The Studio Responsible For Almost Every Terrible 2024 Movie
2024 has certainly been a bizarre year for the world of cinema at large. On the one hand, you have multiple critically acclaimed box office smashes such as Deadpool & Wolverine, Inside Out 2, and Dune: Part Two, accounting for billions in combined profits. On the other hand, however, there have been a number of high-budget flops, both critically and commercially, including Borderlands, The Crow, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Personally, I hadn’t made the connection to all these movie missteps until recently, when I came to realize that the studio Lionsgate is responsible for churning out nearly every terrible movie of the year thus far.
Lionsgate Is Churning Out Flop After Flop
A recent write-up in Variety sought to uncover the source of Lionsgate’s terrible luck at the box office, in the hopes of locating some magical through-line that connects films like Never Let Go, White Bird, and The Killer’s Game.
Needless to say, there’s no easy answer as to how Lionsgate wound up being at the center of all these flops, save for poor decision making skills from the execs behind the wheel. Even still, Lionsgate has been particularly bad this year, even amongst other studios such as Warner Bros, which have picked up a nasty habit of shelving completed movies in favor of marking them as tax write-offs.
Lionsgate’s terrible movie streak isn’t just a funny observation from a consumer standpoint either, as the consecutive failures of seven recent blockbuster attempts from the studio may say something bigger about the state of the industry.
What Went Wrong?
Hollywood is of course still recovering from the combined strikes of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA unions which raged on throughout a large chunk of 2023, meaning many of the films released this year were interrupted during production, placed on hold for months on end, or rushed to be completed during the early months of this year.
This, combined with the increased focus on artificial intelligence in modern media, has led many executives to believe that they can cut out the passionate creatives, and produce films that exist as something of a camel-by-committee.
Obviously, such a plan is destined to fail, as audiences have proven time and time again that AI has no place in writing, acting, or any other deeply human creative processes. While this doesn’t apply only to Lionsgate, the constant inability of Hollywood’s top executives to spot what makes a terrible movie before it hits the box office is an alarming sign of worse things to come.
Lionsgate’s Most Recent Bombs
How is it possible that fans from around the globe could tell that Eli Roth’s take on Borderlands was going to be a complete train wreck from the moment it landed in theaters, but Lionsgate execs couldn’t predict their losses? Even when Lionsgate tried to be careful, they completely ate it, like with the release of Coppola’s positively terrible new movie Megalopolis, which languished in development hell for nearly 40 years, and ran up a production bill of over $120 million.
Is this a case of Lionsgate decision-makers being asleep at the wheel, or did somebody actually review footage of Adam Driver demanding his partner “go back to the cluuuuub” and think “Oh yeah, we’ve got a hit on our hands with this one.”
Megalopolis may actually be a poor example, as Lionsgate is actually on pace to make money from the film, even with its terrible box office scores. This is because the studio is known to purchase the distribution rights to completed or funded films, meaning they put very little front-end investment into many of their projects. Perhaps Lionsgate can still turn things around in 2025 and beyond, before they fall so low that their projects are listed amongst bargain-bin creations from The Asylum.
Source: Variety
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