Raritania

What Will Avengers: Doomsday Make at the Box Office?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:15:47 +0000

As those who have seen me play the game of "How much will this movie make?" before know, I prefer a quantitative approach based on the principal information actually made available to the public in a consistent, timely, systematic way--box office grosses. Thus I look at how the predecessors of a movie in a franchise (it is franchise films that lend themselves to this approach) did before, adjust the figures for inflation, look for any patterns I can find (the range of the grosses, the averages, the trends from film to film, etc.), and then turn to any factors that may skew the result--drawing analogy with how similar films did, for instance--while offering any necessary qualifiers. Thus did I calculate that if Indiana Jones 5 performed "like an Indiana Jones film" it could be expected to make a billion dollars, with a quarter of a billion dollar margin either way (with the caveat that given the downward trend the film seemed more likely to undershoot than overshoot the billion-dollar mark), while the possibility existed that, by way of analogy with Star Wars, it could play like Solo instead and crater--which is, of course, exactly what happened.

Thus when considering the prospects of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday I started with the four Avengers movies made to date grossed between $1.4 and $2.8 billion in current dollars, or about $2 billion and $3.7 billion in today's (August 2026) terms, while averaging some $2.6 to $2.7 billion in today's dollars. If we go by my rule of thumb that cutting out those films that did very poorly or exceptionally well (cutting out Captain Marvel and cutting out Spider-Man, cutting out The Thunderbolts and cutting out Deadpool) "normal" Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films make just 50-80 percent of what their predecessors did before the pandemic, with the biggest tending to take the largest hit, we end up with a range of $1 billion to $3 billion, and a modified average of $1.3 to $2.2 billion. The result is that going by the numbers I have here may reasonably expect the movie to make not less than a billion dollars, with considerably greater possible if not probable and twice that much within the bounds of reasonable expectation.

However, just as with Indiana Jones the qualifiers are really significant, because even allowing for the shock to the box office of the pandemic the latest Avengers will not have the advantages of its predecessors. It does not have the benefit of the kind of build-up that made the original 2012 The Avengers such a hit, and still less the far greater build-up that made the 2018 and 2019 Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame even bigger successes. Instead the best the movie will have going for it is the good will that this summer's Spider-Man has brought the franchise--though this may not count for very much in a period in which, in contrast with Phase Three's success in making the Marvel Cinematic Universe more than the sum of its parts, today the Universe is really just a collection of franchises of wildly varying popularity and appeal, all as much of the public may feel that they have already "seen their one superhero movie for this year." And especially as we are talking about the global gross one also ought not forget just how much China mattered in Endgame's mighty final take, that market alone contributing a mighty $632 million to the total ($827 million after adjustment for inflation), and just under $1 billion for Infinity War and Endgame together (some $1.3 billion in today's terms)--and that even if Hollywood is still capable of making big money in China (just look at how Zootopia 2 performed), China has not been anywhere near so reliable a field for Hollywood's films as it was in the '10s. (Deadpool & Wolverine, such a colossus in America, made just $60 million in China, while Spider-Man, if doing better, was still a long way from the event it was in America, or how the Avengers movies did in China back in 2018-2019, taking in just $232 million, and this about as good as it gets ordinarily, even $100 million a feat for an American movie in China these days.)

The result is that, speaking broadly, I expect that thinking in terms of its predecessors the movie is much less an Endgame box office prospects-wise than an Ultron, if that, for if a gross of a billion dollars or more is hardly inconceivable, it is also far from assured. (After all, if a billion dollars is not what it was before, you still have to sell a lot of tickets to bank that much.) And given what the last two Avengers films cost, and what this one project is already reported as costing (which British tax documents may, as has happened before with Marvel's productions and with Disney's productions more generally, prove a significant underestimate), even a billion dollar-plus gross may prove to be not just a disappointment for the studio, but actually put Disney-Marvel in danger of ending up in the red on this film, all while being worrisome indeed from the standpoint of the whole franchise. After all, there is much more than just the gamble on this one movie at stake, with Avengers 5 to be followed by Avengers 6 in the form of Avengers: Secret Wars, all as the franchise-runners are all too clearly looking to the two films to bring back the MCU's Phase Three glory days, with all that means for the bar the movie really needs to clear to be regarded by one and all as the unqualified, franchise viability-restoring success that its backers want it to be, and others to see it as. Indeed, given all that is riding on this one it seems to me that, however the film turns out, Christopher Nolan's New Hollywood-ish gamble on The Odyssey apart, Avengers: Doomsday seems to me the most interesting single film of the year from an "armchair movie executive" box office-watching standpoint.

Marvel is Not "Back" and (Probably) Never Will Be

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:15:44 +0000

All too predictably the presentist, hot take-spewing idiots of the entertainment press have seized upon the undeniable colossal success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day to tell us "Marvel's back!"

As is so often the case with those of their sort they are engaged in empty sloganeering. After all, in a way Marvel never left. Say what one will, Disney-Marvel has kept the movies, and TV shows, coming at the old rate--some fifteen of them from Black Widow to the aforementioned Spider-Man in a space of a little over five years. And many of those films have been profitable. The two Spider-Man films released in this period have been the biggest grossers of that franchise's history, even after adjustment for inflation, while Deadpool & Wolverine was the same for the broader X-Men franchise of which it is a part, as they helped demonstrate that today the biggest movies can sell as many tickets as ever they did. And still other Marvel releases were at least respectable moneymakers, with four more films making Deadline's three post-pandemic Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament lists in 2022 and 2023 Dr. Strange 2, Black Panther 2, Thor 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3).

However, it is also the case that, even when we set aside those three movies that never had much of a chance because of their release when the (still ongoing) pandemic still had the box office severely depressed (Black Widow, The Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Marvel has had a good many undeniable underperformers, with The Marvels competitive with the DCEU's The Flash as the biggest flop of flop-filled 2023, and Ant-Man 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts safely classifiable as such, all as it was far from unreasonable to see even the profitable Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and Dr. Strange 2 as less than ringing successes given what their predecessors made, and what had been hoped for from and invested in them (Thor and Black Panther relative to their immediate predecessors in their franchises, Dr. Strange 2 to the way the last Spider-Man film had set it up to be a great success).

The result is that if Marvel never left, it is also not "back" to what the aforementioned presentist, hot take-spewing idiots imply when they say so, namely back to the franchise's "Phase Three" (2016-2019) when it felt like Marvel could put out three movies a year and see each gross a billion dollars or close to it (in 2016-2019 dollars, equal to about $1.3-$1.4 billion now), as they ignore the difference in the situation between then and now. The consistent, colossal, success of Phase Three was not so much a matter of the Marvel "brand" (which is the product, not the cause of the company strategy) as Marvel organized its film production in such a manner that one Marvel film led to another, every next Marvel movie contributing in at least a small way to a story building to a climax in the billion-dollar, everybody-showed-up, shocking cliffhanger-reinforced two-part Avengers event that capped it all off. Admittedly more a feat of marketing than of cinematic technique or narrative art it is naively optimistic to imagine that this generation of a synergy that made the mega-franchise "more than the sum of its parts" for so long could make this work again and again, the more in as the success eliminated the novelty; there really is no "going bigger" after Endgame; the raw material on which the franchise depended has become overfamiliar, the principal characters, storylines, etc. all well-used by this point, leaving any approach (rebooting the major characters, turning to less popular ones) likely to lead to diminishing returns; and Marvel even used up its easy options for making its movies seem more "important" than they really were in the current milieu (as with the silly passing off of Black Panther and Captain Marvel as civil rights firsts). The fact that Marvel followed up this extraordinary success with the comparatively plan-less Phase Four and the aborting of the plan for Phase Five's multi-verse saga; the generally less prepossessing character of the movies that followed; the sprawling of the Universe as Marvel stupidly imagined a blockbuster-sized base would display a hardcore fan's readiness to sign up for their streaming service and see every last show and movie and the blowback against it; did not help Marvel retain the audience's affection, and indeed alienated at least a part of it, at a time when no moviemaker could afford it. The pandemic, after all, not only made things harder by disrupting the habit many had of seeing every single Marvel movie that came out, but more broadly produced a contraction in moviegoing that left Americans on average going to the theater two rather than three to four times a year, and pickier about what they deigned to see on the big screen, leaving less room for a see-all-three-Marvel-movies-per-year-type habit. (Meanwhile at the international level Marvel, like the rest of Hollywood, treated the important and hugely profitable Chinese market very lightly indeed, and paid dearly for it, not least with the stupid decision to make a Fu Manchu-based film starring Akwafina thinking "The Chinese will love it!")

The result has been that rather than the Marvel Cinematic Universe being the hugely synergy-benefiting commercial force it was in Phase Three today it is what it was before that, a looser collection of franchises. I will not say that it is absolutely impossible for those franchises to again become something greater than the sum of the parts, but the difficulty of making the old strategy work even the first time, the tougher market now less likely to be receptive to a second go-around, make this hard to picture, all as anything like such a renaissance for the franchise has no precedent in film history. James Bond, Star Wars--they both had their period of glory when they brought something new to filmgoers, frankly innovating more substantially than Marvel did (with James Bond inventing the modern action film and its franchising and marketing, while Star Wars imported the whole technique to Hollywood and polished it to a high sheen as it showed how to blend it with the mythic, with nostalgia and with more out-of-this-world science fiction, revolutionized special effects, and delivered an unprecedented A-grade space opera). After their glory days those franchises went on putting out movies, and making money, at times they even made some of their newer iterations an "event" (certainly Goldeneye was and Casino Royale was and especially the fiftieth anniversary film Skyfall was, certainly the Star Wars prequels and even Episode VII were) and reaped the benefit at the box office, but they were never as innovative again, or as important again.

Looking back it isn't hard to understand why. Franchises are prisoners of their own past successes. Innovate too little and it's just more of the same. Innovate too much and it's not the old franchise anymore and you alienate those who cared about the franchise before. (I, for one, consider George Lucas' prequel trilogy to have been an honorable attempt to not give us more of the same, Lucas in his prequels offering the more information-heavy, political, "grown-up" narrative one sees in his early scripts for Star Wars before he committed to the mythic-fairy tale route, in the films' use of Computer-Generated Imagery, but we all know that the fans didn't love it as much as the original, and that some never forgave it.) And in any case it all feels unnecessary. And so the best thing is to not be a prisoner of a franchise's past successes by letting a franchise go. But it is hard to picture anything more contrary to the instincts of the C-suite-occupying vulgarians of Hollywood, who have under pressure doubled down on their already ever more unhinged commitment to franchises, with the occasional Spider-Man or Deadpool making them cling all the harder even as so many of their other films hemorrhage cash they can ill afford to lose. That said the next best course would be to bet on their strongest successes, and where trying to be fresher, seriously attempt to make what a large audience might really want to see. They did it with Spider-Man, did it with Shawn Levy's Deadpool, the latter a mix of targeted and mass hit that pleased the very devoted base and paid off big. But there aren't likely to be three billion-dollar hits a year in that approach--which means the fantasy of somehow bringing back the ever more distant success of Phase Three will endure and continue to drive the thinking behind the franchise for as long as the few successes sufficiently compensate for the disappointments and the money-losers to sustain them in their resistance to change.

The 2026 Summer Movie Season: An Honest Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:14:05 +0000

Back in August I had something to say of the bullishness of the entertainment press' crowing over the box office receipts as it looked forward to Hollywood's first "$10 billion year" (i.e. first $10 billion theatrical gross) since before the pandemic--apparently oblivious to how a near-decade of inflation have meant that these days $10 billion ain't what it was pre-pandemic, and is in fact not much better than the fairly lousy gross of 2023 when we adjust for it, what was disappointing then being passed off as "aspirational" and an achievement now through the magic of innumeracy. The crowing is if anything louder now, as the end-of-summer retrospectives show us--such that here I am offering my own reading, in which I appraise the summer of 2026 as really no better than what we saw the three preceding summers.

Let us start with the summer that the very "presentist" idiots of the professional commentariat are most likely to reach for as the first point of comparison--the immediately preceding summer of 2025, a disappointing summer season in a disappointing box office year. I fully admit that, even when we account for the first-of-May to Labor Day weekend period being a whole week longer in 2026 than in 2025 because of a relatively late Labor Day (September 7 rather than September 1) by limiting ourselves to the 123-day, first-to-eighteenth weekend between that May start of the season and the last weekend beginning in August, there is a significant gap in the gross between one season and the other. Specifically 2026 came away with a healthy extra near-billion dollars ($4.58 billion versus the prior year's $3.6 billion) between the first May weekend, and the last weekend beginning in August. The problem with making so much of this as the commentariat is doing is that this was a matter of the late summer season having a boost from two immense outliers of a kind one ordinarily can't count on in a single movie season, or single year, as a close reading of the figures shows. Between the first weekend of the summer at the start of May, and the week immediately preceding the third weekend of July, the 2025 and 2026 seasons were nearly tied--2026 merely matching the lousy equivalent stretch of 2025 in real terms, with $2.56 billion in the till, versus the prior year's $2.45 billion, the 4 percent advantage all but wiped out by the near 4 (3.5) percent inflation of the prior twelve month period. Admittedly when we look at the monthly figures we see that 2026 did have a better May, and a better June, than 2025 did, but, reflecting the way that films like the new Star Wars movie and Masters of the Universe movie disappointed badly, they were not so much better that the weak early-to-mid July period, in which the "underperformance" of Supergirl, the live-action remake of Moana and the latest Minions sufficed to even things out. It was only when The Odyssey came along in that third weekend of the month, and Spider-Man arrived in its last, that business picked up--with those two movies accounting for virtually all the increased business, accounting as the two of them did for three-quarters of the total box office receipts of the period.

Approaching the matter another way consider the top ten films of the two seasons. The top ten films of the summer of 2025 together grossed $2.49 billion; in 2026 $3.22 billion at the point in time discussed here; making for a rough $730 million gap. However, in 2025 the two top earners took in some $780 million, but in 2026 about $1.46 billion, a $680 million difference coming to over 93 percent of the gap. Remove them from the picture and the next eight films in line each collectively made about the same amount of money, with the advantage of the films of 2026 so slight (just $1.764 billion as against $1.717 billion) that, again, the gross in 2026 turns out to have actually run a little behind that of 2025 when we adjust for inflation. Once more, considering the matter this way shows that those top two films, The Odyssey and Spider-Man, made all the difference.

In the way that in 2026 two late July releases saved a flagging box office those who can think more than one year back will also remember 2023, when once more a weak summer season in which franchise film after franchise film underperformed two late July releases--a dark, adult, R-rated Christopher Nolan film that somehow made unlikely blockbuster material a popular hit (remember Oppenheimer?), and a lighter, brightly colored, PG-13 film that made even more money--came to the box office's rescue. One may see an echo of 2024 as well in the late July release of a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film that people really wanted to see coming to the rescue of that less than stellar summer season (Deadpool & Wolverine). And taking all four years together one, again, sees that however much the biggest hits may make as much money as ever they did, they also underline the fact that this is not a matter of any broad-based resurgence of film performance, or the moviegoing that would enable it, but of the kind of rare events that cannot be reliably manufactured and thus counted upon coming together in a rare close proximity and giving a sagging box office a lift.

