A cursory glance at 2019’s box office would suggest a hugely successful year for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. This was the year that James Cameron’s Avatar was finally usurped as all-time box office king, with Avengers: Endgame taking home a colossal $2.79 billion worldwide, making it the most successful movie of all time. Endgame completed a decade of interconnected storytelling for Marvel, a run of 22 movies without a single commercial failure and very few critical missteps. Elsewhere in 2019, movies such as The Lion King, Toy Story 4, Captain Marvel, Joker, and Frozen II all proved to be massive hits.
But really, the true success story of 2019 was that of Disney, not Hollywood in general. Seven of the year’s 10 biggest movies were Disney releases, with the studio’s ownership of Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar creating a stranglehold on blockbuster cinema that gave other studios very few opportunities of their own. And that’s before we factor in the properties that it gained this year after buying Fox’s entertainment assets, such as Avatar and the X-Men, that will surely boost its fortunes even higher in years to come. While it remains to be seen what the end result of such market dominance will be–a good film is a good film, and many audiences couldn’t care less which studio makes it–it’s hard to argue that a marketplace monopoly and a lack of variety are good things for cinema. And the dismal results achieved by the other studios show that they are already struggling to compete with Disney’s commercial power.
Of course, that’s not to say that there weren’t any big hits from other studios. DC’s Joker became the biggest R-rated movie of all time, It: Chapter 2 was another horror smash, and the Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw made more than $758.9 million worldwide. And Disney itself wasn’t flop-proof–Tim Burton’s Dumbo and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil both struggled to find big audiences. But these movies are part of a wider series of hugely successful live-action fairy tale remakes, and the success of Aladdin and The Lion King more than compensated for those disappointing results.
Hollywood has never been particularly brave about spending money on new and original movies, preferring to reboot and repackage existing, proven properties with built-in audiences. 2019 proved no different in that regard, but in many cases, it seemed that those audiences no longer cared enough to actually turn up at the theater. It doesn’t help that most of the year’s biggest blockbuster flops were met by terrible reviews too–if you’re not going to make it original, at least make it good, but this was the year that both of these lessons were seemingly forgotten.
Hell, no!
The year of deeply disappointing blockbusters kicked off in April, when the Hellboy reboot hit theaters. Hellboy had always been more of a cult property than other comic book adaptations, and the $50 million budget was more modest than some other big movies this year. But the result was absolutely terrible, replacing the humor, imagination, and thrilling action of Guillermo Del Toro’s two movies with bad performances, muddled plotting, and terrible digital gore. With its release preceded by reports of serious production troubles and an almost unanimous critical panning, Hellboy failed utterly at the box office and plans for a sequel–which is clearly set up at the movie’s end–were quickly forgotten.
God, Zilla!
While blockbusters are increasingly released throughout the year, the summer still remains–for now–a key period for many big movies. Sadly, in 2019, the warmer months proved to be a wasteland of bad franchise films, with a series of critical and commercial failures stretching through to the fall. One of the biggest surprises was Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which arrived at the end of May. While Godzilla has existed in pop-culture for over 60 years, the success of 2014’s Gareth Edwards-directed reboot showed that there was still plenty of interest in a well-written, stylish, and exciting new take on familiar material. Unfortunately, the sequel is none of those things. King of the Monsters should’ve knocked it out of the park–director Michael Doguhterty proved his movie monster skills with the terrific Christmas horror Krampus, the cast was strong (including Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, and Charles Dance), and the movie featured no fewer than four big monsters from classic Japanese movies. But the incomprehensibly-plotted script and seemingly perverse decision to set every monster fight in darkness, rain, or fog resulted in an interminable slog of a film.
