After days of morning to mid-afternoon gloom, Memorial Day bloomed bright and early over Los Angeles — the clouds blown away, no doubt, by the powerful current of sighs, groans and complaints generated by the weekend’s disappointing box office . Turns out Hollywood executives do believe in magic. Somehow they thought that forcing six months’ worth of strikes by writers and actors last year would come at no cost to this year’s summer movie season.
That in 2023, with the film industry still in recovery from the COVID-19 shutdown, it would be perfectly fine to allow writing and production to come to a grinding halt again. Especially if it meant saving some dough in the short run and burning off a few ill-advised deals while the folks with the multimillion-dollar salaries tried to figure out what to do about all these dang streaming services they rushed to create. Meanwhile, outside the billionaire bubble, the delays, particularly of big-budget tentpole movies, scrambled this summer’s slate and left theaters in the lurch.
Yet everyone appears shocked, shocked, to find that this has real-life implications for ticket sales. This was the lowest Memorial Day box office haul in almost 30 years: What went wrong? Putting aside the larger philosophical question — if the studios that make movies don’t care if months go by without movies getting made, why should the general public suddenly bestir itself just because there’s a long weekend? — one has to wonder about the pr.
