there are 17 movies this year that will cross 100M domestic and at least 5 of them are being heavily considered for major awards at the Oscars. the Oscars are largely populist, they always have been, and the idea that they aren’t is patently absurd. even when the winners don’t gross that much it’s usually very easy to see why they would appeal to the majority of voters that, you know, actually saw them.
well if you wanna stretch the definition of blockbuster from “popular movie that was financially successful” to “it has to make 300 million domestic or else no one saw it,”
yeah i guess movies tend to flop when a studio gives up on its release after one weekend and sends it to a streaming service two weeks later. but the movie itself is absolutely a crowdpleaser
if i can’t bring up Marvel movies broadly as a means to illustrate my point (really you can just substitute that for most franchise movies in general if you so prefer) then i guess the CBM fans deserve to be “gaslit” (?????)
years of Marvel movies largely performing well on opening weekend and then cratering afterwards has really damaged how people talk about big movies like this. like the expectation is instant gratification for *everything* regardless of a movie’s circumstances. thankfully Avatar is gonna have holiday legs and 10 weeks of practically no competition and then we can laugh about some of the absurd doomposting that i read for the last 10+ pages
great example of this is the Lincoln Square imax is almost completely sold out for the weekend and a lot of screenings are already nearly sold out continuing through next weekend. even like 10:45 on a monday night has a crazy amount of seats sold.