X-tremely bad
A week after Godzilla stomped into theatres, it was joined the X-Men movie Dark Phoenix. To be fair, no one was particularly surprised that it didn’t turn out to be any good. The previous X-Men film, 2017’s Apocalypse, was also bad, and it was hard to escape the feeling that this was a franchise on its last legs, particularly with Disney now owning the property and looking ahead to a complete reboot. Nevertheless, the Dark Phoenix saga is one of comic books’ great story arcs and fully deserving of a screen version better than the last attempt, 2006’s The Last Stand. Sophie Turner did her best to give the tragic story of Jean Grey some emotional power, but bored performances by the likes of Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence–who really look like they’d rather be anywhere but on an X-Men set–and a distinct lack of thrills made it was very hard to engage with the story. It was a sad end to one of modern cinema’s first superhero franchises, and while it’s exciting to think what Marvel might ultimately do with these characters, it’s a shame the series couldn’t have had a better send-off than this.
Men in Crap
2019 also saw several decades-old series brought back with the vague hope that enough people remembered or cared about them. Spoiler: they didn’t. Mid-June saw the release of Men in Black: International, the belated fourth entry in the sci-fi comedy series that kicked off with the Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones-starring original in 1997. This time, Thor Ragnarok stars Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thimpson were cast as the alien-chasing agents, but the movie contained almost none of the humor and chemistry they brought to that Marvel movie. Men in Black: International was a classic case of a studio thinking that just because a series was popular in a previous decade it still had an audience. But it’s questionable if anyone even wanted a second or third movie (have you ever met a big Men in Black fan?), let alone this unfunny, charmless, and boring fourth installment. No one knows what the bizarre-sounding Men in Black/Jump Street crossover that was in development at one stage would’ve been like–but it’s hard to think it would’ve been less interesting than what we did get. With a woeful $253.9 million worldwide gross–only slightly more than half of what the original movie made 22 years ago–don’t expect to see a fifth part any time soon.
Dark Farce
A commercial failure doesn’t necessarily mean the end of a franchise. When Terminator Genisys bombed in 2015, many predicted that a sixth Terminator movie would be a long time coming. But the return of James Cameron to the franchise he created quickly put the next film into development, and in October, Terminator: Dark Fate arrived. Produced by Cameron and directed by Deadpool’s Tim Miller, the film took the Force Awakens approach of trying to remind fans why they loved the series in the first place, by combining a new cast with old faces and presenting a greatest hits package of cool Terminator moments. While the result was a slight improvement on Genisys, it ultimately added nothing to a series that probably should’ve ended back in 1991. As with Men in Black, not to mention Predator and Alien in previous years, it demonstrated that giving a movie a familiar title simply isn’t enough to get audiences to care if you’re offering very little elsewhere.
Gemini Panned
As always, the vast majority of 2019’s blockbusters–both good and bad–were reboots and sequels. The only original big budget movie to hit screens this year was Gemini Man, a sci-fi action thriller in which Will Smith fights a younger version of himself. The film had been in development for many years, and advances in digital deaging technology finally helped make it a reality. And the movie was praised for its technical aspects, with director Ang Lee continuing his fascination with digital trickery and higher frame rate technology. If only as much time and money had been spent on the script. For all the technical wonder of Gemini Man, it was ultimately hamstrung by a hokey screenplay that feels more like something Jean-Claude Van Damme might have starred in during the 1990s than a wildly expensive high concept blockbuster featuring one of the world’s biggest stars (sorry JCVD, we still love you).
Of course, every year delivers disappointing blockbusters, bad franchise movies, and unwelcome reboots and sequels. With so much spent on these huge movies, studios look to take as few risks as possible in order to appeal to a wide audience, which all too often results in predictable and unmemorable films. Nevertheless, 2019 was worse than most. Leaving Disney aside, it’s been a financially disappointing year for every major studio, and it’s not hard to think that a few more risks–and smaller budgets–might have eased the pain a little and given fans a reason to return to these venerable franchises.
It’s tempting to think that studios might learn, and make some more original blockbusters–with a better script than Gemini Man obviously. After all, there’s only so many IPs you can rely on before you need to create more, and even Star Wars and The Terminator were new movies once. But let’s face it, this is Hollywood, and forward-thinking has rarely been its great strength. Probably the best we can hope for is that the next reboot of whatever decades-old franchise is given to filmmakers who really care about it, and have something new to offer audiences than the tired disappointments we watched in 2019. Fingers crossed.
