The Movies of Early 2025

After the turmoil of the last few years at the box office, 2024 felt very much like a rebuilding year.  Covid is now becoming a distant but still haunting memory, and Hollywood for now has settled it’s fights with labor after the crippling strikes of last year.  But even still, the blow of those back to back crises have taken their toll on Hollywood and especially with movie theaters.  The hope was that after being rattled for nearly half a decade that the movie theater industry would finally see a rebound.  But, with the strike pushing back so many productions in the pipeline, there was a fear that the backlog would cause the preceding year, 2024, to feel very empty.  Movie theaters needs an abundance of product in order to survive, and because of Hollywood’s internal problems, the theatrical market was looking to have a possibly light year.  However, some surprising things did happen.  One was the resurgence of Disney, who bounced back big after a disastrous 2023, which saw many of their films crash hard at the box office.  This year, they managed to be the first studio to cross the $3 billion box office mark this decade, thanks to mega hits like Inside Out 2 (2024), Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and Moana 2 (2024), as well as with modest hits like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) and Alien: Romulus (2024).  And that’s quite the feat considering that they didn’t even release a single film in the Spring.  The other studios managed to fare well with some of their tentpoles too, with Universal scoring big with Wicked Part One (2024) and Warner Brothers doing well with sequels like Dune: Part Two (2024) and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).  There were however some shocking flops as well, with once believed to be sure fire hits like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) and Joker: Folie a Deux (2024) both becoming massive flops.  And while there are positive signs of recovery, movie theaters are still expressing concern about the lack of consistent business throughout the year, and are hoping that Hollywood ramps up their production line once again to help keep the lights on at the movies.

As 2024 comes to an end, it is now that time once again to look ahead at what the next year brings.  With the re-building year that we experienced these past twelve months, which saw fewer movies but in general stronger performance from those that did stand out, the hope is that the groundwork has been set for an even bigger rebound in 2025.  Like past years, I will be taking a look at the upcoming movie of the Early 2025 season.  This includes my picks for the Must Sees, the ones that have me worried, as well as the movies that are worth skipping.  My choices don’t always pan out like I initially thought they would, so there might be a few surprises here.  My previews are purely my own gut readings about these movies based on how much interest I have in them based on the effectiveness or lack thereof of their marketing.  So, with all that said, let’s take a look at the movies of Early 2024.

MUST SEES:

CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD (FEBRUARY 14)

You can always count on Marvel to deliver spectacle on the big screen, and given that they found some of their mojo again in 2024 thanks to the success of Deadpool & Wolverine, the hope is that they can carry some of that momentum into the new year.  2025 is going to be a major year for Marvel Studios, with three big tent-poles planned.  We will have to wait until the summer for Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but this winter season we do get a new chapter in the Captain America franchise started on the big screen.  Post Avengers: Endgame (2019), the dynamic of the character has completely changed, with Chris Evans retiring from the role of Steve Rogers (the original Cap) and the superhero known as the Falcon now picking up the Shield and assuming the role, with actor Anthony Mackie now getting that top billing.  It will be exciting to see how well Mackie does under the new title.  We already saw a glimpse of him as Captain America in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier where he managed to pull the part off pretty well, especially with the falcon wings now combined with Captain’s red white and blue uniform.  But what is interesting with this film is that it’s signaling a return for Marvel to a more hard edge thriller style for the franchise, like what we saw with Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014).  There are some interesting new elements they are bringing in, like Harrison Ford assuming the role of Thaddeus Ross, which had previously been played by the late William Hurt.  Here, we finally see the payoff of the Red Hulk plot-line for Ross that was made famous in the comic books, and it’s pretty impressive so far from what we’ve seen of Harrison’s transformation into a Hulk from the trailers.  The effects used for Anthony Mackie’s flying moments also look intense and visceral as well.  I’m also interested in seeing how they finally pay off the return of Tim Blake Nelson’s villainous Leader, 17 years after he was first introduced in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk.  Hopefully Marvel starts the year off strong with this blockbuster return of one of their most important Avengers.

PADDINGTON IN PERU (FEBRUARY 14)

A very different change of pace from the latest from Marvel Studios.  The first two Paddington movies have managed to earn the reputation of being some of the best family films ever made.  Some would even claim Paddington 2 to be one of the best sequels ever made, period.  Given that, the expectations are very high for this third film in the series.  The lovable marmalade eating bear returns once again, but this film has him returning to the place he originally came from; the jungles of Darkest Peru.  It’s a refreshing way to change up the formula for these movies, and hopefully the same good humor that defined the first two movies translates over as well.  Unfortunately, this film did not carry over the director of the first two, Paul King, who was busy at work creating the hit musical Wonka (2023).  It did carry over much of the same cast though.  Ben Whishaw continues to give Paddington his warm and disarmingly kind voice.  Hugh Bonneville is also once again on board as the frustrated but kind Mr. Brown.  This movie does bring in some exciting newcomers into the cast, including the always charming Olivia Colman as a singing nun, and Antonio Banderas as a river boat captain.  The only worry I have with this film is that the last movie maybe has set expectations too high, and that this threequel may not live up to what has come before.  Hopefully the film still remains entertaining.  It’s that rare movie that is meant for kids, but is so clever in it’s execution that it also provides a lot of entertainment for adults as well.  I think as long as they remain true to the heart of the characters and their story, this third Paddington movie should still manage to be a fun time at the movies.  And taking him out of his comfortable domestic life in England and putting him back into the perils of the jungle may just be the exciting little adventure this series need to keep itself going.

MICKEY 17 (MARCH 7)

So here is a movie that I already talked about at length over a year ago.  The reason I’m talking about it again is because shortly after my last preview, Mickey 17 got pushed back a full year and more from it’s original release.  Now closer to the actual release, we actually have a lot more information about what kind of movie we are getting, and it’s a bit of a surprise.  Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho is known for making films with a darker tone, so it’s surprising that with this new sci-fi film that it appears he’s making a comedy.  It’s certainly not what you’d expect as the follow-up to something like Parasite (2019).  But, at the same time, it looks like it’s going to be a fun movie as well.  What really gets me in this trailer is the performance that Robert Pattinson is giving.  Pattinson has been spending the last decade trying to shake off his Twilight past, and he’s managed to make it work out by taking on all these quirky character roles, and his work here in Mickey 17 is very much a huge departure from his Twilight films.  I love the weird, high pitched voice he’s giving Mickey here, because it sounds like nothing you’d expect someone like him talk like.  The fact that he’s so jaded about dying, because he keeps being replaced with new clone bodies, also is a hilarious aspect he’s added to this character.  But the question will be if Bong Joon-ho manages to nail the tone of this film.  He’s had comedic moments in this movies before, but I don’t think he’s embraced this kind of level of absurdism.  It’s definitely an experiment for the groundbreaking director that’s worth checking out.  I’m also excited to see how actors like Mark Ruffalo, Toni Colette, and Steven Yuen also work within this story.  Hopefully the extra year of waiting was worth it, and the extra information we now have about this movie gives it a whole new level of intrigue that I hope makes this a truly unique film experience.

