McNamara: Movies are not dead. It’s just fear speaking

When I became the television critic at the Los Angeles Times in early 2007, many people told me it was a very bad idea. Why would I give up my job as a screenwriter to write TV reviews? Didn’t I know that The Sopranos was coming to an end? And that, with a few notable exceptions, faithful TV shows were dead, murdered by reality TV and endless Internet content?

Fortunately, I didn’t listen to any of it; instead, I was able to follow and write about one of the most impressive artistic revolutions of our time. The pendulum (and Hollywood’s penchant for excess) is what it is, and television is facing a financial crisis, largely due to this wonderful period of growth. But even though the industry is in a period of austerity, no one is predicting the complete demise of the art form.

I think of television in 2007 every time a panel of experts declares something dead. I certainly thought of it a month ago when so many people were declaring the end of going to the movies.

In May, The Fall Guy, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Garfield: The Movie failed to meet pre-release expectations. Rather than questioning the accuracy of these expectations themselves,, Especially in the face of crippling strikes by screenwriters and actors, the industry and many of its observers preferred to proclaim that the sky was falling.

“People just don’t want to go to the cinema anymore,” several people have said loudly and publicly.

Then “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “A Quiet Place: Day One,” and especially “Inside Out 2” premiered and suddenly everyone was going to the movies again. The box office is in full swing and “Deadpool & Wolverine” hasn’t even been released yet.

As it turns out, people still want to go to the movies. Maybe not in the numbers they did before streaming made TV itself curated and available 24/7, or before a global pandemic closed theaters for more than a year and studios decided to make movies available for home viewing just weeks after their release. “A Quiet Place: Day One” has already grossed more than $100 million worldwide in its first five days, and that’s despite Paramount announcing July 30 as the streaming date.

As this film and other films from June or July prove, if there is one thing (and this is important) that people actually wanna seethere they all are, talking and laughing and waiting in line to pay $17 for a ticket and $10 for a bag of popcorn. I saw Inside Out 2 a full week after it was released and it took me nearly half an hour just to find a parking spot.

After last year’s strikes, this summer may not be able to match the magic of “Barbenheimer” or whatever metric analysts want to use. But that’s not the point.

The point is: why do we place so much importance on announcing the time of death when the patient is clearly still breathing?

This country has been through a lot of trauma in the last few years, but we’re not doing ourselves any favors by constantly jumping from “problem” to “disaster that could bring about the end of the world as we know it.” (Don’t even get me started on the frenzy into madness after the presidential debate, but subtext, subtext, subtext.)

Not only is this exhausting and sometimes embarrassing, our addiction to exaggeration makes it impossible to separate the real DEFCON 1 emergencies – the climate crisis, the homelessness crisis, the internal threats to our democracy – from less serious problems.

This is not to downplay the situation in Hollywood. For those working in the entertainment industry, the current phase of restrictions is a very current and existentially threatening problem. But to view the failure of a few films as an indicator not only of the state of film but also of the mindset of billions is not only unhelpful, but has also proven to be utter nonsense in the recent past.

Television was dead until it wasn’t. Summer box office was dead until it wasn’t. Publishing had no future until Oprah started a book club and Harry Potter came out. Oh, and remember when people told Taylor Swift she was in danger of ruining her career through “overexposure”?

It’s both pathetic and poetic that Inside Out 2 just “saves” the summer. Much of the story is about how terrible life is when fear takes control. Fear can only imagine the worst scenarios and inevitably panics when it tries to prevent them.

That doesn’t mean that some of these scenarios aren’t possible or even likely. It just means that we’d better not rely on fear alone to define life’s problems and find solutions. Give joy a chance, or sadness, or even embarrassment.

Pixar won’t change the state of the nation (after all, it has its own problems). But the pained laughter elicited by the film’s climactic scene—in which Anxiety dishes out one disastrous prediction after another—is telling. Given the state of American politics, social media (and traditional media’s attempts to keep up with it), and the trauma the pandemic has caused, we’ve become a nation of anxious adrenaline junkies who ignore the good, pounce on the bad, and make sweeping generalizations about very complicated things whenever something seems to be going wrong.

Or even before. Like fear, we are all increasingly in the business of prediction. Whether on Instagram or CNN, analysts (professional and self-appointed) act like modern-day fortune tellers, analyzing polls, social media, video clips, and the general zeitgeist to utter words of prophecy and, increasingly, doom.

Of course, crises happen and collapse must be avoided. The film industry faces a multitude of challenges, as do many other industries, as it always has. And it always will. Alarm bells are important, but they become increasingly ineffective when they are rung every hour.

Not every moment requires an immediate decision – even referees often resort to video replays. Some moments require a calm assessment of the problem and possible solutions. It’s easy to run around screaming that the sky is falling, but what’s more difficult is determining whether what actually fell is an asteroid or an acorn, and whether something can or should be done about it.

Many things change, for better or worse, but some things don’t. The entertainment industry certainly needs to be better funded, but people will still want to hear stories in the dark.

Even if finding a parking space is quite difficult.