Once again: due to changes in habits wrought by hard times from the "Great Recession" forward, the escalation of the small screen's competition with the big by streaming, and the lingering disruptions of a mass-killing, mass-disabling, still-ongoing pandemic that the media are exceedingly eager for everyone to forget (maybe that theater you used to go to isn't around anymore, and there isn't another anywhere near so convenient close by), people go to the movies less than they used to--per capita ticket sales in North America two a year rather than the three to four a year they had been before the pandemic. As this greater reticence about the proverbial night at the movies suggests, people are choosier filmgoers, passing on many a movie that just a few years ago they would have casually gone to see--with big-budget franchise films that depended on sucking in more casual viewers to hit their highs in particular suffering. The result is a smaller market with tighter competition, such that if you want the public to devote one of their (again, we are averaging) two trips to the theater this year to your film you had better make something that excites them in a Gotta See It Now way. This doesn't have to mean high art or great innovation (certainly It Ends With Us wasn't, certainly the video game-based hits of recent years haven't been), or even rule out more classically blockbuster-type franchise films of the superhero or any other type (Spider-Man, again, was a case of a franchise film that did excite them), but it does mean that Hollywood will do a lot better targeting its hits in line with the detectable existence of genuine public enthusiasm (and keeping a close watch on the bottom line as they do so) than cranking out high-cost franchise films nobody asked for in the expectation that "everyone" will show up and then WHINING WHEN THEY DON'T (as the difference between, for example, Brand New Day and the profoundly ill-conceived $200 million rendition of He-Man we just got shows).

Of course, that is not the narrative the Hollywood executives want promulgated, and which their courtiers in the entertainment press are promulgating, as instead they cling pathetically to the delusion that the market is "recovering" to what it had been before the pandemic, an euphemism for the studios being able to go back to assembly-line production of crapola the way Bob Iger's Disney exemplified in the days before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, as they scrape the bottom of the barrel for any old thing they can remake, reboot, spin-off, sequel, prequel. Thus does it seem that we can now look forward to a ready-to-retire Tom Cruise in yet another retread of a movie from the days when he specialized in playing the arrogant young jackass, Days of Thunder, Part 2--my two cents on which notion you can of course read here.

The Word "Smart": A Few Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

The usage of the word "smart" has long seemed to me unsatisfactory as a descriptor of the powers of an individual human mind. If "smart" seems to be defined in the dictionaries I have checked as a synonym for "intelligent," people seem to use it rather less precisely than they do "intelligence" and its derivatives, often also using it to refer to "knowledge" or "skills"--obviously a different matter than "intelligence." Even the most intelligent person, after all, does not know what they have not learned. One may imagine that they would, all other things being equal, learn the knowledge or skill at issue more quickly and master it more fully if given the chance than someone who is less "intelligent," but the point is that not given the chance they simply do not have that knowledge or those skills. They are no less intelligent for that. But they may be considered less "smart" for that, a view which bespeaks considerable muddle regarding the concept of "smartness" generally, which seems to me to be compounded by the lower-level muddle characteristic of our speaking of those things which make up "smartness." (Consider our debates about "generative artificial intelligence," and the skeptic's charge that all it does is gather material from its surroundings and slice and dice and recombine it to give us what it does. Are we really so sure that this isn't exactly what humans do when they "create?")

Making matters worse is the way in which intelligence and smartness and the rest, quite frankly, for all the pretenses of modernity and science, of standardized testing and technocracy, is generally understood by the layperson in those terms Thorstein Veblen would have characterized as barbaric--as a matter of personal prowess and force, with reference to said prowess, said force, supposed to explain everything else. The imprecision, and invidiousness, of the use of the word "smart" in particular are all too consistent with this, and consistent too with what is inseparable from all of them, the constant, strident, use of claims to superior intelligence as a justification for inequality--in our time extreme, ever-increasing, ever-more brutal inequality favoring an elite second to none in all of human history for its stupidity, viciousness, gracelessness. Altogether that muddle and barbarism, that conformism and meanness, make the use of the word "smart," like so much else, all too redolent of exploitation of the the stupid person's grasp of the concept of intelligence for the vicious ends of those intent on upholding the status quo in our time.

The Intellectual Faces a Totalitarian State

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

The writings Victor Klemperer produced during his time under the Third Reich would seem to today be unjustly, and not at all innocently, neglected. Still, those who do remember them recall them as a portrait of life in Nazi Germany such as few had, the perspective of a German Jew who, because of various personal circumstances, if deprived of his home, job and career, forced to wear a yellow star, perform forced labor in a factory and live in segregated quarters while subject to controls, harassment and abuse of many kinds did not leave the country, go into Anne Frank-style hiding, or put into a concentration camp but rather, and accordingly had a chance to observe "ordinary" German life in Dresden until the city's aerial destruction, and then outside it all the way down to V-E Day. Keeping a diary through it all (I Will Bear Witness), he also, reflecting a sensitivity to language such as all too few members of his profession (professor of language and literature) have, he recorded along with his experiences numerous observations of and reflections on the evolution--or rather, devolution--of the German language as seen in official usage and everyday life under Nazi rule.

Of course, in doing so Klemperer wrote of the saturation of the German language with nationalistic, racist, Anti-Semitic, militaristic reference and evocation. More subtly he remarked the tendency of the Nazis, for all their reactionary romanticism of the past, and their idealization of soil, tradition, the rural world, to technological language consistent with a vision of the country as a great machine under their control. More subtle still was perhaps the most striking theme of his analysis, the way in which the Third Reich's language endeavored to stultify the critical faculties, and in doing a thorough job of that, stultify the intellect more generally. Hence the Nazi exaltation of the physical over the mental, and feeling over thinking, not least in its redefinition of heroism. As Klemperer observes the Nazis seemed to cast aside the idea of the hero as someone who did something for others in their fixation on remarkable physical deeds, a tendency exemplified for him by their cult of sports and the sports hero, and especially the race car driver--hardly an image of self-sacrifice for a common good! It was evident, too, in their exaltation of "faith," a word Klemperer seems to have got really sick of hearing, especially given that the faith so many spoke of was faith in the Fuhrer (the faith in whom really could seem religious given Hitler's quasi-secular deliberate imitation of the language, rituals, symbols, archetypes of the Christian faith to exploit the religious feeling of the believing part of the German public on behalf of the party, its state, its ideology, its causes), while they made "fanaticism" into a virtue, evident not just in the propensity for physicality over intellect and faith over cognition, but also the propensity for bombastic language, characterized by superlatives, evident in how every deed of the Leader was "historic"; by an obsession with "breaking records"; by a penchant for little-understood foreign words that impress the ignorant more than their entirely adequate, well-understood native equivalents ever could have.

Klemperer was also highly sensitive to how even the critically-minded, immersed in the toxic atmosphere created by this corruption of the language, the culture, could find themselves touched by its insidious influence. While it is a cliché of anti-intellectualism that the intellectual lives "in an ivory tower," or "up in the clouds," Klemperer tells us that in fact "a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people," with all the vulnerability that goes with that. In spite of his "awareness of being lied to," and his "critical attentiveness," he knows that "at some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all."

As one whom life disabused of many a foolish illusion, he saw all too clearly that intellectual life and the broader public need each other--a lesson those who see any positive role for the life of the mind would do well to heed. Say what one will, those whose principal talent, task, contribution to society is in thinking can hardly make that contribution very well for very long without the interest and support from those who are not intellectuals of the same type themselves, or even intellectuals in any conventional sense, but can nonetheless appreciate what they do--all as that in turn means that the intellectual has a duty to society more broadly, not least in helping others see and understand the world around them. Alas, it is a lesson that the enemies of both intellectuals and the general public have heeded better than they, doing all they can to alienate intellectuals and the general public from each other, with one obvious result in a society where those who actually hold power persuade much of the public that the elite consists not of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, of Big Oil and Big Media, of the health care-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the tech-industrial complex, of billionaires and their Beltway fixers and the Yes-I-Knew-Jeffrey-Epstein-But-I-Had-No-Idea-What-All-Those-Girls-Were-Doing-There-Honest club, but college professors barely making ends meet, or simply people who whatever their occupation happen to "like books"--and at the same time convincing the professors that the working people with whom they have so much more in common than is generally acknowledged are a pack of Know-Nothing hardhats whose instincts naturally put them on the side of their persecutors, such that the intellectuals' warnings about the danger to them both go ignored, and the isolated intellectual themselves all too often succumbs to the lies of the powerful.

Why Do They Ignore Victor Klemperer?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

Readers of a certain generation may remember the actor Werner Klemperer, best known for playing Colonel Klink in the classic sitcom Hogan's Heroes. As it happened Klemperer (as is so often the case with those who have much opportunity for an artistic career) came from a prominent family, in this case not one of businessmen or politicians but artists and intellectuals. Werner's father was the conductor of the storied Kroll Opera House in Berlin until it was closed down in the Depression--after which persecution by the Nazis drove him out of the country, ultimately as far as Los Angeles, where he became the head conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his son Werner found his way to the Pasadena Playhouse and Hollywood. However, the Klemperers still had relatives back in the old country, among them Professor of Romance languages at Dresden Technical University Victor Klemperer.

If in a very different way from Werner Victor is a noteworthy figure in his own right far outside even his specialty of French literature because of the diaries he kept in Germany during the war, and because of what grew out of it, his study of how the German language evolved--or, as I would think he would have had it, devolved--under Nazi rule, The Language of the Third Reich, which has an historical interest for those at all interested in Nazi Germany. Yet Klemperer today seems little known, in the United States at least. Why is that?

One can very easily chalk it up to the relative insulation of the United States from foreign authors and their works--as well as those relatively few authors and works that are "granted admission." A Max Weber or Sigmund Freud, a Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt, a Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich von Hayek, a Jacques Derrida or a Michel Foucault, were all highly serviceable to the needs of political orthodoxy in their ways, and above all Anti-Communism and the Cold War (the more easily given how many of them were ardent Cold Warriors). By contrast Klemperer was a citizen of a Communist country, and not some persecuted dissident of the kind America thought-leaders hasten to lionize but one in good standing with his government, who analyzed the Third Reich in ways that hit all too close to home not just for Nazis but for the right broadly, such that his person and ideas were doubly unwelcome.

As if all this were not enough Klemperer's attitudes toward the matter of ethnicity worked against his enjoying their favor. Klemperer was a universalist, who believed in a common humanity, and the individualism that only a common humanity allows. The more in as Klemperer was personally made to suffer so much at the hands of the believers in Race, he despised the "partial, bigoted . . . perverted form of romanticism" so dear to nationalists of so many kinds--all as, perhaps not unfittingly for a philologist, he thought that where culture was concerned "Language is more than blood." Indeed, if born a rabbi's son he was baptized as a Protestant decades before Hitler, and married to a gentile--a believer in assimilation who assimilated, and considered himself a German because he was a German, so much so that even as relatives like his cousins left he could not bear to leave his homeland, and went on regarding himself as a German through the Third Reich, and its Holocaust, and afterward, when he decided to return to the university he had taught at before, not just in Germany but the same German city where he had so long made his home.

Alas, in America, as Susan Glenn has shown, universalists like Klemperer ended up on the losing side of a "cultural Cold War" with the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, who held the idea of assimilation in contempt. Held that it is arrogant and foolish presumption to ever imagine that one could, or even should, define themselves rather than accept the definition imposed on them by birth, family, community, society, and even--perhaps most of all--those who would oppress them as, simultaneously despairing, bitter, prideful they insisted "They won't accept us, ever, and even if they would accept us to join them would be a sacrifice of our souls, a betrayal of ourselves"--because of that belief in roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness, thinking that this is "Who we are" and that without it we are nothing. And, having not the slightest sympathy, empathy, respect or even understanding of why anyone should think otherwise (the suffocation of the ethnic ghetto and chafing at the marginalization that goes with being outside the mainstream, a desire for a wider and freer life, the attractions of reason and universality and humanity, all nothing to them), they insist that anyone who thinks differently from the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers et. al. is less than human, or more often, simply a pathetic, deluded, likely self-hating creature who, unless he is saved by a return to the fold will see their life end in tragedy one way or another.

Of course, the universalists lost and the partisans of roots won that culture war no later than the 1970s, giving America its present-day politics of identity, multiculturalism and the rest demanding that people define themselves not merely by the ethnic community they were born into but by ancestors of whose lifeways they know little and which have lost all relevance to the world as "Who they are," define themselves as those who would persecute and oppress them define them rather than resisting, and indeed that those who have strayed from the tribe even think of their persecutor and oppressor as actually having given them a gift for which they ought to be grateful by forcing them to "rediscover their roots" and "embrace their heritage" and return to the faith of their fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, the fold, in that hackneyed drama so--to use a word Klemperer would approve--kitschily reenacted so many times in our era's memoir and fiction, with all that means for Klemperer's self-identification, and his larger understanding of these matters. (Indeed, in reviewing Klemperer's diary for the New York Times Richard Bernstein is every bit as graceless toward Klemperer on this score as one would expect a scribbler for that rag to be.) The irony in the unhappy situation is that this cult of roots that has contributed to the marginalization of Klemperer's work and insights is yet another reason why they are so thought-provoking--and I dare say, such a broad, humane, perspective a badly needed corrective in a world where so many have gone mad (or simply stupid) with their idolatry of the dark gods of Identity.

Theodore Dreiser and the "Crisis of Masculinity"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

I recently had something to say of the alleged "crisis of masculinity"--the moral panic evident among both the cultural "traditionalists" and the anti-traditionalist "woke," that young men are either unable or unwilling to follow the "script" for their lives that society conventionally, traditionally, set out for them.

My take on the matter is that the claim that there is a crisis of masculinity is obtuse, reactionary, dishonest and self-serving. Simply put, society makes onerous demands of its members, with the ones at issue here the young. Given how the costs of compliance with those demands seems to be ever rising, the rewards of compliance falling as they grow less certain, more remote, smaller, those of whom the demand is being made are more resistant to the demands than before, and while being more resistant perhaps more questioning of the demands than before. Yes, changes in "gender norms" are part of this. (That women are expected to bear traditionally male demands at work, etc., while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for the home and child-rearing; that men are expected to share significantly, even equally, in those traditionally female burdens, while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for being the household's bread-winner, all as he must resign himself to his home not being his castle, and his spouse not being a supportive wife as he is instead expected to be supportive of her as she makes her own journey through life while juggling all of the aforementioned responsibilities, etc., etc., etc.; inclines both men and women to feel like they are getting a raw deal.) But the narrowly gender-based side of the issue is far from being the whole story. That we have seen a collapse in the real purchasing power of working people's incomes is far from irrelevant to the situation, greatly compounding the stress all of them are under, and making "the deal" that much less attractive, however much the idiots pouring gasoline on the fires of kulturkampf from both sides would like to not notice it. (Like marriage and family the "home ownership" conventionally regarded as a prerequisite for "responsible" establishment of a household today means a mortgage far beyond their means on a money pit designed to be worthless before the mortgage is up for the dubious privilege of living under the thumb of a Home Ownership Association or condo board that will make them feel like less an owner than a tenant or even a squatter, as the political string-pulling vultures of private equity circle over their heads in an arrangement giving them all the "personal responsibility" of home ownership without any of the benefits--such that only an idiot would not have misgivings.)