SINNERS (APRIL 18)

Perhaps the most mysterious movie lined up for release in the next couple of months, this new film from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler looks to be a very provocative cinematic experience.  Sinners reunites Coogler with his frequent leading man Michael B. Jordan (whose appeared in all of his movies so far) and shows him playing a man desperately trying to survive some evil presence in what looks to be the Prohibition Era American South.  What the characters are up against remains vague so far; Zombies, vampires, we haven’t been told yet.  But Coogler is certainly paying homage to horror movies of the past like Night of the Living Dead (1968) with some of the visuals he has shown briefly so far in the trailers.  Coogler has proven himself to be a capable genre director in the past, with his Black Panther movies perfectly displaying his command of the super hero genre.  It will b really interesting to see how well he applies his skills to horror.  It’s also interesting what film stocks he’s using here.  The movie looks like it’s being shot on film with large formats in mind.  The dramatic scenes appear to have been shot with 70mm Panavision, giving that extra bit of super widescreen like what we saw with Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015).  And meanwhile, the action scenes have been filmed in 70mm IMAX.  So, with those two large formats being used, it seems like Ryan Coogler wants this movie to be a major spectacle, and I am excited to see the finished results on the biggest screen possible.  It’s a good move trying to sell this movie on it’s atmosphere and sense of mystery, rather than just spelling out what kind of danger is lurking in the shadows.  And hopefully that fruitful collaboration between Coogler and Jordan continues to yield success for both of them here.  Let’s hope that when this mystery unravels that it makes for one hell of a scary movie in the end.

WOLF MAN (JANUARY 17)

One of the best decisions that Universal Studios has made in the last 10 years was to abandon their DOA Dark Universe plans, and hand off their stable of classic movie monsters over to more capable hands in the horror genre.  Blumhouse has become the beneficiary of the classic Universal monsters, and they began their successful collaboration in 2020 with their adaptation of the Invisible Man.  The modern day re-imagining of the classic movie monster created one of the best horror movies of the last few years and it showed Universal that you don’t need to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into this kind of franchise in order to create a cinematic universe.  All you really need to do is make your movies scary, and as Blumhouse has demonstrated with their own house style, less can be more.  The director of The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell, has been granted yet another classic Universal monster to work with; the Wolf Man.  Just like what he did with Invisible Man, Whannell is stripping the story down to just the basics and using all of his tricks in building suspense and atmosphere in deliver the scares.  I like the fact that the movie is a simple cabin in the woods story focusing solely on a single family.  Christopher Abbott is the father whose bloody encounter with the monster leads him to go through a terrifying transformation, causing him to become the titular Wolf Man.  It’s a smart way to tell this story, by keeping things personal, with the father coming to the horrible realization that he’s slowly loosing his humanity, and his wife (Julia Garner) becoming increasingly terrified that the man she loves is becoming more and more a threat to the safety of her and their daughter.  I hope that Leigh Whannell manages to deliver again with this re-imagining of the Wolf Man story, and that both Universal and Blumhouse continue to work with their remaining stable of characters in this same simple but effectively creepy manner.

MOVIES THAT HAVE ME WORRIED:

SNOW WHITE (MARCH 21)

This remake of Disney’s very first feature length animated film has been contentious to say the least.  It’s coming out at a time when audiences are generally growing tired of Disney’s trend of remaking their old classics, viewing many of them as shameless cash grabs.  Currently, the sequel to one of those remakes, Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) is struggling at the box office, showing that the era where these kinds of movies were able to mint money for Disney may be over now.  At the same time, this movie has been plagued with production woes, which caused the budget to swell out of control and led to a delay of over a year from it’s originally planned Spring 2024 release.  It’s been said that in order to recoup their costs, Disney will need this movie to gross over $600 million, which is going to be difficult given that audiences seem to have moved on from the Disney remakes.  And if all that weren’t bad enough, this movie has become a hot potato subject in the annoying present “culture war” debates, purely because the film’s star, Rachel Zegler, has been outspoken about her feelings about what it means to be a Disney Princess in the modern era.  Zegler is certainly entitled to her opinion, and I honestly have no problems with the things she has said, but there are plenty of other bad faith critics out there online who are grinding their axes anxiously waiting to tear this movie apart.  I myself have a lot of worries about this film, mainly due to my own lack of enthusiasm for the Disney remakes trend.  But, at the same time, I also had these same worries about their The Little Mermaid (2023) remake last year, and ended up being pleasantly surprised and charmed by that movie.  My hope is that Snow White  will surprise me in the same way.  I like Rachel Zegler as a performer and I think she can pull off the role of Snow White well enough, especially as a singer.  The casting of Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen also looks to be interesting.  Can’t say I admire the CGI dwarves though; hopefully they work better in the final film.  Things may turn out bad for this one, and I’m dreading the discourse around it.  After the good year that Disney had in 2024, I don’t want to see them end up with another black eye at the box office.

DOG MAN (JANUARY 31)

One thing that has bothered me in recent years is the inconsistency that we’ve seen from Dreamworks Animation.  Once one of the vanguard studios in the animation industry, the brand has taken a hit with quite a few misfires in recent years; much more so than their rivals Disney, Pixar, and Illumination.  Sure they still put out a hit film every now and then, like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) and this year’s The Wild Robot (2024), but these hits will often be offset by a lackluster sequel like Trolls: Band Together (2023) or a full on flop like Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken (2023).  My worry is that this will also be the case for their next film, Dog Man.  Based on the popular children’s book series, this new film copies the illustrated look from the novels, which does look appealing enough.  But it also seems like it retains the same entertainment level of the books as well, which is mainly catering first and foremost for kids.  There’s nothing wrong with choosing that as the target audience, but Dreamworks Animation at their best doesn’t just make movies for younger audiences; they make them for all ages.  As stated before, there are movies like the Paddington films that transcend their G-rated appeal and are able to give enough entertainment to audiences no matter their age.  Many Dreamworks movies in the past have done that as well too.  But with movies like Dog Man, they seem to be pandering to a specific audience, and that to me says that they are limiting their creativity in the process.  I could be wrong, and this movie may in fact have just as much humor and charm to appeal to both the parents and their kids.  It’s just not coming across like that in the advertisement.  My hope is that Dreamworks manages to find that spark again to bring them up to the level of Pixar and Disney, especially at a time when both of those studios are delivering billion dollar movies again.

LOVE HURTS (FEBRUARY 7)

It has been pleasing to see the career revival of Ke Huy Quan in recent years.  The former child actor famous for playing Data in The Goonies (1985) and Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) has made a remarkable comeback as an adult, especially with his Oscar-winning turn in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022).  Now, he gets to be a top billed star in his own action movie.  Having worked as a stunt coordinator for several years, Ke Huy Quan is no novice when it comes to performing action scenes, and it appears that many of the set pieces in this upcoming film feature him doing many of his own stunts, which is impressive.  I think another plus is him putting a upbeat, happy-go-lucky spin on the character, which could make it a fun time.  It’s also great to see in the trailer that Ke’s fellow Goonie Sean Astin has a supporting role in this film, possibly marking the first time they’ve actually been in a movie together since The Goonies almost 40 years ago, which would be quite the reunion.  The only thing I worry about is that this kind of genre may have been played out too much already.  The John Wick films constantly has to refresh itself with every film to keep the premise from growing stale, and the plot for this film feels a little too close to the Bob Odenkirk film Nobody (2021).  Hopefully, Quan’s magnetic charm is able to carry this film.  It’s not so much the performance that I worry about but rather the action scenes themselves.  Hopefully, given that this movie is from the same production company behind Nobody and Violent Night (2022), they are going to keep things fresh and make the action set pieces unique and fun to watch.  They definitely have the right actor in place, who knows a thing or two about fight choreography, and he’s at a point in his career where people are excited to see him on the big screen again.  He’s long overdue for a starring role, and hopefully Love Hurts is that fun kind of violent spectacle that lives up to the high standards of the genre.

