By TeeJay Small | Published
The year 2024 has been a strange year for the world of cinema as a whole. On the other hand, you have a highly charged box office smash like this Deadpool and Wolverine, Inside Out 2again Dune: Part Two, accounting for billions in combined profits. On the other hand, however, there have been a number of high budgets, both critically and commercially, including The Borderlands, A crowand Francis Ford Coppola Megalopolis. Personally, I hadn’t connected to all these movie missteps until recently, when I discovered that the studio Lionsgate is responsible for releasing almost every bad movie of the year so far.
Lionsgate Releases Flop After Flop
A recent write-up in Variety sought to uncover the source of Lionsgate’s poor fortunes at the box office, hoping to find the magic line that connects films like Never Let Go, The White Birdagain The Killing Game.
Needless to say, there is no easy answer to how Lionsgate got to the center of all these flops, except for the sound decision-making skills of the executives behind the wheel. Still, Lionsgate has been the worst this year, even among other studios like Warner Bros., who have a nasty habit of shelving finished films to avoid being flagged as tax write-offs.
The infamous Lionsgate film series isn’t just a funny sight from a consumer perspective, as the consecutive failures of seven recent blockbuster efforts from the studio may say something big about the state of the industry.
What Went Wrong?
Hollywood is still recovering from the combined strikes of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA unions that continued during most of 2023, which means that many films released this year were disrupted during production, stopped for months on end, or rushed to be finished in the first months of this year.
This, combined with the increased focus on artificial intelligence in modern media, has led many executives to believe that they can cut out passionate creators, and produce existing films as something for each camera committee.
Obviously, such a plan is destined to fail, as the audience has repeatedly proven that AI has no place for writing, acting, or any other deep human creative processes. While this doesn’t only apply to Lionsgate, the constant inability of Hollywood executives to recognize what makes a terrible movie before it hits the box office is an ominous sign of worse things to come.
The latest Lionsgate bombshell
How can fans from all over the world say it’s Eli Roth’s take The Borderlands it was going to be a complete train wreck from the moment it hit theaters, but Lionsgate executives couldn’t predict their loss? Even when Lionsgate tried to be careful, they ate it up completely, like the release of Coppola’s worst new movie. Megalopoliswhich languished in development hell for nearly 40 years, and grossed over $120 million.
Is this a case of Lionsgate’s decision-makers being asleep while driving, or did someone review the photo of Adam Driver wanting his partner to “go back to cluuuuuub” and think “Oh yeah, we’ve got something on our hands Lena.”
Megalopolis it might actually be a bad example, since Lionsgate is actually on track to make money from the film, even with its poor box office scores. This is because the studio is known for buying the distribution rights of finished or financed films, which means they put in very little money for most of their projects. Perhaps Lionsgate can still turn things around in 2025 and beyond, before they’ve declined to the point where their projects are listed among the bargain-bin creations from Asylum.
Source: Variety
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