As one might guess the resistance to the demands in question is not the new thing either side makes it out to be, quite naturally given, again, the demands' onerousness, with Theodore Dreiser's nonfiction reminding me of that. As he explains with great frankness, as a young man he had no desire whatsoever to join the Rat Race, to push and strive to "get ahead" as society demanded. Especially as a young man Dreiser seemed to feel there was something wrong with him for his shrinking from the struggle and hardship and cares of the conventional path--a view that Authority, of course, encouraged, insisting that any healthy young man ought to be eager-beaver to throw themselves into the fray, stupidly, irrationally convinced that they will be the one donkey in the five thousand to get the carrot in that way morons valorize as "confidence." But if perhaps feeling all this more sharply than others as a young man who was exceptionally intelligent, sensitive and intellectual, while at the same time distinctly lacking the social advantages of many of his peers, there was nothing unusual about the sentiments themselves, this indeed the norm among those whom, as Stendhal observed long before Dreiser came into this world, had their youths spoiled by the burden of settling on and starting in a career due to their not having been born rich (as Dreiser so much wished he had been). At the same time, while young Dreiser was certainly (very) interested in women he had no particular desire for marriage and a family--and indeed explicitly challenged the "natalist" view in his writings.

Of course, few read Dreiser these days. But what Dreiser thought others also think in a world that, due to society's miserable failure to address the problems so glaringly evident to Dreiser and those who heeded him in the twentieth century, is still dealing with the same problems ta century on, such that individual young people, faced with the "scam" or "racket" of adulthood more often fail to achieve it, or simply decline it. Authority is horrified but, as usual, lacks any intelligent answer to the discontents before it, leaving us at the present impasse so many misrepresent as a "crisis of masculinity."

The Wordsmith and the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

Those of us who have been writing and putting out our work online by way of blogs, self-published books and other such material have been watching the return on effort invested get worse for a long, long time. For the blogger, and self-published author, the situation circa 2010 was far from great, indeed by any reasonable standard depressing--and what kept many going was the hope that things would get better. However, as I can say with the hindsight of a decade and a half it was actually as good as they ever got. Since then the chances of "discovery" by people actually ready to do a bit of reading, who if they like what they see might possibly share it with others who might look at it, has plummeted. Some of this was a matter of the way the web just went on getting more crowded (with the onslaught of AI slop not helping). But much of it was also the way in which the grifting scum of Big Tech and assorted, equally vile, vested interests of similar type, from search engine algorithm changes designed to force you to look at more advertising by deliberately making it harder for you to find what you want, to publishers making war on the e-book, to the Establishment war on alternative media in the name of fighting "fake news" as they sought to make sure that unapproved "realfacts" never undermined the credulity of the public in their "goodfacts," fought an exterminationist war against anything and everything that would democratize the means of communication.

Those prone to soften the facts into the "optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view" offered the frustrated writer false reassurances that quality work would surely find its way to an audience come what may, and enjoinments to adapt to the new milieu. Thus those who wanted to share an opinion online were directed to, rather than hoping to be discovered, go where the people were--in Reddit fora and on X and so on--and speak their opinions there; to if they had something to say about a book, say it in the Customer Reviews section of a book retailer's site. Or better still, say what they had to say in a video on YouTube.

Of course, to abandon one's own blog in favor of Reddit or Customer Reviews meant that rather than a writer having their little corner of the web they were expected to have their say in some Big Tech fora policed by corporate enforcers; to trade their essay-writing for trying to start conversations with strangers all too likely to prove to be rancorous or even bullying idiots given that this is who you so often meet should you talk to strangers online; to give up the hope of a living from their writing that a little corner of the web represented to many an author to creating content, and value, for those Big Tech companies that would reap the profit instead. At its most light-minded it is "Let them eat cake," and where more knowing, a call to cheerfully acquiesce in the ruin of small producers as the Big drive everyone else to the wall.

If anything the enjoinment to give up the written word altogether in favor of becoming video producers is worse. After all, never mind the higher resource outlay required, or the plain and simple fact that many a person comfortable with blogging would be uncomfortable speaking in front of a camera, what could be said in the first medium could as easily be said in another (you try turning a dense two thousand word essay into a video)--for what little it would have been worth given the finiteness of the audience they would now be trying so much harder to chase. (Even those who are barely numerate should be able to see that turning six hundred millions blogs into six hundred million vlogs will see the vast, vast majority of would-be Youtube stars end up with absolutely nothing for their trouble as the ranks of vloggers explode in a world where there is no more demand for their offering than there was before.)

It would have been much less like the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view, but much more honest and intelligent for these purveyors of advice to tell the writers in question that in today's web there was just that much less room for what they had to offer; that this was a systemic matter that in their case left the individual with a paucity of good options, the way systemic changes so consistently do in our time; and that this was the proper starting point for anyone asking the old question "What is to be done?"

Of Discovery and Digital Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

That an item presented without the backing of a major platform or promotional budget could be discovered, and by engaging the interest of readers online who share it with others, enabling it to come to wider attention--in the most extreme form of this, "go viral"--was ultimately the foundation of those hopes that the Internet would enable a democratization of the means of communication in any degree by giving those with nothing but their ideas, their words, their passions, their art, a chance to reach an audience on their own merits.

Of course Big Tech, Big Media and the political Establishment have warred against any such democratization from the very beginning. Of course, it is the case that their deliberate efforts were not the only thing that stood in the way of such online democracy. The mere crowding of the web over time, a process exacerbated by the proliferation of AI slop, was not intended to cut off the small web user's chance of discovery, just made it less likely in an incidental way. The shift of the web from lower-resource text to higher-resource audiovisual content has played a part was similarly incidental. Even the chokepoint capitalism of Big Tech that has seen it make visibility another commodity, and rig its algorithms to keep users on their crappy platforms by elevating some at the expense of everyone else, has been first and foremost about making money for their obscenely overvalued monopolies, rather than pushing bloggers to the wall. Nevertheless it has, alongside more deliberate efforts like the favoritism shown "brands" by Internet search, and the highly politicized campaigns against so-called "fake news," played a massive part in bringing the Internet closer to its Maximum Era--with the fact that so many powerful actors have a stake in the broad outcome diminishing any concern for the role they have played, and helping to eliminate any concern whatsoever for online democracy and the small-timers who set such hopes by it from The Discourse.

Today with that Maximum Era upon us, and indeed to go by the signs of collapsing Internet traffic for those small-timers the Great Internet Die-Off underway--it is in the nature of such a Die-Off that we wouldn't notice what was disappearing, because our noticing it had been foreclosed in advance, just as with the extinction of species the scientists never had a chance to catalog--the outcome may not be surprising. The hope that some technological change would largely suffice to bring "power to the people" has been raised again and again in modern times--and again and again disappointed as, within a society where power is highly centralized and exercised in authoritarian fashion, the latest technologies much more often tending to serve their purposes than to undermine them. (Consider how George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola sank much of their fortunes into the expectation that the means had arrived with which to take movie making away from the big bad studios and put it in the hands of the artists .) Still, that it has happened before, that there was reason to be skeptical, does not make the disappointment of the hope any less painful--all as it seems well to remember that in this case the promise of democratization was in itself an instrument of that centralized power, and indeed the "cyber-utopianism" of which we saw so much in the 1990s really just another flavor of the "market populism" that had the fascists of Silicon Valley pretending to all the world to be hippie flower children who just want to make the world a better place. Too few seem to recall that in this time in which it can seem the robber barons of Silicon Valley had never pretended to be anything but a bunch of swaggering Nazis--and those corporations inclined to do so went in for Market Populism 2.0 in the form of the Woke Capitalism that, reflecting the intellectual muddle of our times, the right was much more inclined to bring to the attention of the mainstream, as, as much as ever, the left was prevented from saying the obvious by its exclusion from the public square in that way that respectable opinion, without the slightest alertness to the hypocrisy and the irony involved, calls "free speech."

The Politics of Internet Audiovisualization

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

There seems no denying that the web has become much less text-based and much more audiovisually-based where the "content" published and consumed are concerned. This does not seem to me to be a neutral development, certainly where the ability of a few to control what we see online, and thereby influence the discourse broadly, is concerned. Quite the contrary, it makes a technology that it has made a technology that was always more centralized, elitist, even authoritarian from the start than cyber-utopian propagandists ever let on more so, with two factors especially relevant.

One is that the old text-based Internet permitted greater accessibility, and deeper, more critically-minded interaction, in various ways. Certainly it seems to me that, where the resources required are concerned, far more people are able to produce a passable 1,000-word post and put it up on a page than produce a passable video conveying the same content (or any content). It was also the case that the experience of reading text was more conducive to attentiveness toward and parsing of the content than the experience of listening to someone speak in a video intrinsically less susceptible to preview, to "close reading," etc.. By the same token the audience were more inclined to reply, and reply thoughtfully, with a worked-out written response expressing their thinking. The result is that if, as Jen Schradie had it, the Internet was always a better tool of broadcast than of dialogue there was still more room for the latter than there would later be when the written word had to compete so much with the moving image, the audiovisual orientation raising the costs of participation in a way shutting out many, and reducing the scope for interactivity as Internet usage becomes still more a broadcasting medium.

At the same time there is the reality that if there are many forms of rhetorical appeal those who have sought to appeal to an audience's reason have found themselves more reliant on the word than the image--whereas those who have deliberately looked to bypass or overwhelm the rational faculties have historically found in the image the better tool. After all, if a picture may be worth a thousand words in cases, in many a case a thousand words can tell a person a great many things that no plausible number of images can convey--images most effective when the purpose is conveying a simple, already known and understood message forcefully, rather than introducing us to a new message, and still less, helping us make sense of the complex phenomena around us. Accordingly a technological context in which the image is so much in the ascendant over the word would seem to reshape Internet culture in favor of those who place their trust in bypassing rational thinking with images in favor of the elitist and authoritarian as against the egalitarian and democratic, with all that implies for the discourse at large.

The Politics of the Internet We Have: Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

Analysts of our online life such as Jen Schradie have found that, contrary to the expectations promulgated by the cyber-utopians, it has not been the case that the marginalized found in the Internet a leveler in the political battles they fight where they can make their voices heard. Quite the contrary, the Internet has worked for the privileged, the established, the powerful, for many reasons. To name just those that I have found most compelling, there is the extent to which the Internet has proven more conducive to broadcasting simple messages than the conveyance of complex ideas or nuanced conversations; its gatekeeping by big corporations, with their profit and associated motives; the microeconomics of getting anything actually looked at online favoring the well-resourced financially; the continued importance of legacy media in bringing attention to what is actually is to be found online, with its own biases in favor of the powerful; and the reality that the requirements of significant participation in online life, especially going beyond the most utilitarian tasks (doing your shopping, paying your bills, etc.) or simplest entertainments (streaming a TV show) to actively getting involved in political discussions favors those who are privileged in many ways. (They have more of the disposable time and energy such a situation requires; they feel safer expressing an opinion in public than do those who are socially disadvantaged, or have dissenting views, with all that means for what Internet users will be more likely to ignore, what they will be likely to share, certainly the more after seeing so much retaliation from employers , government authorities and others who didn't like their online activity.) And indeed, it seems possible that all of these factors, which have accrued to the advantage of the right, have aided them meaningfully in their run of political victories through the twenty-first century--their success online a factor in their success in political life broadly.

Of course, all that said one may say "That was in the past, but what about now?" For my part I do not see any of those factors becoming less important, but rather their becoming more so. Certainly the way our online life has evolved has made it less plausible that anything will be "discovered" online, and that much more important that anyone who wants their message noticed put in the time and money to make it visible to people. (Have I not been writing of the looming Maximum Era for the web for quite some time now?) Certainly those who have long gatekept the web have only got more aggressive about that, both in their own financial interest as enshittification itself holds Internet attention-seekers to ransom, and their increasing inclination to display the rightist biases that are the norm for Big Business and the wealthy--and perhaps the particular right-wing inclinations of Silicon Valley as well, certainly to go by the conduct of Musk in regard to X, the Ellison family in regard to its holdings, etc..

Meanwhile other recent developments in our online life would seem to reinforce that trend. There is the way in which the Internet is becoming less text-oriented, and more audiovisually-oriented, which means getting a message that people will be receptive to is costlier (video is more resource-intensive than text), while arguably also being less conducive to dialogue, and thus making the Internet that much more a broadcast medium. There is also the way in which rather than digging for information themselves people are turning to answer engines--with the result less contact and support for any source of information, to the particular disadvantage of smaller, alternative media-type sources as against the big operations, but also with the result their getting what answer engines tend to offer, the Establishment answer to any question, with all that is likely to mean, as their abilities to seek out anything else atrophy for lack of exercise, more generally translating to an audience more disposed to simply believe what Authority tells it. All these developments not yet advanced anywhere near so far as they eventually might get to be, those hoping for a more egalitarian Internet where the marginalized, the progressive, etc. have a voice would be very, very wrong to be complacent about these developments--the more in as the Internet has played its part in the unmitigated string of disappointments and disasters the twenty-first century has been for them to date.

The Way We Live (Online) Now

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

From the start the web had an exceedingly high ratio of would-be speakers to would-be audience--on social media at times, seemingly approaching one to one. The result was that the competition for web user's attention was so extreme as to call into question the meaningfulness of the concept of competition itself--the more in as what went on did not take place on anything resembling a level playing field, since visibility was purchasable, legacy media attention critical, and appeal to the privileged indispensable from the outset. However, the monopolization of online search, and the channeling of a very large part of online traffic through social media's platforms; the gatekeepers' increasing treatment of "non-brand" online "content" as a disgusting piece of schmitt ("the cesspool"); said gatekeepers' taking on the Ministry of Truth function of weeding out search results that might get in the way of Authority's "goodfacts"; their grubbing after ad-dollars on the basis of not taking users to what they are looking for; the advent of "answer engines" that search the web "so that you don't have to"; the way sites "defend" themselves against those engines' searches and artificial intelligence generally in ways that also made them less searchable by humans; the paywall fetishism and general copyright Nazism; the "algorithm changes" knocking small-timers down from their hard-earned places in the search rankings again and again with each quarter and then penalizing them again and again for their losing traffic; the explosion in the volume of "AI slop" online, against which everything made by everybody has to compete; the discouragement of the old-fashioned web user by the increasingly disgusting character of the experience, with all that has meant for the willingness to really search for what they want; among much, much else; have all but killed the chances of those gambling on the web letting them reach an audience through the magic of "discovery" and whatever grain of truth there ever was in the myth of "virality" that were ever the ordinary person's ONLY chance in the game, and sine qua non of any democratization of the means of communication. And that, of course, is before we look at the ways the war on the e-book, the audiovisualization of online life, the ever more thoroughgoing enshittification of blog syndication platforms, the growing brazenness of the Roderick Spodes of Silicon Valley about using their platforms to push their disgusting politics, made life tougher still for some (the self-published book author, those simply not willing to swap their blog for a vlog whether low-resourced or camera-shy or just really word-oriented, those whose interests are "niche" and intellectual rather than lowest-common denominator generally, and yes, the politically progressive, getting the worst of the situation yet again).

