2021: The Year Hollywood Fought for Survival and Turned on Itself
Spider-Man crossed $1 billion, but original films were punished at the box office and found refuge on streaming. Meanwhile Hollywood's institutions went to war with one another, and cancel campaigns reached Arab cinema.
In the last week of 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home passed $1 billion at the worldwide box office. It is the first film to do so since the coronavirus crisis began in December 2019, when Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was the last to cross that line.
Spider-Man’s record takings hide the full picture. The global box office stopped this year at about $21 billion, roughly half the total for 2019. North America is among the markets hit hardest, falling from more than $11 billion two years ago to around $4.5 billion. For the second year running it was overtaken by China, where takings exceeded $7 billion, more than double last year’s, keeping China on the throne as the largest market in the world.
Two Chinese films, The Battle at Lake Changjin and Hi, Mom, took second and third place among the year’s highest earners, and Detective Chinatown 3 came sixth. The other top earners were all sequels, remakes or superhero films, among them the James Bond film No Time to Die, F9, Black Widow, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Dune, Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the first Marvel film built around an Asian superhero.
The price of an original film
Not one of those Hollywood hits is an original film. All of them rest on established characters or familiar stories that have drawn big audiences before, and all of them star leading names. The finances of the Hollywood studios no longer allow them to gamble on new films, and when they tried to break that formula they paid dearly.
Ridley Scott‘s historical epic The Last Duel, with a cast of Hollywood stars that included Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Adam Driver, took less than a third of its production budget. King Richard, the story of the father of the tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams, made about half of what it cost to produce, despite the critics’ praise for its star, Will Smith, and his place at the head of the predictions for this season’s best actor Oscar.
Artistic merit, substance and the fame or appeal of the stars are therefore no longer the essential ingredients of profit at the cinema box office. Fictional characters such as superheroes have become more famous and more attractive to audiences, who turn out to see them in cinemas whoever plays them.
Streaming, the refuge of drama
The power of stars still works on the streaming platforms, which have become the oasis of dramas and art films and their saviour. The platforms pay Hollywood stars tens of millions of dollars to join their projects, which often shine at international festivals, collect prizes and dominate the Oscars. That enhances the platforms’ reputation and raises their subscriptions.
Netflix paid Leonardo DiCaprio a reported $30 million to star in Adam McKay’s satire Don’t Look Up, which is regarded as a strong Oscar contender alongside other Netflix films such as Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson. Amazon offered Being the Ricardos, with Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. Apple TV+ offered Joel Coen’s film of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, and Swan Song, starring Mahershala Ali.
With more subscribers around the world than in the United States, the streamers also went looking for local projects in languages other than English. They found treasures that Hollywood had ignored, which travelled far beyond their home countries, drew audiences everywhere and became more popular than American productions.
The most prominent was the Korean survival thriller Squid Game, watched in more than 140 million households, which made it the most-watched series on Netflix. Netflix also released an Arab series from Jordan this year, AlRawabi School for Girls, which topped the viewing charts in the Arab world while its content stirred controversy there.
Cancel culture and Hollywood’s civil war
Beyond its losses at the box office, Hollywood faced a more dangerous challenge: cancel culture. Once its enemy Donald Trump had left the White House at the start of the year, its institutions turned their arrows on one another and sank into a civil war that destroyed some of its most important symbols.
In February, American journalists, most of them members of the Critics Choice Association, and the women’s rights organisation Time’s Up accused the Hollywood Foreign Press Association of racism and demanded the cancellation of the Golden Globe awards it presents each year. Hollywood’s studios and stars boycotted the association, which led NBC to cancel its broadcast of next year’s Golden Globes ceremony.
The Critics Choice Association seized the Golden Globes’ date, hoping to replace the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as a force that shapes the Oscars. The tables soon turned on the attackers.
In September, Time’s Up fell apart and its entire board resigned after it was accused of helping the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, in his battle against the women who had accused him of sexual harassment. The Omicron variant then forced the Critics Choice Association to postpone its ceremony. Hollywood has thus lost every opportunity to promote its films on the road to the Oscars.
Films and their stars did not escape the cancel campaigns and boycotts either. Matt Damon faced a fierce campaign accusing him of homophobia after he said in a press interview, while promoting Stillwater, that his daughter had rebuked him for using a slur for gay people. Stillwater and his other film, The Last Duel, both failed badly at the box office.
Netflix’s The Power of the Dog also drew criticism over its treatment of homosexuality, while other campaigns called for a boycott of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza because of scenes that some considered racist towards Asians.
In some Arab countries, other Hollywood films were banned, among them the superhero film Eternals and Steven Spielberg’s musical West Side Story, because of their gay and transgender characters.
When the campaigns reached Arab films
Hollywood rarely pays attention to campaigns to boycott its films in the Arab world, because its income there is very small. It would sooner pull a film from cinemas there than bow to demands to change it. When those campaigns turned their fire on Arab films, however, the consequences were grave and sometimes frightening.
In July, Omar El Zohairy’s Feathers won Egyptian cinema its first grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, in Critics’ Week, thanks to a distinctive style that replaced Egyptian melodrama with absurdist satire to present its surreal events. When it was shown at Egypt’s El Gouna festival in October, fierce campaigns of condemnation accused it of damaging Egypt’s reputation with its abundance of scenes of abject poverty.
Fortunately for the makers of Feathers, the Egyptian authorities stood by the film. Mohamed Diab’s Amira was less fortunate and is still fighting for its survival.
Amira tells the story of a Palestinian girl who discovers that she is not the daughter of her imprisoned father, who had fathered her by smuggling his sperm out to her mother. After screenings at the Venice, El Gouna and Carthage festivals it headed to the Karama festival in Jordan, where it met a noisy campaign that ended in its withdrawal as Jordan’s entry for the best international film Oscar and the cancellation of all its screenings.
The tables turned on the art of cinema in 2021. Cinema used to be a mirror held up to society, exposing its flaws and provoking debate about them. Now cinema itself stands accused, and society holds it to account. Film-makers no longer have a monopoly on the social narrative. They face millions of rivals on social media who manipulate a film’s content, often without having seen or understood it, to make it look hostile to society. Those rivals stir public anger against the film and demand its cancellation in order to swell the number of their own followers and admirers. If works of art really are cancelled when they ought to be debated, only works that promote prevailing ideas and values will survive. Cinema will stop being an art that provokes debate and develops ideas and will become a tool of entertainment and amusement, like the Hollywood films at the top of the box office.
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