THE LEGEND OF OCHI (FEBRUARY 28)

When it comes to A24, you certainly take a risk with what kind of movie you’re going to end up watching.  And that has been the appeal of A24, the fact that they do make the kinds of movies that no one else will make, mainly due to so many of them being just so insanely weird.  But, not all of their movies are home runs.  Sometimes you do get that odd movie that just doesn’t land.  This new fantasy film sees the studio launching into a more family friendly territory than what we usually see from them.  The movie definitely takes it’s inspiration from family adventure films like E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982), but with a much more art house flavor to it.  There are things that I find really appealing about this film.  One, you can’t go wrong with Willem Dafoe in your cast.  And second, I like the fact that the creature in this film looks to be a physical puppet instead of a CGI creation.  It’s nice to see one practical effect used in this film.  The only thing that bothers me is that there seems to be a vaguely AI art feel to the film, particularly with the impressionistic environments.  I’m hoping that this is an intentional artistic choice, and not the filmmakers trying to cut corners using AI in place of actual hand made effects.  The practical effect of Ochi tells me that this film is leaning more into real effects than CGI, so hopefully it’s just a coincidence that the art style looks like AI art.  The problem is that AI art is at a phase where it creates this odd blended look to it that softens the image and makes it feel in a way soulless, because it’s created by algorithms and not by a trained artistic eye.  It unfortunately reflects bad on a movie like this, where a softer look is probably intentional.  My hope is that the visuals work more cohesively in the finished film, because it does look like a charming movie, and another example of A24’s commitment to unique visions in cinema.

MOVIES TO SKIP:

A MINECRAFT MOVIE (APRIL 4)

It’s kind of insane how many movies based on video games have included actor Jack Black in them.  He played Bowser in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and also voice Claptrap in this year’s Borderlands (2024), and neither film was very good.  The same seems to likely also be the case with this adaptation of the popular block building game, Minecraft.  Given that the game itself is just an open world sandbox, there isn’t much of a narrative to draw from, so the makers of this movie just decided to copy the Mario Bros. formula instead.  Jack Black plays the avatar character of the game, Steve, who we learn here came from the real world and has been living in the Minecraft world because of reasons we don’t know about yet; nor really care either.  The film also brings in a weird assortment of supporting characters, including the additions of Jason Mamoa and Danielle Brooks to the mix.  Jack Black is there to be his same old persona, which I guess you’re getting what you paid for with that.  He’s a fine comedic presence sometimes, but man I wish he would stop taking paycheck roles like this and actually make something that better uses his talents as an actor.  I get the feeling that too many of the jokes in this movie will fly over the heads of people who have never played the games.  The re-imagining of the world itself even feels off, adding more textural detail to a game whose mass appeal is it’s retro simplicity.  Coming off of the massive failure that was Borderlands, Jack Black probably doesn’t want to be associated with yet another failed adaptation of a video game, but that’s sadly what may end up being the case again here.  And this time, he can’t hide himself behind a CGI animated character anymore.

FLIGHT RISK (JANUARY 24)

Another film that I talked about before in a preview, before it got switched to a later release date after I published the article.  In general, my feelings towards this movie hasn’t changed in the interim.  I still see it as a major step down for both Mark Wahlberg and director Mel Gibson.  Gibson continues to burn through all the good will he may have had left in Hollywood with his self-indulgent choices as an actor and filmmaker, and it seems like this is the only kind of movie he’s now capable of making.  He’s gone from the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Braveheart (1995) to making a B-movie action thriller.  Mark Wahlberg is also seeming to be an actor just spinning his wheels as a performer, taking safe familiar roles that coast on his name rather than actually doing anything challenging.  Hopefully both men get out of their own bad habits and actually make movies that are better suited for their talents.  This movie looks like it’s dead on arrival, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that Lionsgate pushed it out of the competitive Fall Season and left it in the dumping ground that is late January.  We’ll see if it’s better than it looks on the surface, but something tells me that this one is not going to be lighting up the box office, and hopefully it makes the two men behind it become more reflective of how their talents are being wasted.

NOVOCAINE (MARCH 14)

In contrast with Love Hurts, here we have an action comedy example of trying too hard.  The film’s premise is that the main character feels no pain, so he’s able to fight without the experience of pain affecting his state of mind.  Jack Quaid is a likable enough actor, but here I don’t quite buy into him being a capable action star the same way that I do with Ke Huy Quan.  With Quan, you already know going in that he has martial arts training and a background in stunts.  Here, Quaid definitely is not the one doing the stunts.  What you have to rely upon then for this film’s premise to work is it’s sense of humor, and again judging by this trailer, that seems to be lacking as well.  This kind of premise could work, but it requires more believable stunts as well as an actor with a bit more of a off-kilter personality.  Jack Quaid seems to be playing this character as too much of a milquetoast every-man.  Perhaps there might be a bit more to this movie, but it just looks to be playing it too safe.  This needed a far more absurdist take on the material.  In a genre now dominated by the John Wick’s of the world, your action comedies need to stand out more, and that requires taking a whole lot more chances.

So, there you have my preview of the movies coming out in Early 2025, pending any last minute release date changes.  One thing that’s noticeable is the lack of major tentpoles in the month of March.  Sure, there’s Mickey 17  and Snow White set for release, but it’s a noticeably emptier month than what we have usually had.  It’s the key Spring Break period of the year, so the studios have used March as a way of generating some early box office wins while people on on their holiday.  This past year we saw this as the place where blockbusters like Dune: Part Two and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) were able to find their audiences and generate some strong box office.  But this year, things feel a lot less bountiful in the Spring.  This might be the residual effect of the strikes, as the backlog of projects has created a gap in the pipeline of movie releases, and Hollywood no longer has any movies left available that they were able to delay until the strikes were over.  Hopefully, this doesn’t leave the rest of the year in a weaker state.  2024 was a year with a lot of positive signs of recovery for the theatrical business, and the hope is that this momentum will continue into 2025.  Big movies like Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners should help give the box office a boost, but movie theaters will need many more movies to outperform expectations going into the new year.  The hope is that by the time Summer rolls around that things will especially begin to sizzle at the box office and that hopefully movie theaters will able to endure what may be a lighter than usual Spring season.  In any case, there are a lot of movies that I personally am looking forward to in 2025, and in some cases I won’t have to wait too long as some of my Must Sees are definitely found in these early months ahead.  So, have a Happy New Year and let’s all have a fun time going to the movies in 2025.