Indeed, I cannot think of a single development in the relevant decades that offered all these web users any help whatsoever, the Web Gods relentlessly closing doors without ever opening any windows en route to the Internet's Maximum Era. Yet even with all this having happened any blogger, etc. asking "Why don't I have an audience?"--for instance, to one of those answer engines--will not hear about these things. Instead those they find online will tell them that they must be doing everything wrong. They should have laid out the money for a fancier web site, and search optimization, and paid guest bloggers, and advertising--never mind whether any of this would really have been likely to bring a return, especially in a situation of declining prospects for everyone at the very game they are playing. Consistent with that pattern of victim-blaming and general gas-lighting that in America is called "optimism" and having a "good attitude" and commending which is the foundation of the racket we call "self-help," they pass off systemic failings as individual ones, while in that pitching of services whose sellers will get their money regardless of whether the would-be star makes any money or not from their use (as they will almost surely fail to do) turning a buck on their futile striving.

However, factoring into this there is also the way in which elites are invested in a particular view of "tech," for so long the great hope of neoliberal capitalism, whether its actual performance (their hopes for which would seem represented by the idiocies of the AI bubble), or simply its legitimation. Regarding that said elites can seem stuck in the market populism-hawking '90s, oblivious to how if Silicon Valley ever really represented something more hopeful to those less than in love with actually existing capitalism, something freer and more democratic and uplifting--not least, in its democratizing the means of communication--it has for many come to represent all that is most loathsome in it. No reasonable person denies that the Internet is a hugely important utility that has brought a great many benefits to the world (just picture yourself getting through the period when people weren't pretending there wasn't a pandemic without it), but it also seems that no reasonable person would deny that the terms on which we have got it have, on the evidence to date, also made it a far more useful tool for oppression than liberation as, besides its well-known combination of cyber-gangster's paradise with Orwellian surveillance nightmare that has left the great majority of the public as unprotected as it is bound, it has been an instrument of Orwellian social and political control as well. And far from this having been the "There Is No Alternative" inevitability apologists for and admirers of the status quo and its injustice, misery and brutality so constantly hasten to tell us it is, the fact remaining that, contrary to the stupid libertarian lie the ever downward-punching Establishment press repeats a thousand times before anyone else can get a word in, the "tech entrepreneurs" endlessly marketed to the public as latterday culture heroes TO WHOM THEY ARE INFERIOR actually made their obscene fortunes not by inventing anything, but, as an elementary grasp of economic history and theory shows to be far more likely, by sociopathically enshittifying what an earlier generation had invented not with the "venture capital" of businessmen who risked all to win all, but government-directed taxpayer dollars in a triumph not of the "INNOVATION!" unleashed by the market but of corporate welfare, monopoly power, rent-seeking and the general financialization/bullshitization of our economic life that Big Tech did so much to lead, with the unfortunate outcome to be seen all around us, online and everywhere else.

Literature in the Age of the World State

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

In writing his "future history" of the world in The Shape of Things to Come H.G. Wells told of the movement of humanity from the failing Modernity he saw all around him in the middle of the "Thirty Years' Crisis" of 1914-1945 to the more flourishing, peaceful, saner world of the early twenty-second century--the shift from the wreck of capitalism and the states system and "traditional" culture with its superstition, tribalism, selfish striving and the rest to a world united under a rational, scientific, global government using the world's resources for the good of all. In telling the tale he did not neglect the development of culture, and especially of literature--with the scattered remarks together comprising a story consistent with the development of society at large (and his ideas about it).

As it happened, H.G. Wells saw some of the literature of his time as having its interest--favorably citing such works as Erich Kästner's Fabian and Hans Fallada 's Little Man, What Now? as "vivid and illuminating" portraits of their time still readable for their historical (and perhaps other) interest two centuries on. However, his view of the avant garde literature of his day was certainly unfavorable, the world of literature and art seeming to him as decadent as the economic and social system in which its producers lived. The more in as they pandered to the sentiment of an essentially privileged and conservative readership, they became increasingly hostile to modernity, science, technology, reason, progress, indeed the view that "there IS such a thing as society" (or noticing these things, acknowledged them only to condemn them as Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World, as he regarded George Bernard Shaw to be doing in Back to Methusaleh) as they retreated into a "bitter and peculiar Bohemia." In the process they also became prone to be "elaborately stylistic and 'rare'"; and "brutally smutty" as, bespeaking a desire for escape "from the immense demands" of civilization's failure and need for radical social, economic, political change they made "a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life" instead, reflected in a vast amount of pornography that could be "solemn . . . facetious . . . sadistic," even religious, as it wallowed in its own obscenity, what we would today call "edgelordism" the order of the day.

As one might guess the collapse of civilization in the middle of the century, as the Second World War he envisaged (in many ways with uncanny accuracy, in others less so) did not so much end as fizzle out in exhaustion, paving the way for a pandemic that was more murderous than even the wartime machinery of destruction. However, literature did revive with civilization, albeit along different lines, the "style" and the smuttiness a thing of the past, along with the moral simplicities of the earlier era amid the great changes in life attendant upon the struggle of the workers of the World State and all they represented with the remnants of the bad old ways. Thus where the novel--the "bourgeois," "realist" "nineteenth century" novel--conventionally depicted "individual character in a set battle between good and bad in a world of undisputed standards," the novels of Wells' 1980s were "preoccupied with this universal battle of ideas and mental habits in people's minds"—a battle not of "good and bad" but "a wild confusion between two sorts of good and two sorts of bad and of innate character distorted in a thousand ways." If stylistically less striking than the decadent works of the 1930s and 1940s they were psychologically more complex, and certainly far more attentive to the social facts from which that earlier literature retreated, and apparently more accepting of them. At the same time literature became more "adult"--bespeaking a world of people with longer life expectancies spent in better health than in a time when life tended to be shorter, and the years of relative soundness of body and mind still more so, such that people made more of the fleeting years when they were young than people of the World State era did.

Accordingly one could trace the march toward sanity through the development of literature--and the ways in which, at least after the World State's passage through a busybody, "Puritan" phase in which it was censorious of older work, much of that older work lost its affect for a later, saner people. As Wells recounts, much that people enjoyed previously--like the comedic delight in punching down and punching up within a hierarchy, not least as seen in the "queer clowning with insults and repartees," seemed to the people of the twenty-second century "either fatuous or malicious." Likewise the "false stresses . . . unnecessary sacrifices and desperations" of "'romance'" (about which the author cites Paul Hennessey's remark that it was "'essentially the violent and miserable reaction of weak spirits to prohibitions they cannot fairly overcome'") had little meaning for them. One may add that the "edgy" content of the post-war years also had little meaning for them. (As Wells put it, the reader of that later day, if bothering to look at that material, would "find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting," just "comically pretentious and pitifully silly.") For all that it was still the case that they had "popular romancers" writing thrillers about the violent "age of insecurity" between 1945 and the World State's bringing about a healthier order, with the dangers lurking in, of all things, big hotels, with their "secret lifts, passages, ambushes and sinister private rooms" (the era's equivalent of Gothic literature's castles?), while figures like Basil Zaharoff still had their interest for fans of such narratives. All the same, Wells informs us, "admirable biographical studies" were "ousting the old romantic novel from the entertainment of our leisure so soon as our imaginations have passed beyond the purely romantic stage."

Revisiting all this I could not help thinking of Wells' ideas about literature as he expressed them in his contemporaneous Experiment in Autobiography (published just the year after Shape). In particular I thought of how trenchant a critic Wells was of the nineteenth century novel as exemplified by a Henry James, and how his pre-war association with James only emphasized for him what the Jamesian novel could not do with its acceptance of "undisputed standards" in society and preoccupation with "exterior reactions"--with Show, Don't Tell--and what it seemed so important to Wells that the novel could and should do amid a sense of that world-crisis to which he was so much more sensitive than his more celebrated contemporaries, not least depicting the "controversial matter stewing and fermenting in all our brains," "the conflicts and changes of ideas within" them. Indeed, writing of the post-World War I literature with its aversion to modernity, it style, its smuttiness, he seems to have thought that for the time being literature was moving away from rather than toward what he hoped, but thought that it would be relevant to a more progressive period. I also could not help thinking of how a Wells was far from alone in his views--his contemporary and friend Upton Sinclair taking a not dissimilar view in his books considering the history of literature (Mammonart), and literature in his time (Money Writes!), as indeed it could seem to me that Sinclair, like Wells an intellectual titan of his day, endeavored to realize similar ideals. Certainly his novel Jimmie Higgins, about the experiences of a socialist American factory worker during the era of the First World War, seems to me to admirably realize the ideal of a novel attentive to "the conflicts and changes of ideas" within a human brain in an age of upheaval--and it may well be that the affinity has its reflection in Upton Sinclair being one of the few contemporaries of Wells' to get a mention in the book, as the author of a work on the problems of the Soviet Union. It seems significant, too, that he imagines Sinclair Lewis (who actually died in 1961) living until 1990--and cites a letter historians believe to have been by him recounting the aftermath of a bombing raid on Berlin in the Second World War Wells anticipated. By contrast figures like Henry James--or the Modernists who idolized him--get no direct mention even as historical curiosities, while it is an interesting irony that even as Virginia Woolf gets no mention here as even an example of the post-war literature he criticized, her scarcely remembered husband Leonard Woolf does (as the author of a pamphlet on world government).

Of course, history has taken a different course, with Wells today scarcely remembered at all as a writer of Literature (indeed, of anything but the handful of "scientific romances" he produced in the earliest part of his career), and the same also going for the Sinclairs, both Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, as Bernard Shaw has been subject to a similar forgetting that would have likewise buried him were it not for the accident of one of his plays having been the basis of a popular stage and screen musical that, making Shaw safe for popular consumption, can seem to reduce the Social Question to "improving people's English." (Thus does a Disney movie starring a young Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox evoke Pygmalion!) Meanwhile in the English-speaking world, at least, Kästner, Fallada and the German "New Objectivity" with its realism and attentiveness to society of which they were representative seems to be ignored by, if not unknown to, the literary taste-makers. (As is the case with so many of those authors whose interest is greatest from a standpoint like Wells', Fallada entered my ken not through my literary studies, but my readings in the social sciences--in this particular case, C. Wright Mills' mention of him in White Collar.) Instead it is the denizens of the "bitter and peculiar Bohemia" with their reactionary sensibility and elaborate and rare style and smuttiness--the Modernists as we call them, represented by figures like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who championed not a New Objectivity but a New Subjectivity, so to speak--that critics have, for generations now, exalted as the height of literary art as one list of their pronouncements after another reminds us. The respecter of contemporary literary standards may smile at Wells' apparent lack of foresight--just as they may smile reading what Upton Sinclair had to say about literature--but one can just as easily do the opposite, taking the contrast between Wells' vision of where literature would be by the twenty-first century, and where it actually is actually reflective of the failure of the world to address the crisis of his day, and so in this era of polycrisis still struggling with it, not at all promisingly in the view of many. And they might well say the same of our sense of comedy and of romance, our notions of morality and of edginess in this era in which it seems that literature is altogether on the way out (with all that that can seem to imply about the state of culture and society now). They might also think about how the last great boom in fiction as the written word was on its way out centered on tales of youth specifically, the young adult fiction boom that is clearly a decade behind us now.

Do Women Buy Eighty Percent of the Books Sold?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

Honest answer: after much searching, I just don't know.

Here's what I do know, though--that the eighty percent figure has been repeated many times over the past few decades (you can find the very similar claim that women buy 70-80 percent of books in a 1997 New York Times article); and that there seem to be many similar-sounding but really not identical claims about women of some sort buying eighty percent of something of some sort. Thus have I also read that it is specifically college-educated women that buy eighty percent of the books, or that women buy eighty percent of fiction, which are not the same thing (in the first case only a portion of the female population doing the relevant buying, in the latter women buying only a portion of the books, because nonfiction is obviously left out). I have also noticed that unlike the earlier New York Times item many of the more recent claims do not identify the source of their information (with, indeed, an Author's Guild claim about women buying eighty percent of fiction in 2022 offering a now broken link as its source).

At this point I suspect that trying to get to the bottom of this one would require a lot of detective work of the kind that is getting tougher all the time in this age of broken search, paywall fetishism, and often unhelpful answer engines for the meager payoff of finding out that, yes, people have been lazily and sloppily repeating the number for many decades now. Still, there may be something to be said of why this is the case. Certainly there seems the extent to which, just as happens with all other kinds of information, a great many people do indeed misuse and abuse statistical data, often without even having sufficient understanding of it to know that they are doing so, with this easy to imagine here.

This is all the easier to picture given the extreme scarcity of information about publishing. If Hollywood is far from being open about its finances, as the Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament reminds us every year with what it gets right and what it gets wrong and what just looks dodgy in it, you can make a much better guess about what people are watching from the box office report than what they are reading from the bestseller list. This arguably reflects the fact that with films, especially theatrically released features, we are talking about a more limited and manageable offering of "content," but frankly it also reflects there being rather less interest among the media in book sales, the more in as our culture is so much more audiovisual and so much less word-centered than it used to be, with this leaving the analyst reliant on what few scraps of information seem to them to have any credibility whatsoever for lack of better.

However, it seems that alongside the sloppiness of many people's use of statistics, and the relatively limited reportage on the book industry as compared with film, there is the matter of why the scrap in question should seem so credible--why people so readily accept the claim that "women buy eighty percent of the books/fiction/etc." Stereotypes about innate differences between males and females, and the manner of their upbringing, would seem to have their part in this--the idea that females are more verbal than more visual and mathematical and mechanical males, of the well brought-up young lady being kept indoors as the boys are encouraged to "go out and play," all as a boy's being "bookish" is thought unseemly by his peers and even by adults in a way that it is not for a girl to be so. Indeed, the literary historians have given us to understand that women have historically been the primary audience for works of fiction intended for private, personal, leisure reading, such that the form has so often been oriented to a female leadership. (After all, what is the male equivalent to the stereotype of the high school age girl with her copy of Pride and Prejudice? Hint: there isn't one.)

