Blockbusters are failing spectacularly, but how that changes Hollywood is anyone's guess

When describing this year's box office offerings, "excitement," "anticipation" or "interest" would probably be the wrong words to use. Instead, think "schadenfreude."

Most recently, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny — reportedly, the most expensive movie of the franchise — utterly failed to excite audiences with the once-reliable promise of further adventures of a beloved character. Instead, the $300 million US film did so poorly it's unlikely to earn its studio even half the money it spent making it. 

Elsewhere, Dreamworks saw its worst opening weekend of all time with Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken — as the lack of a media campaign tanked any interest generated by its fairly positive critical reviews.

And The Flash bombed so spectacularly it gained the unfortunate title of biggest comic-book movie flop of all time. 

"Just the amount of consecutive disappointments that are coming out from these major movies with these very inflated budgets," said Nicholas Janzen, a film commentator and content creator in Toronto. "I think that's what's making it so jarring."

It's a string of flops continuing off of last year's, including everything from Shazam! Fury of the Gods to Dungeons and Dragons and — to a degree — Pixar's Elemental, which saw the studio's second-worst opening weekend of all time. These busts come at the same time as two concurrent strikes. Writers walked off the job in May, followed by actors this week. Both groups say streaming and growing risks from AI threaten their livelihoods.

That's not to say that the film industry itself is tanking — far from it. As of this week, Cineplex reported its earnings have nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels, with box office revenues reaching 98 per cent of 2019 numbers. Meanwhile, upcoming heavyweights Barbie and Oppenheimer have already lit a fire under fans: in an email to CBC News, the theatre chain reported over 130,000 presale tickets sold, earning both films over $1 million already.

And other movies have found, sometimes surprising, success: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One set a franchise record for its preview screenings, Asteroid City beat Grand Budapest Hotel as Wes Anderson's highest -grossing weekend, and the independently distributed Sound of Freedom astounded by crossing the $50-million mark earlier this week, more than tripling its budget.

When it comes to what succeeds and fails, the movie industry has never been more unpredictable, Janzen noted in a video he made after noticing the trend.

"My video was kind of just like, 'What's going on here?'" he said. "It's these movies that seemed like surefire hits kind of tripped out of the gate."

The reason behind Hollywood's strategy for success coming undone could partially lie in bloated expectations. The concept of blockbusters originated in the 1940s, with the term originally used by newspaper reporters to describe "the new, large, 4,000-pound bombs dropped by Allied forces on enemy cities," wrote Canadian pop culture researcher Charles R. Acland.

In the Hollywood context, the jargon became a marketing device used to turn the once-dismal summer months into a draw for audiences and make a film seem worth seeing — regardless of how good it was.

The idea of marketing movies as big-budget events grew in the 1950s, during what University of Bologna associate professor Marco Cucco called Hollywood's "worst crisis." In the post-war years, a baby boom, reluctance to spend money on luxuries such as movie tickets and the invention of a new, easier way to watch media — television — kept audiences out of theatres.

Investing in big, expensive productions separated studio films from TV, and a relatively large number of epic-historical dramas capitalized on that.