Mufasa: The Lion King – Review

The trend of Disney re-makes of their classic animated films has become a, shall we say, contentious thing within the fandom.  While some animation fans are happy to see these classics re-imagined in a live action, plenty more are not so happy.  The argument is that Disney is not adding anything new to these movies, and that their creation is purely for a cynical cash grab.  While there is merit to those arguments, I for one try to judge each of these remakes on their own.  The best remakes are the ones that can justify their existence, and make the case that a live action version of a classic animated film is there to compliment it rather than overshadow it.  Disney, for the most part has been all over the place with their re-makes.  Of the movies, I would say one is an improvement over the original (Pete’s Dragon), while quite a few are just as good (Cinderella, Jungle Book) and some that are not better but were decent in their own way (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin).  But, then we have the re-makes that absolutely fail at being anywhere near the same league as the originals (Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, Dumbo).  But this trend of Disney “live action” remakes hit it’s pinnacle with the release of 2019’s The Lion King.  Pinnacle in terms of box office yes, with a world wide gross of $1.5 billion, but also pinnacle in it’s absolute worthlessness.  I ranked the film as the worst of the year, and that was because I thought it represented the worst of the remake trend under Disney; a pure copy and paste job that paled against the original in every way and was the most blatant cash grab that I had ever witnessed from Disney, which is saying a lot.  So, you can imagine that I had a lot of worries and resentment on my mind when I learned that Disney was preparing another film in the same world of their Lion King remake; a prequel centered around the character of Mufasa.

I get why Disney was doing this.  Shareholders were pleased with the box office results of the first Lion King remake, and they wanted Disney to do it again.  It didn’t matter that the first remake was critically panned (including from yours truly) and that it didn’t even register in awards season.  The billion dollar gross was what mattered, so Disney was looking to find a way to follow up their mega-hit.  But, what direction would they take.  There were direct-to-video sequels to the original 1994 Lion King, but those films aren’t as beloved, so doing yet another copy and paste job wasn’t seen as ideal.  They would have to go a more original route.  Unfortunately for Disney, the director behind the first Lion King remake, Jon Favreau, had already moved over to the Lucasfilm side of the company to work on The Mandalorian series on Disney+, along with a slew of many other Star Wars projects in the pipeline.  This was going to leave him unavailable for some time, so a new director was needed.  Surprisingly, Disney went far outside their stable to look for a new director, and they found the unlikeliest of filmmakers to fill that role.  Barry Jenkins was considered to be an art house filmmaker, having made a name for himself writing and directing Oscar winning films like Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018).  Going into the new decade he was deep into production of his ambitious mini-series for Amazon Prime, The Underground Railroad, when Disney approached him with the prospect of working on their follow-up to The Lion King, and he was surprisingly receptive to the offer.  After gaining a strong reputation as a prestige director, was he gambling that good will by taking on what many saw as a corporate cash grab, or was he seizing an opportunity to bring his artistic style to a bigger canvas that would have broad appeal with worldwide audiences?  It would all depend on if he could elevate this story beyond it’s predecessor and create something that both creatively satisfied himself as well as fulfilled the obligation that Disney had entrusted him with.  And so, the result is the prequel backstory of Mufasa: The Lion King.

When Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyonce) must leave Pride Rock for a day, they entrust Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) to babysit their daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter).  A sudden storm causes the trio to seek refuge in a cave, where they also find Rafiki (John Kani) meditating.  In order to help calm the rattled lioness cub and her companions until the storm passes, Rafiki begins to tell the story of how Kiara’s grandfather, Mufasa, became king.  Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is washed away by a river and separated from his family.  He ends up many miles away in the territory of another pride of lions.  Their cub prince, Taka (Theo Somolu) helps save Mufasa from the perils of the river and brings him to the pride’s nesting grounds.  Taka’s mother Eshe (Thandiwe Newton) takes Mufasa under herwing, but the father Obasi (Lennie James) doesn’t trust Mufasa because he is an outsider.  Many years pass, and grown up Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Taka (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) have become as close as brothers.  The peace of Obasi’s pridelands is shattered however when a pack of white lions invade.  While protecting his adoptive mother, Mufasa kills one of the male white lions.  The dead lion turns out to be the son of the white lions’ king, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), who now has a vendetta against Obasi’s pride as well as for Mufasa himself.  In order to secure the bloodline of the pride, Obasi sends his son and Mufasa away for their protection.  Forced to seek out a home of their own, Taka and Mufasa venture into the wilderness.  Mufasa convinces Taka that they should seek a vast green valley called Milele which he remembers his mother talking about when he was little.  On the road, they encounter other travelers, including the lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and her bird companion Zazu (Preston Nyman), as well as a young Rafiki (Kagiso Lediga).  But, their journey is not without more peril, and Kiros and his minions are following their tracks every step of the way.  Can they stay ahead, and does the presence of Sarabi drive a wedge between the Mufasa and Taka that shatters their brotherhood?

Given my distaste for the first Lion King remake, I didn’t have a lot of high hopes for this prequel.  My interest did perk up though when I learned that Barry Jenkins was tapped to direct.  Jenkin’s involvement could indeed bring some much needed depth and character to what otherwise was a soulless corporate product.  But, was Disney going to let him cook, or was he going to be another promising filmmaker swallowed up by the machine.  The expectations were already low, and my hope was that the movie wouldn’t be any worse than the first film.  And thankfully, it isn’t.  At the same time it’s also not a whole lot better either.  Mufasa: The Lion King is an improvement in many ways, but it also suffers from a lot of problems that are just inherent in the presentation itself.  Let me start with the positive, in that it is refreshing that this movie is not just another copy and paste job like the last movie.  The Lion King remake was one of the laziest big studio films that I had ever experienced, because it was a purely shot for shot remake, minus all of the soul that you get out of traditional animation.  I’ll talk more about my issues with the animation later, but at least story-wise it was refreshing watching this movie and not knowing what the story beats would be from scene to scene.  Now, the story was a still a tad bit on the predictable side, but at least they were building from scratch and not with the same exact script from another movie.  It’s a risk taking on a prequel, because you ultimately know the destination it’s heading towards.  But, the backstory of Mufasa is something that Disney has never really explored much in any media, so if there was any fertile ground to mine out of this franchise, this is where they found it, and Mufasa is a compelling enough character that the movie does manage to justify it’s own existence, merely by finally giving us something we haven’t seen yet out of this world.

Where the film falters though is in it’s inconsistent execution of the story.  The biggest flaw of the film is it’s framing device.  The film pulls away from Mufasa’s story constantly to remind the audience that they are being told the story second-hand by Rafiki.  I have a feeling that this was a studio mandated addition to the film that Barry Jenkins was forced to put in there, just to break up the seriousness of the movie’s tone in order to inject more kid friendly comedy to stay with the shot attention spans of younger audiences.  Each time these cutaways would happen in the film, it would grind the movie to a halt, and rob the movie of any dramatic heft.  And the cutaways to the present would be excruciating too, because it involved very unfunny comedy relief from Timon and Pumbaa.  Seriously, I hated this framing device so much because of what it was doing to the story proper.  Even worse, they were making meta jokes about The Lion King movie, the Broadway play, and Disney in general that felt horribly out of place in this world and just seemed like a desperate ploy by Disney creatives to make themselves look more clever than they really are.  They should have just let Barry Jenkins work with the story he was given and not feel the need to spice it up with pop culture puns.  You could cut out all of these cringey interstitials and the story would’ve flowed so much better.  It may not have been the greatest story ever told, but the tone wouldn’t feel all over the place and you would get a more cohesive experience.  It’s where the film felt like it was compromised the most.  While watching it, I found myself managing to appreciate the story when it found it’s groove, but then I’d grow frustrated again every time Timon and Pumbaa butted in.  It’s the worst instincts of studio interference sabotaging whatever kinds of improvements that this movie was attempting to make in response to the first movie’s mistakes.