All of this would seem to have had reinforcement in an age of increasing access to audiovisual forms of entertainment, which seems to have been especially connected with the decline or outright collapse of categories of publishing conventionally regarded as oriented to a male reader--the spy story, the paramilitary action-adventure paperback, the military techno-thriller. (Yes, there were women readers for all that stuff too. But especially in its heyday it tended to be very male-oriented stuff for a mostly male audience--often, very, very male-oriented in a way that few presses would stand for today--so, no, probably not as many women read it. Additionally I suspect that the males who read this stuff were more likely to read just this stuff, rather than partake of other kinds of fiction reading, as compared with the female fans, who were probably less likely to give up on fiction reading altogether when they moved on from such material, instead watching more TV and playing more video games.)

By the same token there is how the decline of print adventure-oriented fiction left the female-oriented romance category looming the larger within publishing. And there are also the ways in which work in publishing became something of a "pink collar" job--more women to be found occupying decision-making posts as editors, executives, etc. here than anywhere else in Big Business, perhaps because publishers selling to a largely female audience saw it as advantageous to hire more women for the job, all as (however much the identity politics-minded may be resistant to any such admission) the output of a "feminized" publishing scene skewed that much more female. Certainly it does not seem completely irrelevant that works by, centered on, aimed at, consumed by young women much more than men dominated the young adult boom earlier in this century (Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Victoria Roth, all as even John Green's The Fault in Our Stars seems worthy of mention), while at the more adult level there was no male equivalent to the successes of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, or the E.L. James' phenomenon, or more recently, the popularity of Colleen Hoover.

Still, it would seem that whether the supposition is accurate or not any female preponderance in the book-buying public today likely matters less than the continued digitalization-audiovisualization of culture. Certainly as I look about my very strong impression is that across the lines of gender people generally are doing less reading on the whole, and less long-form reading, less leisure reading, etc. especially, with the younger cohorts in particular forsaking the printed word, and even the digital word, in favor of the audiovisual, all as there is no end to the trend in sight. Amid that, if there was anything to the claim that women do eighty percent of the book-buying, fiction-buying, etc. this may well remain so--but that eighty percent will be eighty percent of a very, very small book-buying public as reading continues to wane.

What Are People Really Reading on this Blog? (And Blogs Generally?)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

In recent years I have had something to say of how the web seems to be working--and who it seems to be working for. As the reader may guess this has not been unconnected with the fact that, as this blog and my working papers show, I publish very heavily online, making what people look for and find online of more than casual interest to me. Indeed, personal experience was what ultimately led me to taking a more academic interest in the topic, while that experience also validated what many others have said about the web we used to have, and the web we have now, in what I have called its "Maximum Era."

So did it go when recently checking Google Search Console's "Insights" regarding the Google search traffic that brought Internet users to this blog in the last twelve months. Far and away the thing most likely to bring this blog readers was my writing about Monsieur Paul Flart, and right after that, the paperback action-adventure fiction imprint Gold Eagle and its shuttering about a decade ago.

My writing about movies also gets some attention. The principal draw is the box office analysis--as with what I have had to say about the Deadline magazine Most Valuable Blockbuster tournaments (or in this year's case, its non-appearance), with the interest in some of what I thought of as only short-term surprisingly enduring. Even though Black Panther 2 and The Marvels came out back in 2022-2023 people still end up here looking for analysis of their box office performance--and what I wrote about the 2024 Twisters still gets looked at too. There is also my writing about those movies that haven't happened. Thus do people come here following up the reports about the Jack Ryan movies that never got made, like that The Cardinal of the Kremlin movie that would have brought Harrison Ford and William Shatner together in the same film, and the reports of a Debt of Honor movie we heard back in 2023--which I suspect will never amount to anything either--and of course, my thoughts about what the makers of a movie adaptation of The Honourable Schoolboy would have to cope with in getting the movie made (which I wrote about not because it seemed to be happening but precisely because it wasn't happening, because it looked like the movie producers of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy were skipping over it to go straight to Smiley's People, not that that happened either). Quite a few people also come here looking to see if there is a Bad Teacher 2 out or in the works. (Could it possibly be that this is one Hollywood sequel people really do want to see?) And the piece I wrote comparing Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer to Ridley Scott's Napoleon still gets an occasional glance.

My writing about books and TV also accounts for a lot of the traffic, in that order. It is mostly the writing about fiction that seems to command some interest--in the main my reviews of old spy novels, particularly those of Robert Ludlum (The Aquitaine Progression , especially), Frederick Forsyth and Clive Cussler, with the many reviews of James Bond continuation novels I have up here getting some, but on the whole less, attention. The reviews of techno-thrillers get still less attention than that--though some people have found their way here looking for a review of Harold Coyle's Trial by Fire. Meanwhile the TV writing that principally catches people's eye had to do with Hallmark's offerings, especially my bit about its cosy mysteries, like the Morning Show, Matchmaker, Crossword and Hailey Dean series', and my pieces about Baywatch, and Flatland, and Unhappily Ever After (and so too, I guess, Warehouse 13, given all those who come here wanting to know if H.G. Wells really had a sister).

The more evidently "highbrow" and essayistic, ideas-oriented stuff doesn't do as well. Still, my review of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction and piece about Angus Calder's The People's War have drawn some readers--as, in a lighter vein, so has Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain. My reviews of and essays about literary fiction predictably get less attention than what I write about more popular fiction, but people looking for information about Shintaro Ishihara and his "novel" Season of the Sun do wind up here with some regularity (if, I think, less because of the literary interest of his books than because of his political career), and Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet , end up here every so often. My pieces on Umberto Eco's "The Myth of Superman," Dwight MacDonald's discussion of MassCult," Stanley Kubrick's discussion of his political views circa the time of A Clockwork Orange get glances now and then as well. So does the discussion of Alan Moore's critical remarks about fandom and the comic book superhero genre, just what it is that "makes a famous person a celebrity"--and of course, the annoyances of a college composition class for the student much more often than not usually compelled to take it. Once in a while people also look at what I have had to say about particular usages and phrases--for instance, politics as "Show Business for ugly people," the etymology and significances of "badass," the irritatingly Wildeian "Expect the unexpected." And let us not forget the interest in why Hollywood makes it seem as if adroitness with chopsticks is the norm rather than the exception among North Americans.

It is also the case that it helps that things I wrote about that weren't topical at the time becoming topical later has a lot to do with their chances of getting some attention. Certainly the release and reception of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has had people coming here wanting to know about the origin of Homer Simpson's name, and taking a few more glances at the review of Cussler's Trojan Odyssey specifically. Likewise Vanity Fair's piece about Loelia Ponsonby from a while back had people's keyword searches bringing them this way (though in at least one case the searchers found their way here tracing the characteristically mean-spirited remark attributed to her, but more famously uttered by one Margaret Thatcher). If the interest in the box office performance of Black Panther 2 has endured due to the continued output, and troubles, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe it has pointedly spiked recently--as it happens, in the wake of Disney-Marvel's announcement of its intention to have Black Panther 3 out in December 2028. (It also seems no coincidence that the piece about why college students can't stand composition tends to get more traffic in the early part of the college semester--or that the review of Coyle's Trial by Fire is attracting more attention given recent headlines . . .)

As anyone who has read much of what I have here may have noticed, some of the pieces that get the most attention are frankly marginal to what this blog is "about" (like the career aspirations of would-be professional flatulists). And altogether if much of what is being looked is the kind of thing I write about, it is a limited portion of the total, as the rest gets a lot less notice, at least from this avenue. One can shrug at that and talk about the "Pareto principle"--the idea that twenty percent of anything is likely to account for about eighty percent of the result. Still, I think it is suggestive of how the Internet works. Clearly Internet search, all other things being equal, is more likely to have a satisfactory result when we are looking for proper nouns--for specific people and the titles of works of fiction and so forth--and thus privilege pursuit of the concrete over the more diffuse, the more general, the more abstract. It is also the case that this blog, being (as the generally disrespectful answer engines have told me when I asked about it) a "niche" blog rather than a Big Media operation amid this Internet Maximum Era is most likely to get attention when I think to write about something that other people aren't writing about, but which someone out there is interested in in a way that adds up to a fair number of searches over an extended period. Thus writing about, for example, Theodore Dreiser doesn't get me much in the way of the "attention economy--other people aren't writing about him, but there wouldn't be readers if there were, as things are. (David Walsh said Theodore Dreiser was a "dead dog" to the literary Establishment, and the interest I see in his "Trilogy of Desire" doesn't disprove that.) By contrast if the interest in, for example, the novels of Robert Ludlum is a long, long way from its peak, there is just enough of it left out there, and few enough people writing anything about those novels, for the interested to have a chance of ending up here. So does it go with the writing about TV, which focuses on the kind of television that usually gets ignored by the prestige TV-loving coastal elite "cool kids" who dominate the entertainment press because the shows are unfashionable (as with Hallmark) or old (like Baywatch) or simply never got much notice (like Flatland and Unhappily Ever After). It also matters that every now and then I venture an "unpopular opinion" about the subjects I write about. (How else would anyone interested in The Sopranos end up here? Meanwhile if people come here looking to see how Twisters really did, that seems to me suggestive of their, quite naturally, not buying the upbeat media narrative given the gap between their claims about what a big hit it was, and the actual numbers we saw.)

And yes, it seems to me symbolic of the state of the culture today that Paul Flart is this blog's biggest draw these days. Even where it comes to their "disposable," more recreational, Internet searching it is decidedly not intellectuals who prevail among the Internet usership, such that a far greater audience is interested in the doings of Mr. Flart than those of Mr. Cowperwood.

No, You Can't Do It Too: The Independent Profiles Allen Levi

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

Profiling bestselling Theo of Golden author Allen Levi the Independent's Annabel Nugent gives us to understand that Mr. Levi simply "decided to take a stab at writing for the first time" because he "just wanted to see if" he "had the muscle to write a piece of long fiction,'" and in the process produced a self-published novel which "with no marketing campaign, and for two years, no mainstream publisher" now tops the New York Times fiction bestseller list.

Thus Ms. Nugent gives the impression that this was some out-of-the-blue success by a first-time writer who crapped out a book on a whim, and then without marketing resources or the backing of a mainstream imprint (the qualification "for the first two years" regarding Theo of Golden's lack of a mainstream publisher is the kind of thing few people register) became a gen-u-ine bestseller--Levi realizing exactly the kind of fantasy that fires the imaginations of those who become "aspiring authors." However, as Nugent herself makes clear when we get past the attention-grabbing crapola that constitutes her opening paragraphs, it didn't exactly go down that way. Thus was it the case that Levi left his longtime law practice in Columbus, Georgia, to "study Scottish fiction at the University of Edinburgh" (!)--as one does when not having any aspirations to be an author, of course. After all, "his love of language" expressed itself not in prose, but rather in his becoming a "full-time singer-songwriter, performing at various events and for Christian organisations around the US over the next couple of decades," which was not at all relevant when his project manager niece "compile[d] a list of people Levi had encountered over his diverse career" and turned to them "for their help in spreading the word among their local church groups, libraries, bookstores and book clubs" in what Nugent calls "good ol' grassroots, person-to-person marketing." (Just "marketing," not "marketing campaign." Totally different.) This moved enough copies to move Simon & Schuster to pick up the rights, paving the way for a David Morse-read audio book edition, the Washington Post interview from which Nugent plucked her quote about Levi's just wanting to see if he could write a long piece of fiction, the seal of approval of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, etc.--which enabled the book's sales to go from the 125,000 copies it managed as a self-published work to the twenty times that number it has sold at present.

In other words, Mr. Levi wasn't someone who had never thought of writing before, but had in fact gone to a great deal of trouble to study literature formally in a manner few do without aspirations here (his ditching his law practice--a classic English major profession, by the way--and crossing the Atlantic to attend the ancient university makes his interest seem less than casual, somehow), and acquired lengthy professional writing experience (songs aren't novels, but all the same, it is writing experience, and he had a lot of it by this point, all as we can be forgiven for suspecting that even if this was just a matter of seeing whether he could "write a long piece of fiction," it wasn't really his first try). Moreover, for all the insistence that there was "no marketing campaign" he did indeed have one that was facilitated by the kind of support system of family and friends, and the kind of platform, that virtually all those aspiring to self-publication the way Levi did has can only dream of--with it seeming to me relevant that Nugent lets slip that Levi actually turned down an offer of publication from a publisher before going the self-publishing route. (Not only is it the case that few who have any offer of traditional publication will refuse it in favor of the desperate last resort that is self-publishing, but the fact that he did have such an offer implies there is something we haven't been told here. After all, how did Mr. Levi get the offer before he refused it? And why was the publisher in question willing to take a chance on a first-timer in a way that publishers so rarely are? That he had connections, that he had a platform, that he was plugged into the Christian media machine, may not be irrelevant.) Moreover, even after having what is by the low, low standard of self-publishing a blockbuster Levi's really big success was inseparable from Park Avenue calling and amplifying it in a way that turned a comparative trickle of sales into a flood of millions, with more to come--for, contrary to the title of the piece ("Meet the 70-Year Old Debut Novelist Who Turned a Self-Published Book into a Global Bestseller") Levi, who again, had lots of help from the start, didn't turn a "self"-published book into a "global bestseller," rather a Big Five publishing media machine did that, a fact that Ms. Nugent gives very short shrift indeed as she plays her part in its promotion.

Thus Nugent misleads the reader MASSIVELY by, even as she gives a good many facts contradicting it, early on insisting on the clichéd "It all happened overnight!" "I wasn't even trying for success!" "I never dreamed it would get this big!" narrative. Undeniably in line with the obvious function of a puff piece to promote a Simon & Schuster book in that way that ought to remind anyone who has read Balzac's Lost Illusions of the "ugly" "preparations" "behind the scenes . . . the painted supers, the claqueurs hired to applaud" to generate the "unexpected . . . success" that the "theatre of literature" presents the public, it is also consistent with the principle uttered by Dauriat in that book that, contrary to the hopes of those who hope to make a Name for themselves as authors, one has little chance of becoming an author unless they have made a Name for themselves already. (I wonder if Ms. Nugent, or any of her colleagues, ever read Balzac. Going by his unfashionability in such circles, probably not--any more than she is likely to have read the equally unfashionable and yet likewise indispensable Upton Sinclair, or Jack London.)

What makes all this so much more grating to those who have "been there" is how it cruelly fosters the "You can do it too!" illusion of the accessibility of the literary path to celebrity to our aspirationalism-addled "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." And perhaps the more striking in a case like Mr. Levi's because of how, reflecting the always hard and now significantly worsening reality of publishing generally and self-publishing specifically that "writers" like Ms. Nugent do not touch with a ten-foot pole, new stories of breakout "self-publishing" success have been lacking for quite some time, all as the generally minor early successes have long since faded from view. After all, it certainly isn't an accident that you probably haven't heard anything about Amanda Hocking in a long time. But don't expect Ms. Nugent to tell you about that.

