After the summer of 'Barbenheimer,' Hollywood faces an uneasy fall

Anyone who follows the Sayville Theater on Instagram might have noticed a recent advertisement for “Strays,” the new pets-gone-wild comedy starring Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx. It’s an image of a pooch sitting in a theater seat, holding a popcorn and soda. But this isn’t the official poster — it’s a homemade job created with online software.

Why go through the trouble? Thanks to the ongoing actors strike, stars aren’t publicizing their own movies — and “Strays” had opened to a disappointing $8.2 million domestically. “I think it would have done 30% more business if the actors were making the rounds and doing interviews,” said Devin Fickling, the Sayville’s property manager. “We are doing more advertising on our end to try to compensate.”

Dogging the movie industry is a sense of unease as the upbeat summer season — a box-office bonanza driven by the $2 billion combo of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — turns to a less sunny-looking fall. Global box office reached $4.54 billion in July, the highest-grossing month since the pre-pandemic era, according to Gower Street Analytics, but the ongoing strikes by actors and writers are beginning to hurt business. A dearth of publicity means less buzz for upcoming movies, and worried studios have begun pushing back big titles like “Dune: Part Two” to 2024. And then there’s the obvious question: After the phenomenon known as “Barbenheimer,” is there anywhere to go but down?

“It’s layers of uncertainly on top of uncertainty,” Dade Hayes, business editor at the trade website Deadline, said. “Even in a normal environment where the guilds weren’t on strike, you have these existential questions hovering over the kind of movies that are coming out in the fall.”

BOX OFFICE STRONG, BUT SIGNS OF WEAKNESS

It’s a curious state of affairs given Hollywood’s recent successes. The good times started on the first weekend of the year, when “M3GAN,” a modest horror film about an AI doll gone berserk, became a sleeper hit that would eventually make $181 million. In March, “John Wick: Chapter 4” scored the franchise’s biggest opening weekend with $73.8 million. Soon after came the video-game adaptation “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” the year’s second highest grosser in North America – just after “Barbie” – with $574 million.

Mixed in with the hits, though, were some relative misses. Marvel’s usual Midas touch faded with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” a $476 million disappointment. The high hopes of two Warner-DC movies were also dashed: “The Flash” fizzled with $286 million and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” earned just $133 million. Harrison Ford’s last crack at the bullwhip, in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” and Tom Cruise’s latest “Mission: Impossible” thriller both posted impressive but not spectacular returns, and might still lose money because of their reportedly massive budgets.

“There was an awful lot of bloat,” Hayes said. And yet, he notes, there’s a well documented audience appetite for smaller films. He points to last year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a low-budget hit that won the Oscar for best picture, and this year’s “The Sound of Freedom,” a faith-based drama from a little-known studio that has grossed $178 million.

“Do summer blockbusters have to cost $300 million?” Hayes said. “They don’t.”

STRIKES AND REPERCUSSIONS

The last thing Hollywood needed this year was a strike — and it got two. The writers’ guild struck first, on May 2; the actors’ guild followed on July 14. Among their major demands are higher residuals for movies and television shows, along with guarantees that AI will not be used to swipe their work (or, even worse, replace them). So far, there’s been little communication between the guilds and the studios, and no visible progress.

Meanwhile, the lack of publicity has produced a subtle but noticeable lack of movie buzz. It’s usually right around now — the start of film-fest season and the early dawn of Oscar season — when stars begin popping up everywhere. Instead, there has been a near-total ban on late-night chat, red-carpet strolls and other promotional work. You could be forgiven for not realizing that the latest Scorsese-DiCaprio collaboration, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is barely a month away; its last big press push came in May, at the Cannes Film Festival.

All this is causing anxiety among theater owners, especially independent ones who are still getting back on their feet after the pandemic. Their biggest fear: If the strike goes on too long, the studios will postpone even more release dates, leaving them with few movies to play. Already, Sony has pushed “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” from Christmas to March 29 and Warner Bros. recently did much the same with “Dune: Part Two,” bumping it from Nov. 3 to March 15.

“If they start moving product, I’m going to be up a creek,” Jay Levinson, owner of the Bellmore Playhouse, said. “How do you fill 15 screens when you don’t have any movies? How many screens can you play ‘The Equalizer’ on?”

Levinson added that the strike is giving him serious concerns about the future of his new theater, the South Bay Cinemas in West Babylon, which is currently undergoing renovations. “You start saying to yourself, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t open it up at all,’” he said, though he added he’s still pushing to be open by Thanksgiving. 

TRYING TO STAY POSITIVE

Nevertheless, reports of the movies’ death may be greatly exaggerated. The movies have survived the advent of television, the invention of the VCR, the rise of streaming platforms and the dark years of COVID-19. Audiences keep turning out for movies of all kinds, from the big-studio action-sequel “Fast X” to the indie horror film “Talk to Me.”

“When people were really in doubt about the future of our industry over the last few years, we were saying: ‘Calm down, wait for the movies to come back,’” said Phil Contrino, director of media and research for the National Association of Theater Owners. They did come back: The domestic box-office for this summer (defined as the first Friday in May through Labor Day weekend) seems poised to hit $4 billion, a 21% increase over last summer, according to data from BoxOfficeMojo.

“It’s not rocket science,” Contrino said. “When the movies are there, people show up.”

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com