Overall, Barry Jenkins does attempt to bring some improvements, but it also feels that he had his hands tied.  But there were just some things that were also impossible to fix in general.  The photorealism of the movie is still a major problem, because of how it robs the character out of the animation.  I talked about this a lot in my original “live action” Lion King review here, but this film too suffers from the lack emotive animation that the traditional style can offer.  When you use traditional, “cartoony” animation, you can give everything from humans to animals to even appliances expressive facial emotions.  This goes a long way towards helping an audience connect with these characters on an emotional level, because the animators are able to display emotion purely through expression; conveying things that dialogue along can’t deliver.  When animating with photorealistic animal characters, you lose that creative license because animals like lions don’t have a wide array of facial expressions in real life.  A lion’s face is emotionless by nature, and trying to get that kind of character model to emote in a movie like this while still maintaining that photorealism just doesn’t work.  The animators try to push expressions just a little bit more here compared to the first film, but the movie still can’t quite get there.  It doesn’t help that Jenkins is also a novice when it comes to animation, so he isn’t able to push the medium beyond it’s comfort zone.  There are some impressive shots of landscapes in this movie, and I do appreciate the diverse amount of locations that Jenkins tries to bring into this world, including a beautiful passage through snow capped mountains.  But the photorealistic presentation also just keeps things feeling impersonal when it should be awe-inspiring.  The thought that kept crossing my head throughout the movie was that all of this might have made for a better movie if it was a prequel to the original animated movie and animated in that style instead.  It may not have been as good as that 30 year old classic, but it would have had a lot more character to it than what we got here.

The film is also a mixed bag in terms of the vocal performances.  For one thing, I really was not digging the shoehorned way that the orginal film’s cast was brought into this movie.  It just reminded me about the waste of talent that the first remake was.  Donald Glover still sounds unremarkable as Simba, and I think Beyonce just gets one line total in this entire movie (and still manages to be one of the top billed stars).  Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen were especially grating this time around and really wanted them to shut up every time the movie cut back to them.  But at the same time, I thought the movie had some strong performances from the newcomers.  The best performance by far comes from Aaron Pierre, who had the unenviable task of playing Mufasa.  He had enormous shoes to fill, as he’s tasked with taking over the role from the late great James Earl Jones, an actor so iconicly tied to the role of Mufasa that he voiced him twice, both in the original and the remake.  Pierre manages to pick up that mantle in a way that is respectful to Jones’ performance, but also allows for the actor to make it his own.  I also viewed Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s performance as Taka to be a far better take on the character that one day becomes the villain Scar than Chiwetel Ejiofor’s phoned in performance in the original remake.  Of course, both still pale compared to Jeremy Iron’s original performance.  Speaking of villainous turns, Mads Mikkelsen reliably brings some appropriate menace to the character of Kiros, and helps the somewhat one-dimensional villain stand out just a bit better.  One other thing that this movie has going for it is that it features a new score of original songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda; Disney’s current in-house hit maker.  While the songs here are passable, they aren’t quite as strong as Miranda’s other recent work and certainly no where near the quality of Elton John’s work in the original animated classic.  But, at least Barry Jenkins has a voice cast here that’s capable of singing and doing the Miranda songs justice.  You don’t have to listen to Eichner and Rogen mangle “Hakuna Matata” anymore.

Whatever issues Disney still has with their production of live action remakes, none of them are going to be solved by the results of Mufasa: The Lion King.  Certainly bringing Barry Jenkins on board to direct this movie was a bold move, but even a great filmmaker like him can only do so much to lampshade the problems that are inherent in the production to begin with.  I can see the kernels of the more enriching story about destiny and finding yourself through adversity that Barry Jenkins was trying to strive for in his telling of Mufasa’s story, but I also see all of the meddling from Disney executives who seemed to get cold feet from this more mature storyline and tried to shoe horn in more stuff for the little kids.  The most redeeming thing about this film is that it has more originality to it than a straightforward remake.  Barry Jenkins doesn’t use any pre-built template here and tries his best to craft something new. In some fleeting moments, he succeeds, and the movie actually rises above it’s mediocrity.  But too often, you feel the cynicism of the studio trying to milk this franchise out of all the money they can get from it.  My hope is that Barry Jenkins is able to use this exercise to grow as a filmmaker and make something bold and ambitious for his next film.  The worst case is if it ruins his reputation and he just becomes a director for hire in the future, no longer driving his own artistic style but rather just finding the work that he can get.  He’s a very unique voice, and it’s a risk for someone like him to work within the machine like he’s doing here with Mufasa.  I give him credit for trying, and you do see flashes of creative brilliance here.  But Mufasa just has too many flaws that hold it back.  It is an improvement over the first remake, but I argue again why they don’t just take this story and apply it to the original animated style.  That’s where this story truly belongs, and I feel like The Lion King’s place is less in a real world aesthetic and more in the realm of escapist fantasy that hand drawn animation can provide.  Stop trying to strip away the color and animation out of this storyline and let this Lion King truly roar.

Rating: 6/10

What the Hell Was That? – Eight Crazy Nights (2002)

On thing that we know about Christmas movies is that there are a lot of them.  Literally hundreds.  And you have any type of Christmas movie you want; funny Christmas movies, sad Christmas movies, dark Christmas movies, and even violent Christmas movies.  But, the one other thing you’ll note is that the holiday season seems to exclusively belong to Christmas cinematically.  It’s not the only holiday that is celebrated during the peak of the Winter season, and yet if you had only the movies to go by, you would think that Christmas stands alone.  There are a variety of winter season festivals that mark the end of the year, but it’s perhaps the eight night holiday of Hanukkah that usually is celebrated alongside Christmas by the Jewish community that is the only other one known to most people.  Hanukkah, the Hebrew festival of light, shares the tradition of gift giving with the Christmas holiday, and in recent times it has risen up in esteem culturally as being a presence in the otherwise homogenous Christmas season.  It’s not uncommon today to see a menorah alongside a Christmas tree in public holiday displays, and as there are growing interfaith families across the world, the sharing of the season between the two holidays is becoming far more widespread as well.   And it is a great thing that culturally we are viewing the holiday season as a celebration of traditions from all over the world now and not just that of Christmas.  But, in terms of cinema, we still haven’t seen much change in the dominance that Christmas has over the season.  Though there have been some attempts, we haven’t seen a film emerge as the definitive Hanukkah movie that helps to cement it’s place as a classic in the same way so many Christmas films do.  Of course, one filmmaker did try, and it unfortunately turned into a monumental disaster.

