the special effects of these films to unionize to be better paid and considered, the weariness of the public which has been rather demanding and benevolent towards the Marvel and DC teams…

Shazam! Rage of the Gods, a devastating flop for Warner, made just $133.8 million at the Box Office. Rachel Zegler, who plays Anthea in the film, didn’t seem entirely sold on the film herself, explaining why she joined the DC Universe. “I needed a job… I’m very serious” had she dropped on the red carpet…

While Dwayne Johnson can’t stop crying and pouring out the painful failure of his Black Adam, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was quite a hit with critics and the public, collecting a little more of $476 million at the worldwide box office.

The Flash? Leaded among other things by the affair around its headliner Ezra Miller, the film only brought in 268 million dollars. Considering the sums involved in the creation and marketing of such steamrollers, these are not exactly triumphs for the Marvel and DC stables…

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Broadening the spectrum, other supposed Box Office behemoths have taken a violent backlash. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was a disappointing failure, grossing less than $370 million at the worldwide box office. Given the notoriety and aura of such license, it’s a slap that has the vigor of an uppercut.

Even the latest installment of Mission Impossible underperformed. While Tom Cruise was endlessly looping in his jet with the planetary cardboard of Top Gun Maverick, Dead Reckoning has still not crossed the $500 million mark a month after its release. The studio had gone to great lengths to evangelize the crowds, however, bombarding audiences months in advance with featurettes of the actor’s jaw-dropping stunts.

And what about the latest Pixar film, Elementary, which scored the second-worst start in studio history by failing to raise $30 million in its opening weekend?

steven the oracle

It is in the light of these observations on a severely battered box office, and what is more fierce competition from streaming platforms, that we must reread the words of Steven Spielberg made just ten years ago, playing the oracles on the uncertain future of the American box office.

Invited to speak in June 2013 with George Lucas in front of the students of the film school of the University of Southern California (USC), they had already cooled the assistance, by expressing their pessimism in the face of the increase in production costs, ticket prices and the multiplication of screens.

“[Les studios] make [des films] for money” said Lucas. “So their views are getting narrower and narrower and people are going to get bored.” Regretting that these studios would rather produce a single $250 million film than be interested in several original and personal projects, Spielberg said: “There’s going to be an implosion the day that three-four or even half a dozen of these big-budget movies crash, and the pattern is going to change again.”

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He will drive the point home just two years later, announcing the decline of superhero films. In an interview given to the Associated Press as part of the release of Bridge of Spies, he predicted a fate similar to those of the Westerns.

“We were there when the genre died” he explained. “There will be a time when superheroes go down the same path as the western. That doesn’t mean that the western won’t have a chance to come back or that the superheroes won’t come back.

Of course, superheroes are alive and thriving today. But these cycles have a limited lifespan in popular culture. A day will come when mythological stories will be supplanted by another genre that young directors are currently thinking of exploring for all of us.

The time may have come…