The Devil Wears Prada 2: Sold on Nostalgia?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

If the summer of 2026 has strongly echoed certain past summers (not least, the deeply disappointing summer of 2023) it also had its more anomalous features, not least the summer season opening with The Devil Wears Prada 2. Less sign of the times than accident (the studio just opportunistically seized on the vacating of that weekend by a desperate-to-recapture-its Phrase Three glory days Marvel when it bumped its latest Avengers film from May to December), it seemed very much a sign of the times in the backers of the movie, having left the cinematic side of the franchise fallow for two decades in spite of the publication of sequels to the original novel, deciding to put out a Part Two at this time--a reflection of the ever more ruthless exploitation of any prior success, however out of date the content.

For there is indeed a case that this material was very badly dated. Consider the narrative: Aspiring Serious Journalist Goes to Work for Fashion Magazine She Thinks Beneath Her With Boss From Hell, Embraces the Pleasures of the Superficial, Learns Boss From Hell is Human After All, and Has Her Principles Tested Before Returning to Original Serious Journalist Career Trajectory. In spite of the obligatory moralizing about, retreat from, reconciliation to not being part of the Condé Nasty world Andy Sachs' trajectory traced (for after all the film was a vacation from Real Life, not relocation to the Promised Land of the Beautiful People) this was ultimately a love letter to the Miranda Priestlys of the world and all that they represent (this movie really very conventional and conservative in every way, even the ways in which it contradicted itself). And so one may wonder if, after the Great Recession and the fraying of "globalization," after the pandemic, and a second generation of declining prospects for the many; after "relatability" became the coin of the virtual realm in this age of living through one's cell phone screen; after the decline of popular attention to celebrity generally and haute couture especially; after "body positivity" replacing beauty on our screens and the "I'm just like you|" fraud of the Internet influencer the "I'm not just like you!" fraud of the old-time product endorser; would all this really have very many takers? Frankly trying to make a go of all this seemed to me to be awfully obtuse--with all this underlined by how the studio was releasing what looked like, and in fact was, a great big heaping celebration of privilege, luxury, snobbery, upper-class self-satisfaction and pretension, toxic employers and general downward-punching #Girlboss bourgeois feminism promising only more of the same actually hit theaters on the day of global social protest that is International Worker's Day (an irony that the provincial and class-terrified American media, of course, did not register).

As it happened, even allowing for inflation Prada 2 was a bigger hit than the original (the nearly $690 million it grossed about 30 percent more than the $530 million the first film's $326 million in 2006 would be if we adjust the numbers for today's prices), a feat the more impressive for the shrunken nature of the post-pandemic market; and almost certainly brought in a healthy profit. (The movie's $100 million production cost may go with a similarly hefty promotional cost, all as reuniting the original cast may mean a healthy cut going to "residuals and participations," but I can easily see eventual all-sources revenue north of $500 million leaving the studio with $200 million+, very likely enough to land it a place on Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster list of the top ten profit-makers next year, in the event that they dare to hold the Tournament.) The result is that what the movie offers does indeed seem to have been salable, suggesting that the appeal of vicarious contact with that unrelatable world of glamour and celebrity and luxury is not yet past--though a subtler explanation does occur to me, namely that a Prada sequel is the better able to sell those things because, in contrast with a movie doing so from scratch, it had done so in the past. Because for the target audience Andy and Miranda and the rest are old friends, seeing whom offers them nostalgia for a less hard-bitten time when that ever more remote fantasy of glamour and celebrity and luxury could reach them, such that the new offering reaches them by the roundabout route of evoking the memory of when it had done so the first time. Still, if Hollywood had a winner here (commercially at least), given the way the studios have gone on operating in their stubborn insistence on adhesion to the flagging blockbuster model rather than aiming for the targeted hits the current market demands, I think it more likely that this was one time when they were not clever, but simply lucky, in producing a sequel that a sizable audience actually wanted.

Is Gaming Changing Our Politics?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

On the whole I think that when we consider video games and their effect on our politics those of any progressive sympathies are likely think of them as a force for reaction. After all, whatever the potentials of the gaming medium as a whole (the idiosyncratic, the experimental, the "indie" does not count very much for my present purposes) the games that have historically dominated the market have been a highly corporatized big-budget mass market product. Gaming has also been associated with diversion, escapism, even mental stultification--to the disadvantage of attentiveness to everyday reality, and even the faculty of critical thought. And looking at the actual content of the games would, I think, reinforce rather than diminish the impression that they work in favor of the status quo rather than against it. After all, they tend to have for their theme physical heroics, often violent physical heroics, in contexts defined by the simplicities of myth and the fantasy of personal power from primitive quests of monster-slaying and princess-rescuing, to militaristic-jingoistic war scenarios, to competitive sports, and even "petty bourgeois" fantasies of criminality, all while frequently displaying a Futurist Manifesto-like reveling in speed, danger and destruction--even before one gets to the "frat house" atmosphere so often seen in online gaming, or the impression left by the (admittedly far from nuanced) coverage of Gamergate.

Yet considering all this I also find myself thinking of Edward Castronova's writing of the possibility of an "exodus to the virtual world" two decades ago that seems, if anything, even more timely today. In spite of the hype surrounding the Metaverse all these years later our means of "entering" a virtual reality are not much better, the entrant still looking at a screen rather than bodily immersed in another world the way so much '90s-era science fiction told us we would be. Still, much more than was the case when the World of Warcraft was a hot topic people can, and do, carry their virtual world everywhere with them on their smart phone, all as virtual life now involves far, far more than Role Playing Game-style questing in the age of the chatbot, with today's moral panic-mongers making Futurama's Space Pope's injunctions against dating robots part of the discourse. (Thus are Republican legislators rushing to ban "robot marriage," no, I am not making this up.) And of course there is what Castronova had to say about the matter that very few acknowledge, namely that the virtual is as attractive as it is because of the unattractions of real life, unattractions that, Castronova warned, required society to address its problems if it was to avoid such an exodus, something it has signally not done, and which have if anything signally worsened in the polycrisis-ridden decades since he published his book.

Of course, the talk of an "exodus" may seem to simply affirm what I said earlier about video gaming being a vehicle for escapism that affirms the status quo rather than encouraging a critical outlook and a willingness to achieve positive change. Still, any escape into virtuality with anything like the technology we have can only ever be partial given that, again, people have their bodies and minds out here and not in those machines--and so have no choice but to deal with this world, however much they would prefer to not do so, with the tension inhering in that perhaps having its effect on the thinking of some of them. Certainly there is the argument that the increasing immersiveness of video games has made "gamers" place a higher value on the leisure time they are able to devote to them than they did before--which, it stands to reason, makes them more resistant to, more questioning of, the demands that a society which expects its members to live for economic striving, to "live to work" rather than "work to live," etc., as those demands drag them away from their virtual world they prefer to this one. ("No, I'm not trading my weekends for workends . . . I gots a game I'd rather be playing.") It may also be that the experience of video gaming, not simply as a vicarious out-of-this-world adventure but as a chance to see sustained effort actually make them good at something and being good at something pay off in some manner, however trivial ("You've leveled up!"), has sharpened their sense of the dissatisfactions of "real life," and what real life is so often an euphemism for, society, as summed up in the jokes long found on the Internet and elsewhere that "Life is a broken video game." ("Maybe the economy isn't really a meritocracy. Maybe hard work doesn't pay off in it the way they say. Maybe the American Dream is a cruel lie.") Their attention to gaming may even have sharpened their critical stance toward the technology companies that Authority has for so long presented as capitalism's best face, as the devoted gamer, the more in as they live in an era in which games are so much more than before an online experience subject to assorted controls by capitalist firms quite prepared to subject their customers to totalitarian forms of surveillance to defend their copyrights, consider the ways in which business takes advantage of the consumer. (Think, for example, of the present outcry over Sony's decision to cease producing physical media.)

That same preference for the virtuality of their games may even prompt them to think about the people who actually make the games, whose work is the basis of their play. As it happened the Byakuya gang arc of the anime version of the Naruto spin-off Boruto saw the eponymous protagonist, through contact with the laid-off maker of a video game he enjoyed, driven to consider the social system he lived in for the first time. As one may guess given the broad tendency of popular culture when it purports to deal with serious issues David Bordwell described all too well, and in particular the more conformist tendency of anime these days, that plot's resolution was fairly centrist in outlook--admitting that society wasn't perfect, but only gesturing vaguely toward redressing its problems (the old "We'll work on it" without saying what anyone would do, exactly) while being vehement that the radicals did not have the answers, that they were plain and simple bad guys cynically exploiting the pain of the unfortunate. But all the same, it brought Boruto face to face with those questions--and he might not be the last to find his love of gaming's virtual worlds making him look at the real one in a way he had not done before.

Explaining Spider-Man: Brand New Day's Box Office Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

The record-breaking box office performance of Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of the biggest stories of the summer movie season of 2026. This is not least because that story has made such a difference in the story of the movie season as a whole, its overperformance almost singlehandedly (along with that of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, entirely) responsible for the bullishness of the entertainment press about the revival of moviegoing at the moment--as the members of that press would be admitting if they were capable of "eighth grade math," for then they would see that 2026, like 2023, was just another case of a weak first-weekend-in-May-to-just-before-the-third-weekend-in-July summer season being "rescued" by the overperformance of a late-arriving Nolan movie somehow turning an R-rated commercial longshot into a blockbuster New Hollywood-style (remember Oppenheimer?), and along with it another lighter, more colorful PG-13 movie more likely to be a crowd-pleaser (with Spider-Man filling the niche Barbie did then).

Of course, saying that Spider-Man overperformed may seem counterintuitive to those who think the NINE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR DOMESTIC GROSS was only to be expected. After all, Spider-Man is Marvel's most reliable earner, just as Batman is the DC universe's. And the last Spider-Man movie did particularly well--Spider-Man: No Way Home quickly racking up $800 million domestically after a December 2021 release that proved that post-pandemic the biggest movies could be as big as ever they were. It only stood to reason that a follow-up would do well.

But just how well? The reality is that the Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man series is already the second reboot of the big-screen franchise in this century, and Brand New Day the ninth live-action feature starring the character (indeed, in bringing Tom Holland together with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield No Way Home, underlined just how very much Spider-Man Hollywood has been giving the public), even before one takes into account Spider-Man's broader Marvel Cinematic Universe and Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) presences, and the animated Spider-Verse films, making for at least another half dozen feature film appearances this past decade alone. One may add that Brand New Day is the fourth installment in Holland's particular sequence, the limits of interest in which are suggested by the relatively disappointing box office take of Dr. Strange 2's directly following from the events of that film, all as it has been four years since then, four years in which people have been less enthusiastic about Marvel, superheroes, franchises, less enthusiastic about sprawling movie franchises that require them to do "homework," which reviewing the events of a movie from five years ago might feel like. One may add that even if one doesn't think much of the multi-verse gimmick the fact remained that the new film didn't promise (or deliver) anything to compare with it as a basis for a sense of it being an "event." One was therefore not crazy to think that the moviegoing public might feel that their appetite had been sated, and that the movie would, even if not necessarily flopping, even if doing by any sane standard decent and profitable business, still not reach the heights of No Way Home in current-dollar, let alone inflation-adjusted real, terms (the former's $800 million in December 2021-January 2022 equal to about $960 million in July 2026 dollars).

However, as of the time of this writing the film has topped the box office chart for six weekends in a row and stands just a little shy of the inflation-adjusted gross of the 2021 film (with $923 million banked domestically, and counting), and it seems to me reasonable to think critically about that. It seems fair to say that contrary to the pessimistic expectation, enthusiasm for Spider-Man, the Tom Holland version of the figure, and the narrative of No Way Home held up--as seen in Brand New Day's colossal $360 million opening weekend gross, and its managing respectable holds afterward, like the 97 percent verified audience score it has on Rotten Tomatoes testimony to a positive audience response.

Still, as is the case with so many mega-hits of recent years (like Top Gun 2, or Deadpool & Wolverine), the boffo b.o. of one movie was helped greatly by a relative paucity of competition for moviegoers' per capita two trips to the movies a year these days. Putting it bluntly, we have had our share of superhero movies these past couple of years--but Spider-Man was the first since the third Deadpool movie to feel like a "must see event" for a wide public, which has left the audience at the least less "superhero-fatigued" than it otherwise might have been, not because there weren't superhero movies, but because much of the public ignored the ones it got (while Spider-Man's own strongest competition, Avengers: Doomsday, was bumped from May 1). The public was also somewhat less franchise-fatigued than it might have been given how many other offerings it passed up, not least the summer's Star Wars, Masters of the Universe and DCEU films (and Minions and Moana didn't exactly do well either, yes, the flops really were many). Meanwhile Nolan's The Odyssey, being a more serious, "adult," darker story, which also did much of its business in the two weeks before Spider-Man hit theaters, cultural event that it has undeniably been, was only ever a limited threat to Spidey (just as Oppenheimer was only ever a limited threat to Barbie, even while debuting the same weekend).

The result is that the fourth film in the third live-action Spider-Man franchise is undeniably an immense box office success by virtually any conceivable measure. However, its success has been in significant part a function of the failure of a good many other films, of this being one movie that got a release into a relatively empty period in which people had been passing on so many blockbusters, so many superhero blockbusters, so that this one could tempt them that much more. Accordingly just as it was a mistake to read very much into what Deadpool's success meant for Marvel and for superhero movies and for Hollywood more generally two years ago (as was shortly proved by the demonstrable idiocies of the "Marvel's back!" crowd at the time ), it is a mistake to generalize from Brand New Day's success the same way. But that of course is not stopping the claqueurs presently burying us in hot takes telling us once more that those who speak of superhero fatigue and Marvel fatigue are Nattering Nabobs of Negativism made to look like fools by what is almost certain to prove an exception rather than a rule.

A Twenty-First Century New Hollywood Director (The Case of Christopher Nolan)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

It seems that these days Christopher Nolan is neither making small critics' darling movies that win Oscars but go little seen (like a Paul Thomas Anderson), nor giant franchise films that overshadow any would-be auteur behind the camera (as Marvel Cinematic Universe film helmers the Russo brothers are). Rather he has, post-Batman, but especially these past few years, been a maker of relatively idiosyncratic movies which are also big-budget, and score both critical raves and wide audiences, in part because the director is himself a "brand." Indeed, the combination of idiosyncrasy, critical renown, box office success, and name recognition Nolan presently enjoys make me think of the New Hollywood of the '70s, where as is the case with Nolan directors who made a name for themselves, if they were willing to press for it, got the chance to gamble big on an artistic vision, and if they won big, gamble again--as a well-established Nolan gambled on the indisputably risky Oppenheimer. By contrast The Odyssey seemed to me a "safe" choice of project, enough so that I couldn't help thinking of, for example, Orson Welles, after having gone through hell to make the thematically, structurally, technically audacious Citizen Kane going with for his next project the ultra-safe route of adapting, of all things, a Booth Tarkington novel. Still, if I'm not sure I was entirely wrong about that (the movie is, for many, an "epic action movie," a Classical-era Lord of the Rings almost), setting aside the melodrama about some of the casting choices (not that I deny that they were not a purist's choices) and the politically partisan whining from the daughter of a Daily Mail writer (why is everyone overlooking that?), Nolan does, just as when he made the last movie, seem to have had some serious concerns on his mind, enough so to get the result some respect from one very tough critic who had not been at all impressed with him before Oppenheimer (enough so that after Nolan's two latest he suggested that "[p]erhaps" his long string of prior films were "a mere tuning up, an apprenticeship").