One of the reasons that we haven’t seen a true Hanukkah classic emerge out of Hollywood is because so many Jewish filmmakers have used their talents to help shape the Christmas season we all know and love.  If you think about it, we have the Jewish community to thank for some of the best Christmas specials and songs that continue to remain essential parts of the holiday to this day (Rankin & Bass, Irving Berlin, etc.)  So it’s surprising that Jews, who make up a significant part of Hollywood history and continue to remain an important community in the industry today, have never been self reflective and put a spotlight on their own holiday season traditions.  Well, one of the reasons that it’s probably the case is that Hanukkah isn’t as important a holiday on the Jewish calendar as Christmas is to the gentiles.  Passover and Yom Kippur are far more important, so Jews probably never saw the reason to spotlight Hanukkah on the big screen as a big deal.  A lot of modern Jews even celebrate the secular aspects of the Christmas holiday alongside their non-Jewish friends, so it’s probably why many Jewish filmmakers gladly made movies and specials to celebrate the holiday season.  But, as Hanukkah has grown as a part of the season culturally in recent years, there are more filmmakers who have wanted to try to give the spotlight to the holiday.  One of those filmmakers turned out to be comedian Adam Sandler.  Sandler, who grew up in a Jewish household himself, played upon the absence of Hanukkah in the public eye during the holiday season, and worked it into a song in his act.  Dubbed “The Hanukkah Song,” Sandler’s tune made it’s first debut on a segment of Saturday Night Live, with Sandler using the song to spotlight a list of beloved Jewish celebrities.  It’s corny and doesn’t really give you any insight into the holiday itself, but in a way it’s also a fun way of showing pride in being Jewish that I’m sure was a major part in Sandler’s crafting of the song.  Perhaps to his surprise, the song took off and became a hit.  In a season dominated by Christmas, it seemed that Sandler’s joke song may have in fact finally enabled Hanukkah to finally crack into the holiday season songbook.

With a hit song, it seemed only a matter of time before Adam Sandler would capitalize on it’s success by making a movie.  And in the turn of the millennium, it was a good bet that he could get that movie made.  Sandler spent his immediate post-SNL years becoming a huge box office champ with movies like Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996) and Big Daddy (1999) all performing extremely well.  At this point in his career, he could get any film greenlit.  This eventually got him a meeting with Columbia Pictures had Amy Pascal, who was interested in producing a holdiay themed movie based around the popular Hanukkah song.  Sandler had an idea for his Hanukkah themed movie, but it was a major departure from what he had made before.  In perhaps the spirit of holiday specials like those from Rankin/Bass and classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Sandler wanted his Hanukkah movie to be animated.  And not just any kind of animated; it was going to have Disney quality traditional animation, but still maintain the irreverent edgy humor that Sandler had featured in his earlier films.  It’s unusual that Pascal approved the project, given that Columbia at the time didn’t have an in-house animation studio like Disney had.  Also, traditional animation was already starting to lose it’s luster in the early 2000’s, where even Disney was struggling to find a hit with the medium at a time when CG animated movies like Shrek (2001) were starting to dominate.  Also, Sandler was uncompromising in having this film reflect his standard of adult humor, meaning that this film was likely not going to be marketed to younger audiences who normally would go to see an animated film.  But, the movie got the greenlight and the problems became very apparent as the movie finally reached theaters in time for the 2002 holiday season.

Titled Eight Crazy Nights, after the popular lyric from the song, the movie is a confused mess that neither works as a wannabe holiday classic, nor even as a vehicle for Adam Sandler’s comedy.  Fundamentally, the film really fails to accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to be a Hanukkah themed movie.  The festival barely is a factor in the story, and in the end it really just becomes another Christmas film, because it’s just unavoidable given the wintertime setting of the film.  The story centers around a character named Whitey who is the standard Adam Sandler protagonist; brash, loud and rude.  With this character, Sandler seems to be going for a Christmas Carol arc of trying to soften a mean-spirited jerk through the warmth of the holiday season, only the film never manages to successfully land that plane.  Davey remains one of the least funny and hatable characters that Sandler has ever played, and it’s due to the mistaken belief on Sandler’s part that the mean-spiritedness of the character is what makes him funny.  Perhaps the arc of his character would feel more genuine if there was effort put into showing his transition from heartless to compassionate over the course of the movie.  But no, we need scenes of him throwing another character down a hill in a port-a-potty because gross out humor was considered in during the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  It should be noted that gross out humor seems even worse in traditional animation.  Poop eating deer is bad enough of an idea in concept, but actually drawing it out makes it even worse.  That’s the level of humor you have to endure through the movie.  And what we get less of is anything heartwarming or endearing, which is kind of what you need to be remembered as a beloved holiday movie.

But Davey is not the worst character that Sandler plays in film.  There’s an elderly man named Whitey that takes Davey under his wing and tries to reform him, and Adam Sandler for whatever reason decided that he wanted this character to have the most grating and obnoxious voice ever.  Whitey is the second most prominent character in the movie, meaning you have to hear his voice through the majority of the film, and after a while it becomes an endurance test.  I don’t know why Sandler thought playing this character was a good idea.  Sure, goofy voices have been a staple of his comedy before, but in this case, the comedy is not translating.  I think it’s because the movie attempt to make the character sympathetic, being the one who takes the brunt of Davey’s abusive behavior, but Sandler undercuts all that sympathy by making the character unnecessarily obnoxious.  The character of Whitey needed to be a lot more grounded in order for the film to work, and that called for a much more subtle performance on Sandler’s part, or just the courtesy of allowing a different actor to play the role.  The thing is, we can still hear Sandler through the performance, making his vocal performance feel disingenuous, as if his own intent is to keep mocking the character even through the moments we are supposed to care for him.  There’s also a third voice that Sandler provides in the film, which is for Whitey’s twin sister Eleanore, but that role isn’t nearly as bad.  For one thing, Eleanore is not in the movie that much, and Sandler makes her sound unique enough that you wouldn’t initially know that it’s him playing the role.  If he was wiser, he would have given the role of Whitey to a different actor, like maybe a veteran professional that would’ve found the humanity in the character, and just left the funny voice part for himself for the role of Eleanore.  But, even with the awful performance he gives as Whitey, it’s still not the worst part of the movie, as freqent Sandler coat-tail rider Rob Schneider sinks to another low by playing an Asian restaurant owner with a typical stereotypical accent.  A typical low bar met with Schneider, but made even worse when you have to see it animated.

The most disappointing thing about the movie, however, is that the animation for it was actually really good.  Seriously, the animation team did an outstanding job making the movie look colorful and fluid.  When Adam Sandler demanded he wanted Disney quality animation for his film, he seems to have gotten his wish.  One thing that the production of this movie benefitted from was that it became a refuge for a time for a lot of out of work animators who came from the recently closed animation departments of Warner Brothers and Fox.  Many people who’ve seen this movie have noticed a lot of striking similarities between the animation of this movie and that of The Iron Giant (1999), and that’s because both movies shared many of the same animators.  And those who came to this film from Fox would have had the experience of working under the direction of animation legend Don Bluth.  The pedigree in this film’s animation team really was quite impressive.  It’s just too bad that Adam Sandler had them animating things like pooping reindeer.  It’s astonishing to think that some of these animators went from working on a masterwork like The Iron Giant to working on one of the worst animated films of all time.  The only good thing about this is that it helped a group of animators stay employed for just a little while longer.  The early 2000’s was not kind to the traditional animation industry as it was transitioning into one primarily geared towards computer animation.  Eight Crazy Nights was definitely not the film to help reverse the trend, and in the end it was another sign that the era of traditional animation was coming to an unremarkable end.  It may not have flopped as hard as Iron Giant or Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002), but it certainly failed to connect with audiences just like them.  But unlike the Giant and Planet, it didn’t gain a cult following over time, and has been rightfully dismissed as a failure that needed to be forgotten.

One of the other big failures of the movie is the fact that it even attempts to be a musical.  There are no less than seven original songs in the movie, each of them about as unremarkable as you’d expect.  Even worse, about half of them feature the character Whitey, so if you thought his voice was grating before, now you get to hear him attempting to sing as well.  But, you know what song is not here at all; the actual song that the movie was based on.  At least, it’s not in the story proper; you have to wait until the end credits to actually hear the song.  But it does make you wonder, why bury it in the credits when it should have been the centerpiece of the actual movie.  Sandler wanted to create a new holiday classic that celebrated the often overlooked holiday, so why didn’t he make the kind of movie that lived up to the spirit of the song.  A lot of his baser instincts as a comic probably got in the way, as he likely favored irreverent, offensive humor over heartwarming material.  The musical score also is fairly lazy from a composition standpoint.  Songs just start to be sung without reason in the story.  It’s like Sandler and company were just adding them in to meet a quota.  And they are generic as possible.  Sandler, as demonstrated with his Hanukkah song, can carry a tune, but here he particularly seems to phone it in, especially as Davey who just seems bored whenever he sings.  The weirdest and most out of place song comes from a scene when Davey breaks into the mall, and he hallucinates all of the different brand mascots of the stores coming to life to teach him a lesson; all of which is another blatant example of Adam Sandler using his movies as advertisement space for product placement.

Clearly, Adam Sandler was not the guy to deliver the definitive Hanukkah movie.  Eight Crazy Nights is a nearly unwatchable mess that doesn’t work in any way; not as an animated movie, not as a musical, and especially not as a holiday classic.  It’s just Adam Sandler doing his normal schtick but with even less effort and through the medium of animation.  Sadly, it wastes some really good work from talented animators, many of whom were at the time struggling to survive in a rapidly changing industry, which this film did nothing to help with.  It wouldn’t be Adam Sandler’s last foray into animation, however, and thankfully he has gotten better with working in the medium.  He found success with the Hotel Transylvania series and later his production company Happy Madison produced the acclaimed Leo (2023) for Netflix.  Sandler continues to perform the Hanukkah song on a regular basis, but the film it spawned has faded from the picture, and it’s probably for the better.  It’s just too bad that no one has picked up the mantle and created a memorable Hanukkah movie on the level of the Christmas classics we watch every single year.  It would be nice if a company like Hallmark maybe tried out doing a Hanukkah themed movie in their style of holiday themed, inspirational films.  With Hanukkah’s profile in the holiday season being elevated to where it is now, it’s beyond time to actually give it a worthy cinematic celebration.  At this point, we already know that Adam Sandler is not the guy to make it happen, but his failure shouldn’t dissuade others from trying either.  A lot of Jews helped to make our holiday traditions a little bit brighter.  It would be worthwhile to show some support for getting a spotlight directed at their own holiday for once, whether it’s in song, on television or on the big screen.  As the song goes, “Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah.  So much funikkah, to celebrate Hanukkah.”

Gifts That Keep Giving – Why Hollywood is Spending Big on Christmas Movies

Like any other year, you’d expect at least one movie hitting the big screen that takes advantage of the holiday season and centers it’s story around theme of Christmastime.  This year is no exception.  We were greeted with a major one this year in the form of the action film, Red One (2024), which brings a bit of Michael Bay-esque mayhem to the Santa Claus mythos.  The movie also brings in two of the biggest action movie stars in Hollywood today, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, to give it even more cinematic gravitas.  Unfortunately, even with it’s well-timed holiday season release date, the film failed to deliver the presents at the box office, becoming a rare misfire for the the two stars on the marquee.  But that’s not the thing that got the notice of Hollywood insiders.  What really sparked a conversation around this movie was it’s astronomical price tag.  The movie, which is based around an original concept centered on the mythos of Santa and holiday traditions, cost over $250 million to make.  That is an astonishingly high production budget for what is essentially nothing more than a Christmas movie.  Now, the movie was financed by Amazon Studios, which is part of one of the world’s wealthiest corporations, so it’s soft box office results will not exactly sink the fortunes of the studio, but even still, many are questioning why a Christmas film needed a quarter of a billion dollar budget.  It’s been speculated that the budget ballooned because of cost overruns due to the lack of professionalism on the part of it’s main star (Dwayne Johnson) who caused multiple delays, but it still doesn’t account for why the project needed to keep going despite all of the production issues.  The answer lies in the fact that Holiday movies have grown into a much larger business over the last couple years.

In the last few decades, we’ve seen a rise in what can be considered Holiday blockbusters.  Christmas films certainly aren’t anything new, as they have existed in Hollywood as far back as the early days with classics like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).  But it was with the success of Home Alone (1990) that Hollywood took notice that a Christmas themed movie could not only perform well at the box office, but also be dominant too.  Further Christmas themed movies would continue to emerge afterwards that were not only successful but could also lead at the box office.  There was The Santa Clause (1994), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), all of which delivered surprisingly strong box office results.  In some of the cases, these movies succeeded not just because they capitalized on the holiday season, but because they connected with audiences in a way that transcended their holiday theming.  Home Alone especially stands out more for it’s comedic pratfalls than it does for it’s holiday aesthetics, because that’s what drove people to the theaters over and over again.  This is usually what separates the good holiday films from the bad, as not every holiday movie is a success at the box office.  Red One is proving that right now, as it does not have the legs to carry it through the holidays and will likely be out of theaters even before Christmas Day itself.  But, there is still a lot of signs that Hollywood is not weary of banking heavily in Christmas themed movies anytime soon even as movies like Red One continue to eat it at the box office.  What we are finding out is that Holiday movies are a far more resilient genre all on their own that have longer shelf lives than most other types of movies.

The reason why studios are willing to invest so much in new holiday themed films is because of something called the long tail effect.  This long tail effect is when a movie premieres in theaters or somewhere else and remains in the public view long after, You see it with movies that remain profitable many years later, helped by a healthy presence in subsequent television airings and re-releases.  Some movies get rediscovered this way too, such as It’s a Wonderful Life which had initially bombed at the box office and then later became a perennial classic.  While the long tail effect can happen to movies in any genre, it seems to more frequently happen with holiday films.  This has been an interesting phenomenon in recent years and it is beginning to be reflected in the way that more and more holiday films are being produced.  Hollywood certainly is more comfortable investing in something that they know is going to have long term value beyond it’s initial release.  One thing that has certainly changed in recent years is the frequency.  While it was common to see a new holiday classic emerge every couple of years, we now are seeing at least one new movie a year specifically be spotlighted with a Christmas theme at it’s center.  This year it’s Red One, a couple years ago it was the R-rated action comedy Violent Night (2022).  And I’m sure that the next couple of years will give us plenty more.  But what is interesting is that these movies are not just being made to solely rely on their theatrical box office.  Now, many more holiday movies are getting made with the intention of sticking around for many years.