It does not seem surprising that there should be such a director working in Hollywood today. Today, just as was the case a half century ago, the movie studios are in a state of crisis amid a collapse in admissions (down forty percent from before the pandemic, fifty percent from before the Great Recession), and the breakdown of their old model for reliably generating hits (just as the musicals and historical epics weren't packing moviegoers in anymore, the sci-fi action spectacles, the superhero flicks, are a shakier earner than before; yes, despite the stupid denials "superhero fatigue" prevails).

Still, in contrast with the situation in the '70s Nolan seems nearly alone, rather than part of a generation of such directors--and that bespeaks the ways in which if there are parallels with the '70s there are also differences here. Not the least of them is that even in its present desperate straits, with so much more money on the line with every movie release than before, with that form of degenerate called the "activist shareholder" breathing down the executives' necks, with Hollywood deeply in denial about the need to change its way of doing business (hence the entertainment press over every Deadpool and Spider-Man, every uptick in the box office, every soon-to-look ridiculous prediction about how "This year we'll see business getting back to what it was before the pandemic!") means that much less room, or willingness, to take the kinds of risks that meant letting the Nolans gamble with their careers, and the studios' money. Of course, as those who recall the New Hollywood's end know well the readiness to permit the odd gamble was part of what led Hollywood out of their difficulties--a young Steven Spielberg and George Lucas pointing the way to a new model for generating hits with films like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones sagas. However, instead of allowing that the "dumbest guys in any room" inhabiting the C-suites hope to save the old model somehow, such that for the time being we are not likely to see very many directors succeeding in following Nolan's path--all as, per the New Hollywood-ish rule book, if Nolan has gambled big and won big twice in a row, a far from impossible misstep is likely to mean an end to this particular run as a formerly obsequious media becomes both cynical and psychotic in its brutality.

Randy Quaid, Armchair Movie Executive

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

At the time of this writing we are hearing quite a bit about the recently announced plans for a sequel to the 1990 Tony Scott-Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder. Much of it has to do with Randy Quaid, living down to the public image he has acquired in a half century long career of playing witless oafs who are "not quite right in the head" shooting his mouth off about the inappropriateness of the casting of Anne Hathaway as the female lead of the film. He appears to have made his judgment on the grounds of her being pregnant (Monsieur Quaid gives the impression of thinking pregnancy is a permanent condition, or that the movie will be made instantly, such that one wonder if the septuagenarian husband, father and veteran actor knows anything about where babies or movies come from); his view that Ms. Hathaway is not "sexy" ("sexy" is admittedly a relatively subtle trait, as against physical beauty, for example, but a great many men of impeccable sensibility in such matters disagree with Mr. Quaid very strongly on this point); and that Ms. Hathaway's having publicly expressed "woke" opinions will count against her with what he claims to be the NASCAR-loving target audience (as if people judged movie releases like this one by their stars' politics, as if the obsession with "wokeness" in movies and the people who make them were going as strong as it was a few years ago; after all, weren't Quaid's fellow travelers celebrating Victory-Wokeness Day just a while back?).

Of course, the media is attending to Quaid's all too characteristic stupidities because as those who don't get any publicity (ahem) know all too well that with very few exceptions any publicity is better than none, Quaid's complaining about the early publicity for this yet-to-be-made movie is not one of those exceptions, and the backers of this film want their publicity damn it. The coprophages reporting Quaid's words also do so because, per the norm for their "profession," they regard anything a famous person says, no matter how stupid, as deserving of respectful attention, the more in as, in this case, the stupidity is probably harmless to the project that Paramount so wants to publicize. (Would you pass on a movie just because Randy Quaid didn't like the lead?) And the media are doing it because if Quaid's stupidities are unlikely to make any difference to the movie's prospects they are nonetheless (especially insofar as they stoke the kulturkampf that is part of this game) a convenient distraction from those things they do not care to cover, such as the world's descent into ecological collapse, economic calamity, war and fascism demonstrates. (Thus amid protests against ICE and the run-up to "Epic Fury" said media gave us "All Nancy Guthrie, all the time!" while on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and with it THE BIRTH OF THE NATION WITH ALL THE REFLECTION UPON THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE MOMENT THAT THAT OUGHT TO ENCOURAGE it instead inflicted on us endless breathless coverage of every minute detail of Taylor Swift's wedding!)

Indeed, attention to Quaid's stupidities even distracts from the not very important (but still somewhat more important, and for the box office and cultural analyst, more interesting) matter of whether anything about this greenlit film project makes any sense, and the possibility of the kind of publicity that even the folks at Paramount would see as bad for their movie. Certainly from their standpoint it is far better to have people arguing over whether Ms. Hathaway's having been pregnant at some point in her life, not appealing to Monsieur Quaid's sense of "sexy" (or so he tells us in public), or whether her political opinions ought to disqualify her from playing an as yet unspecified female lead for an unmade film than to have us talking about what the studio executives probably did. That is, instead of making an artistic judgment about whether she is a good fit for what may be a fairly hazy project at this stage than their playing the old game of "Who's hot right now?" as, with the idiocy of Hathahate in apparent abeyance, with Ms. Hathaway having just had a good summer season with The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey both huge successes in their different ways, casting her seems like a good bet according to their superstitious mode of "thought." The attention to Quaid's remarks has also kept people from discussing the matter of whether pouring what is almost certain to be nine figures into the production, marketing and distribution of a Days of Thunder sequel starring anyone whatsoever (as they likely sign away a good deal of the revenue to Cruise in return for his coming back if Top Gun 2's "participations" are anything to go by) makes any sense at all as a commercial proposition. As I have ended up writing so much about the stupidities of Quaid and the media which covers them, and knowing the ever shorter attention span of the Internet user; I elected to take up the matter of that particular stupidity in a separate item here.

Days of Thunder 2? Give Me a Break

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:10:30 +0000

Recently happening upon the news that Days of Thunder 2 is a go I found that it was easy to hypothesize what the studio executives might have been thinking when they made this call. Responding to the commercial crisis of American filmmaking not by changing their ways in line with market demand but doubling down on their accustomed behavior in that way that has them scraping the bottom of the barrel these days for anything they can sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, spin-off, multi-verse, in that I way so much remark here they noticed that they haven't done Days of Thunder yet, but think they should. After all, they thought, Top Gun 2 (aka Top Gun: Maverick) was a hit, so why not another do-over of a Tony Scott-Tom Cruise "adrenaline" movie from before half the planet was even born? And did Top Gun 2 not prove that Mr. Cruise remains a good old-fashioned star? And didn't 2025's F1 show a movie about car racing can be a hit? With room existing for Days because it's NASCAR, rather than Formula One? And isn't this a good time for a NASCAR movie, because Twisters showed that there is money to be made in pandering to the Red States, and don't those Red Staters just love their stock car racing? Indeed, with all the idea has going for it, we might have a new franchise on our hands, with Days of Thunder 3 following Days of Thunder 2, and maybe a series on streaming too! (And man do we need one, especially with the new owners up to their eyeballs in debt and breathing their fetid breath down our necks as we do nothing but crank out more Star Trek spin-offs no one is watching, and fund anything that pops into the head of a certain Dallas metro area cardiologist's drama club kid cosplaying as a cowboy.)

So what could be more logical than greenlighting a second Days of Thunder?

And yet on closer examination--what more foolhardy? After all, consider the difference between the original Top Gun and the original Days of Thunder where audience cachet was concerned. Top Gun was a genuine pop cultural phenomenon beyond even what the then-spectacular, #1-hit-of-the-year $177 million domestic gross implies, as seen in its launching Tom Cruise's career into the stratosphere; the long ubiquity of songs featured in its best-selling soundtrack such as "Danger Zone," and of course, the Oscar-winning "Take My Breath Away"; the entry of the term "wingman" into the popular lexicon (you know, as in Larry Summers relying on Jeffrey Epstein to be his wingman as he plotted an adulterous affair with his "protégé"); the endless imitation and parody that saw John Gardner turn James Bond into a Royal Navy Top Gun in his next continuation novel (Win, Lose or Die), and Jim Abrahams of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team fame devoting of one of his then very popular parodic gag comedies to riffing on just this one film, 1991's Charlie Sheen starrer Hot Shots!; and one might add, Tom Cruise's return to duty in another "New Classic" hit, A Few Good Men, supplying Donald Bellisario with his elevator pitch for his massively franchise-launching series JAG ("'Top Gun meets A Few Good Men'"). Indeed, for many years afterward it was a cliché of movie publicity to say that a major new release would be "Top Gun" for whatever group of people it was about. (Thus was that other Navy SEALs supposed to be Top Gun for that then-relatively little discussed branch of the Navy, and Backdraft supposed to be Top Gun for firefighters, and True Lies Top Gun for Marine aviation because of its use of the Harrier jump jet, etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam.).

One cannot claim anything close to that for Days of Thunder, which, if launched with a wave of publicity that said it would do for car racing what Top Gun had done for naval aviators, as the conventional wisdom among the entertainment press held that it would be the #1 action hit of its own summer season, ended up an underperformer even by the low standard of a season so packed with underperforming action movies that the to-be-obsolete-in-five-minutes hot take-supplying commentators told us the action movie had had its day. Then after its disappointing box office run (which did not suffice even for a place in the top ten at the American box office that year, the movie's mere $82 million take leaving it in the #12 spot) Days of Thunder did not prove one of those movies that enjoyed a greater success on video or cable, did not win some reevaluation that won it a cult, as it failed to become anything like the cultural touchstone Top Gun was. (I can't remember catching a single allusion to the movie in the decades since, even among obscurity-mongers like the writers of Family Guy or Psych, in line with the comparative meagerness of its mark on pop culture.) Or for that matter, other 1990 releases, like the aforementioned Ghost, or Pretty Woman, or GoodFellas, or even those fellow underperforming 1990 summer season actioners Total Recall and Robocop 2.)

The movie is thus a weaker basis for expecting an appreciable audience to be persuadable that a follow-up is "must see" viewing, all as one should remember the advantages Top Gun 2 had that a sequel to Days of Thunder will not. One is the long vacation so many took from moviegoing in the two years of the pandemic preceding the film's much-delayed release, which made people that much ready to respond to insistences that it is a "must see" event; and the media's cheerleading for the movie in that way that shows them to be dutifully claquing for a jingoistic-militaristic film. (You can tell this is going on when those who ordinarily make much of identity politics set this aside, and critics lower their usual bar, as seen in the craziness of the Rotten Tomatoes score, and how they would give the audience permission to not think too much about what they would see and just enjoy the ride, the pattern all too evident from their response to prior releases.) One may add that all this had a chance to go further than it ordinarily would have done due to Top Gun being released into the very uncompetitive summer of 2022, giving it more chances to be noticed, and more screens, than it would otherwise have had.

In discussing Top Gun 2's success the media has slighted the role of the exceptionally helpful conditions of the release, and its own cheerleading (precisely because they were cheerleading)--but anyone making financial decisions about this on that basis does so at their own peril, all as anyone counting on Days 2 getting as lucky is likely to be making a particularly big mistake, though that is not the only one I suspect they are making here. If the media decided to sing of Tom Cruise's star power rather than all the movie really had going for it, well, the lackluster performance of the latest Mission: Impossible films has made the limits of that all too clear. If F1 was a hit it was that on a far smaller scale than Top Gun--grossing about a third as much, while the movie also happened to cost a lot too. Meanwhile anyone betting on a "Red State movie" on the basis of the narrative surrounding Twisters makes as much sense as betting on a "feminist action movie" on the basis of Fury Road--the "hit movie" narrative disconnected from the numbers (with the fourth Mad Max film probably a money-loser, and the foolhardiness of following it up demonstrated by the flop Furiosa was, and Twisters possibly the same). The result is that while I will not go so far as to say that Days of Thunder 2 will definitely lose money, I will say that anyone expecting it to be "the next Top Gun 2" can expect to be disappointed the same way that the original's backers were when they put out the first Days of Thunder thinking they were looking at the next Top Gun 1. But for all the muddy thinking involved the making of a Days of Thunder 2 still isn't the absolute limit in pointless franchise-making. As I was drafting this very post Searchlight announced a sequel to the 2005 film The Family Stone, as the entertainment press rushed to tell us the movie is a "beloved" and "classic" film (another It's a Wonderful Life!) and pretend that there is popular demand out there for a follow-up a generation on.

What Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbusters" of 2025 Might Have Been if There Was a Tournament

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:44:30 +0000

I recently had something to say of the non-appearance of Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament and its revelation of Hollywood's biggest moneymakers and money-losers of 2025, and specifically my guesses as to why it hasn't happened. (Short version: very possibly squeamishness about another lousy year for a Hollywood that may not be able to take much more, and the inhibitions created by all the merger-and-acquisition intrigue.) But I imagine most of those who have found their way to this blog because of their interest in the box office would be more interested in knowing what the list would be likely to contain rather than why it hasn't appeared. Again, I don't pretend to have inside info, but I have been looking at these numbers for a while, and I'm not entirely uncomfortable hazarding some estimates--to which estimates I devote this post.

Insofar as last year's list is concerned it seems to me that you can expect that if there were a tournament this year Zootopia 2 would be the Most Valuable Blockbuster by a long way given its combination of the year's highest gross (nearly $1.9 billion!) with its budget ($150 million, less than 1/12th as much). Beyond that it gets trickier but the live-action Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Jurassic World: Rebirth would most likely round out the top five. Given the extremely high outlay on Avatar (leaving it with a break-even point possibly as high as $1.3 billion, not much below the $1.5 billion it did make), the numbers I have seen have Lilo & Stitch (a $100 million budget and a gross a bit over $1 billion) the best bet for number two, with a Minecraft movie that cost somewhat more and made just a little less ($150 million) a safe bet for number three, and Avatar and Jurassic Park competing for the next two spots, with the question whether the $200 million production that grossed nearly $900 million, or the possibly $400 million movie that grossed $1.5 billion, had the bigger margin between outlay and revenue. My guess is that Avatar would come out ahead, but not by all that much. Meanwhile it is not wholly out of the question that there might be competition for the number five position from the horror film The Conjuring: The Last Rites, again because of its having made its more modest sum on a (much) smaller budget (the $55 million production taking in a half billion dollars).

Speaking of lower-budgeted films I imagine that the low-cost, high-grossing The Housemaid would make the top ten (as far down as the list usually goes these days), and probably do better than the bottom as it comes in ahead of higher-grossing but much higher-budgeted movies (having pulled in $400 million on a $35 million budget). Final Destination: Bloodlines, which made somewhat less while costing only somewhat more ($318 million on a $50 million budget) could also place in the top ten. This is because when we look to the more conventional, non-horror blockbusters we see a crop of films that cost as much as the biggest movies but made not much more than The Conjuring--the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, F1: The Movie, Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps all priced at $200 million+, and Wicked: For Good perhaps not much less ($150 million is the figure we hear quoted), even as their grosses were all in the $520-$630 million range. I imagine that films from this lot would fill what gaps in the top ten the aforementioned movies leave, but again find the competition among them for the few remaining spots in those lower ranks too close to be worth calling.

As to the separate "small budgets, big profits" list, it seems to me easy to picture, per the norm of recent years, horror films once again king in 2025. Sinners, which in spite of its real North American success, made too little internationally and cost too much for the top ten would also not be represented here because its $90 million+ disqualifies it from "small budget," all as I have a hard time seeing the relatively high cost and not so high-grossing 28 Years Later appearing here either. However, should the final Final Destination miss the top ten list it would certainly be present, as would Weapons, Black Phone 2--and maybe Five Nights at Freddy's 2.

Where the flops are concerned--well, there happen to be no shortage of candidates here. The live-action Snow White would probably headline the list--but Tron: Ares, which made even less while possibly costing about as much, ought to be competitive, and failing its getting the #1 position a solid contender for the #2 spot. Elio, which cost $150 million and only grossed $150 million, could be competitive with Tron. And I wonder about the two lower-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe films that year, The Thunderbolts and Captain America 4, given their $400 million takes and very high budgets. Certainly if Captain America 4 was as expensive as some say ($380 million!) it might actually head the list. Otherwise the two movies might squeak past the break-even point. Still, it would seem that just as Disney could seem to have had a sensational year with Zootopia and Lilo & Stitch (and Avatar) it also took a beating with these other five films in a perfect demonstration of the way that its sticking to the ruthless adherence to the franchise strategy that had it cranking out billion-dollar hits assembly-line style in the '10s (with seven in 2019 alone) that so impressed the Ben Fritzes of the entertainment press is today yielding very uneven results.

Why Has There Been No Deadline Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament 2025?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:44:30 +0000

For many of those who follow the box office these days Deadline magazine's annual Most Valuable Blockbuster "tournament"--their analysts' report ranking Hollywood's biggest profit- and loss-makers during the preceding year, colorfully organized as the film business' equivalent of March Madness (complete with the capping of the tournament illustrated with a photo-shopped picture of the "MVB"'s director(s) making a slam dunk)--is something of an eventual event. However, at the time of this writing it is mid-July without 2025's tournament even having started, or even any sign that it ever will start (as those who attend to it have noticed).

I don't have any inside info here. But I also think there is a very obvious possible explanation--namely that amid the present hard times for Hollywood, and the big studio buyouts, there is more than the usual squeamishness about shining a spotlight on the facts of the situation, certainly at a Hollywood "Establishment" publication like the Penske-owned magazine Deadline. After all, just consider the history of the "tournament." Deadline first held a tournament for 2013 (the following March madness season, of course) and then held one annually thereafter for the next six straight years (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. There were no tournaments for the next two years (2020 and 2021) because of the extreme disruption of the box office by the pandemic, but the magazine resumed the tradition with a tournament for 2022, and continued with tournaments for 2023 and 2024.

Of course, the gross in 2022 was just a bit over half the pre-pandemic norm when adjusted for inflation. However, that was an immense improvement over 2020-2021, with the performance of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels especially reassuring to those hoping business would soon return to normal by showing that would-be blockbusters could still reap ten figure grosses; attribute the fact that it hadn't in 2022 was a matter of the year's having fewer big movies out than usual; and expect that with the following year's "normal"-sized release slate of big movies the box office would zoom back to where it had been before COVID-19, and everyone be able to look back on the blow the pandemic dealt the movie business as something they had all got over, with 2022 a milestone in the recovery. (We did it! Yay us!) However, it didn't work out that way, with 2023, in spite of being far more packed with big movies, not seeing Hollywood gross much more than it did in 2022, the packed slate instead producing a very large number of severe underperformers. (Remember the DCEU's The Flash? The Marvels? Indiana Jones 5?)

Taking in the picture at year's end I argued that the box office of 2023 bespoke structural changes in the market, specifically that American movie going had fallen for the long haul (from 3-4 per capita movie ticket sales to not much more than 2); that this meant as many movies as before were chasing perhaps just two-thirds as many dollars; that big franchise films especially were going to have a rough time not only because of their high budgets, but because those billion-dollar grosses depended on their drawing the casual moviegoer not so easily won now; that in fact if you wanted people to use one of their two trips to the theater this year for your movie, so to speak, you had to really excite them by offering something they really, really wanted rather than grinding out more sequels and prequels no one ever asked for--perhaps something "completely different." (Thus was it the case that without the non-franchise films Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and less expected hits from an animated Super Mario Bros. film to a Taylor Swift concert film, the unenviable situation would have been even worse still.)

Of course, that wasn't what the Hollywood Establishment wanted to hear, and so everyone who talked that way was ignored (and not only when they were doing so on a humble blog like this one). Instead said Establishment preferred to scapegoat Hollywood's workers, whining about the strikes and the way they delayed some releases and undermined publicity for others--and speak "adults in the room" stupidities about Marvel's underperformance a matter of their having failed to get "better" writers and "supervise" their directors properly, which their lickspittle courtiers in the relevant corners of the press faithfully conveyed to the public in the time-honored propaganda model manner of takers of brass checks for service rendered everywhere. They also continued to cleave to these idiocies through 2024, because if that year saw the box office slip from what it had been in 2023 there was a thinner release slate due to strike-era disruptions (for which, of course, they again blamed the workers), while, at least at a glance, the list of movies that did make money was dominated by franchise films per usual, with a few of them especially encouraging to those who wanted to go on working in the same old way, particularly the animated sequel Inside Out 2, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Sure that this meant Hollywood could go back to and sustain pre-pandemic grosses with sequels to the same old franchises that no one ever asked for, the media cheered "Marvel's back!" as Disney-Marvel announced a new crop of Super Russo Brothers-directed installments of The Avengers.

Not so fast, I said, strongly suspecting that Deadpool & Wolverine was an anomaly and an outlier, and no proof of the broad demand for Marvel movies on which the Universe's backers were banking, or for that matter, any of the rest of what Hollywood was so eager to sell. But of course that wasn't what the Establishment wanted to hear that any more than they did what we had to say about 2023, and so while many of us were perfectly capable of guessing what 2025 would really be like (another 2023-like pre-pandemic slate launched into the shrunken 2025 market to chase its smaller pool of dollars held by pickier moviegoers) the Hollywood Establishment were all shocked, shocked I tells ya when 2025 gave the lie to the industry "optimism" of the preceding years, that 2023 was a fluke, that for all its troubles 2024 showed things were getting back on track, that franchise movies were still the thing, that "Marvel's back!" because it wasn't, as Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts and the third-time-isn't-the-charm Fantastic Four film all proved, as 2025 saw theaters take in even less money than 2024 in real terms, and as a result actually make 2023 look like a good year by comparison. Indeed, even Establishment-approved commentators could be seen admitting "It's starting to look like the market maybe isn't going back to what it was before the pandemic . . ."

That 2025 dealt that optimism such a blow has not made the editors of publications like Deadline more eager to dig into the business' numbers, and if anything less so. Especially as 2025 piled yet another terrible year atop a half decade of on the whole atrocious ones, pushing the business closer to the brink, maybe very close indeed (however little the entertainment press admits it). Given the debt the studios had amassed even before the pandemic and the higher interest rates of the last few years, given the abundance of dodgy accounting (just consider how all those streaming revenues involve related-party deals, and the mysteries of "back catalog" value, and how often we hear a film cost far more than the studio initially admitted), I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Todd's post-Enron prediction of a massive write-down of the values of American business. Todd's prediction didn't come to pass at the time--but ever since it has felt as if it could, with Hollywood seeming to me an especially likely candidate between its vulnerabilities and all that was happening. Meanwhile the assault on Tinseltown by the swaggering "move fast and break things" idiots of Silicon Valley, which has seen a certain shiny-headed space rocket-launching individual who, if no match for Ernst Stavro Blofeld when it comes to sophistication, did what Blofeld could not by getting control of James Bond, while we all now have to look at Larry Ellison's ungulate's rear end of a face all the time because of his family's not just taking over Paramount and all connected with it, but trying to take over Warner Bros. too (as they lamely tell us that really they're not building a monopoly--Heavens no!--but saving us from one, because Netflix, with the media as obsequious as usual in repeating after them).

Still, those interested in these matters are hardly lost without Deadline's tournament, as you could probably come pretty close to what they would offer you by applying some basic rules of thumb to some fairly widely circulated information. Just remember the difference between studio net and gross on the production budget and the grain of salt with which one should accordingly take reports of figures not clearly identifying the measure; that the studios lay out a large sum beyond the production budget on the promotion and distribution of the film (sometimes as much as they spend on its production, but these days usually significantly less--the studios less prolific than before with their outlay here); that movie studios usually end up with a little under half of the reported theatrical gross; that they make a sum equivalent to 50-100 percent of that in the relatively short term from video, streaming, broadcast rights, etc., to go on top of the net (more in the case of low-grossing films, less in the case of high-grossers); and you have a rough and ready formula for broadly computing how a movie did. Thus the makers of a $150 million (net) movie probably spent $75-$150 million spent over and above the production to get it seen, meaning a net outlay of $225-$300 million. Accordingly the movie could break even on as little as $225 million grossed and $110 million or so netted in the theater--yes, that little, because even if that still leaves the movie in the red the video, etc. may provide the minimum required to staunch the gap. Meanwhile if it pulls in $300 million it is on still surer ground, at $400 million one can be confident that it has at least broken even, and at $500 million a healthy profit is probable, with said profit only growing north of that point (though who gets a hold of it might be up for argument, if a star got a Tom Cruise-in-Top Gun-2-like deal), with the rest likely to be a matter of the fine details, not unimportant, not without their share of surprises, but in the end unlikely to alter the big picture quite so much (e.g. "Will Megalopolis be #2 or #4 on the year's biggest flops list?"), and certainly that as given the public by the folks at Deadline.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu: Thoughts on the Box Office

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:44:30 +0000

For many decades the Star Wars franchise was king of the blockbusters. Not only did the original 1977 Star Wars, by bringing the model the James Bond franchise had already established years earlier to slow-learning Hollywood, do much to redefine the Hollywood blockbuster (above all, through its assimilation of the principles of the modern action film, and the popularization of the franchised and merchandised action-packed sci-fi spectacle). It was also the case that this franchise itself was such a strong performer that every one of the original film's sequels and prequels was an event that could be expected to, and almost always did, top the year's box office chart. So did it go with Episodes V and VI and I (in 1980, 1983 and 1999, respectively). With Episode II, Attack of the Clones, there was something of an upset, the first Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man taking the crown that year, but that was really an outlier, while at any rate Star Wars was still #2 that year (2002), and Episodes III, VII and VIII, and even the tie-in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, all the chart-toppers of their years afterward (2005, 2015, 2017 and 2016, respectively), one reason why the folks at Disney had fantasies of turning the Star Wars universe into another Marvel Cinematic Universe machine for cranking out billion-dollar hits.

Of course, all that came to an end with the unfortunate prequel 2018 release Solo. In the wake of that flop Disney shelved its bigger plans, and completed only one more Star Wars film, the last of the new trilogy begun with Episode VII in 2015, which brought in another billion-dollar gross but looked far from being the king of a year dominated by the climax to another cycle about which people seemed far more excited, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's culmination in Phase Three's finale, Avengers: Endgame (a nearly three-billion dollar hit that claimed the all-time box office champion crown!), and even such other hits as the live-action adaptation of The Lion King--just "another franchise" among many in a box office where what had originally been novel about the Star Wars series had since become commonplace. As if that were not enough, the shock to everything Hollywood did by the pandemic (and one might add, the strikes of 2023) compounded the shock of the aforementioned box office reversals, producing a long dry spell in which "actually existing" new Star Wars stories were confined to small screen streaming series' (where, if the economics are comparatively opaque, one would presume them to have flourished given how prolific Disney's investment in them has been), until, following the announcement of many Star Wars projects that just never panned out (new Star Wars movies by Rian Johnson and Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins and James Mangold, the Suits apparently asking "Who's hot right now?" and dropping their projects when they ceased to be hot, in the main because of their can't-work-within-someone-else's-franchise-because-I-am-an-arteest! auteur pretensions, inability to understand the material with which they are to work, and general stupidity, as we saw with The Last Jedi, Thor 4, Wonder Woman: 1984 and Indiana Jones 5), we finally got Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu in May 2026.

Did the new movie mark the return of Star Wars to the top of the box office? Alas, no. Indeed, it didn't even get near the billion-dollar mark, its run apparently sputtering out with just a third that sum banked, less than what Solo made back in 2018 even before we adjust for inflation--and all that, I might add, in a patch of the summer where the competition was not too strong. (It certainly wasn't as if Masters of the Universe was sucking the air out of the box office with roaring ticket sales!) Still, if one cannot call Mandalorian and Grogu a sensational performer, and indeed would be justified in regarding it as a disappointment showing how far Star Wars has fallen as a commercial force, one may be mistaken in calling it a money-loser. After all, knowing that Star Wars is just "another franchise," and at that one a half century old and very intensively (sometimes erratically) mined in recent years, its backers do not seem to have counted on its being a box office champion. Accordingly the budget, if far from small, indeed fairly respectable for a major summer release ($165 million!), was still more modest than those of many of its predecessors--a smaller production released with lower expectations that even with the far from stellar gross may well see the movie at least break even when the post-theatrical revenue is taken into account (coming on top of the $170 million or so likely to have been netted theatrically, something north of $300 million plausible, quite enough to cover not just the cost of the production but the marketing/distribution costs as well, and plausibly even turn a profit). Moreover, this particular movie had a stronger claim than most films to being judged by more than its box office given its role in shoring up the TV empire of which it is a tie-in, the back catalog value of one of the biggest franchises in history (in this case, not to be trivialized), and the merchandising value of all things related to it (which is, again, a very big deal in Star Wars' case). The result is that if the makers of Mandalorian and Grogu may reasonably have hoped for more than they got in the way of ticket sales not only may they be better than dissatisfied with the result, but, as they clearly hope that Shawn Levy, who unlike so many of the arteests to whom Disney turned in the past shown that he knows how to thrill the fan base of a creaking franchise, will score again the way he did in 2024 when Star Wars: Starfighter hits theaters a year after Mandalorian did, Memorial Day weekend 2027--and if all concerned are very, very lucky, helping establish a tradition of Memorial Day Star Wars movies, just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe did of new Marvel superhero movies on the opening weekend in May for so many years.