What I think has contributed to this trend is the creation of programming blocks on cable television and on streaming.  These are special selections of movies centered on Christmas that are meant to cater to their audience’s desire to see holiday themed entertainment in the lead up to the special day.  The cable channel Freeform dedicates the entire month of December to playing nothing but Holiday themed movies and specials.  And on Christmas Day itself, the cable network TBS devotes it’s channel to a marathon run of one specific movie, 1983’s A Christmas Story, which has become an annual tradition all on it’s own.  On streaming services, there are specific specialty pages created just to help viewers find holiday themed movies and show episodes.  And what these specially selected programming blocks do is to keep the same holiday themed movies and specials in the public eye year after year.  These have definitely helped in making the long tail effect work especially well for holiday movies.  But, the programming blocks can’t just survive on the same small sampling of holiday classics we all know about.  They need new entries to help keep things fresh over time, though the best of them still remain an essential piece.  Sure, you’ll easily see evergreen titles like Home Alone or The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in the mix, but every year there are newer movies that get added, whether created as an original by the station or the streamer in question, or became an essential addition due to it’s box office performance.  It’s too early to know if Red One will see that kind of future, though the fact that it was made by Amazon tells you that it’s almost a certainty that Prime Video will be spotlighting it on their front page for many Christmases to come.

While these programming blocks definitely take advantage of the holiday season as a whole, it’s hard to know what kind of movies will become perennial favorites.  The problem is that Hollywood is producing a glut of holiday movies every year, and most of them don’t stick the way that they hoped they would.  Hallmark has created literally hundreds of holiday themed movies, but I don’t think many people can name one right off the top of their heads.  Still, Hallmark’s holiday block of films are among the most watched on television every single year, so their business model is still working well for them, even if their Christmas movies all blend together into an indistinguishable holiday blob of entertainment.  The same thing is also happening with broadcasters that cater to the same crowd as Hallmark, such as the Lifetime network or Netflix.  These easy to digest, non-offensive holiday themed movies are good at capturing that holiday spirit, but they don’t stand out like the perennial classics do, and those are the ones that continue to drive the highest viewership during the holiday season.  People just have the desire to re-watch the best Christmas movies there are to get into the holiday spirit, but it’s a hard canon to add onto.  When the same movies continue to generate viewership year after year, why try to replace any of them?  Just like any other genre, it’s hard to know exactly what movies are going to click with audiences and holiday movies ae no different.  For some of the “perennial” Christmas films, they were likely created without ever knowing that they would take on another life as an essential holiday film.  And yet, Hollywood tries a lot harder than they should trying to manufacture the next big holiday classic.

This is probably the reason why holiday films are becoming bigger budget undertakings in recent years.  The bar has been set high by the movies that we recognize as a perennial holiday classic.  A movie like Red One attempts to hit those holiday tropes in a big way, and sadly comes across as too much of a manufactured product rather than a movie made with a lot of heart.  The movie banks on us knowing all of the mythos surrounding Santa Claus and the Christmas season, mainly through the secularized sense, and tries to use all that as the unique element added into a standard action movie plot.  It’s a mix that doesn’t work as intended because we can see the intention behind the film, which is a cyncial ploy to re-sell a regurgitated, standard action movie plot with a new gimmick, and hope it hits that holiday sweet spot.  This is certainly the response it’s getting in theaters, but separated from it’s box office disappointment is it possible that the movie will have a long shelf life as a title spotlighted on Amazon’s own streaming platform?  It’s too early to know, but that long tail effect has kept even bad holiday movies like Jingle All the Way (1996) and Eight Crazy Nights (2002) in the public eye for much longer than they should have been.  The huge budget that Red One received certainly gives it a grander feel, and that’s likely what the filmmakers were intending with their movie.  Because the bar is high for standing out in the genre, you’ve got to present your movie as something pretty special.  Maybe Red One accomplishes this on a visual level, but it remains pretty hollow as a story.  Still, it’s an indicator that holiday movies are getting more ambitious as they try to crack open that door into becoming a perennial favorite for the season.

The only thing is, a lot of the holiday classics became just that out of more humble means.  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) was just a second sequel in a comedy franchise, taking the next logical step past the summer based vacation of the first movie, and managing to surpass it with it’s spot on holiday observations mined for comedy.  It certainly didn’t need a massive budget to do that.  A Christmas Story and Home Alone were also likewise modest projects that only grew in esteem over the years due to their perfectly executed storylines that tie into Christmas.  It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even about Christmas for most of it’s run time, and only incorporates the holiday into it’s inspirational final act.  In all, it’s difficult to actually manufacture a perennial holiday classic, and even with a bigger budget and big conceptual gimmick, your movie is still going to face an uphill battle to be accepted as an essential part of the holiday season.  But, this season also gives more movies a chance than any other genre towards achieving that classic status, because there is a audience that is primed every year to expect something new over the holidays.  Being a Christmas movie definitely brings it’s own built in public attention because there are people out there who seek out holiday themed entertainment.  While that journey to the podium of all time classics is a very narrow one, the platform to launch that journey from is quite broad.  That’s why we see such a large annual investment from Hollywood towards making so many holiday themed movies.  And in the case of movies like Red One, they are getting to be bigger and more ambitious in the hopes of standing out.  But as we’ve also seen, the holiday audience is discerning  and more prone towards accepting past favorites over flashy newcomers.

The holiday season is becoming a much bigger deal when it comes to the movies that take advantage of it.  The reason why Hollywood considers it essential to invest so much money into creating new holiday films is because they hope that one or more will give them that long term success that holiday films typically bring.  With the case of Red One, the question arises about what is too much to spend on a holiday movie?  Red One is certainly going to be a prime example of how not to spend money on a Christmas movie, and will almost certainly leave Amazon in the red.  But, is Amazon looking at the short term box office or the long term viewership on Prime Video as as their barometer for the success of the film.  It may play differently as a permanent fixture on their streaming platform that they can re-promote every holiday season.  But, it’s just one example out of many.  None of the classics are ever likely to diminish over time, because they continue to hit that sweet spot for the holidays that we all appreciate.  The question is, what else may land in that special category of perennial favorites?  For the amount of money that is increasingly becoming a part of Hollywood’s plans for the holiday season, something of quality is likely to emerge.  The long term prospects for success the a perennial holiday film provides is what helps to drive new investment into the genre each year, and eventually something will land and become a new classic.  It may not be this year, but Hollywood will keep trying.  In any case, there is an excitingly open market during the holiday season that we all participate in as we search for new favorites while also indulging in what makes Christmas so fun.  And the classics will remain there as well to help give us that entertainment fix during the holidays.  I for one always have to catch Christmas Vacation once every year(in addition to Charlie Brown’s Christmas).  I’m sure that all of you have your go to essentials as well.  With the frequency that Hollywood is attempting to give us something new each year, let’s hope that another holiday classic is waiting to be opened under that Christmas tree very soon.