As good as Hollywood is at imagining alternate realities, it didn't see this one coming.
The first weekend in March 2020, as Pixar's Onward joined Sonic the Hedgehog, The Invisible Man, and Bad Boys For Life at cineplexes, North American cinemas had a snappy $100 million weekend. Two weeks later, a much-diminished Tinseltown reported that its weekend ticket sales, according to the industry tracking site Box Office Mojo, amounted to $4,160.
That's not a typo.
What came in-between was COVID-19, an illness spread by proximity – the very thing that makes moviegoing a popular experience. In the space of a few days most American cinemas had shuttered, and the ones that remained open – mostly drive-ins – were so sparsely attended they were barely making payroll.
It would be months before major theater chains reopened, and when they did, movie-going was no longer the carefree leisure-time activity it had been. In some places, attending a film at the end of 2020 involved masks, temperature scans at the door, contact-free ticketing.
I know all this because I wrote about it. I had to, with Hollywood not releasing new films to theaters. That year's presumed blockbusters – the 007 thriller No Time to Die, Marvel's Black Widow, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story – all pushed their openings to 2021.
So for a while, I wrote about films movie-lovers could catch at home: Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals, Harold and Maude, Do The Right Thing, silent classics starring Buster Keaton.
Then, I wrote about industry strategies — how studios were releasing films to video on demand, or streaming services, while filmmakers were figuring out how to make movies without endangering casts or crews.
Filmmaker Mark Duplass teamed up with actress and director Natalie Morales to make the two-hander Language Lessons about an unexpected friendship between a woman who teaches Spanish online and a man whose husband has purchased 100 lessons for him as a surprise. The premise allowed them to film without ever being in the same room.
The film How It Ends took a different tack, filming its story of an impending asteroid collision largely outdoors, in a spookily — if understandably — deserted Los Angeles.
As summer arrived, and theaters had to either reopen or face bankruptcy, new issues arose. In August, I attended a critics' screening for Christopher Nolan's time-bending thriller Tenet, joining six other reviewers spaced as far from each other as possible in a 450-seat IMAX house. I remember thinking that this couldn't seriously be the model for the future.
And indeed, when theaters showed the film, some with seating in checkerboard patterns that limited attendance to one-tenth of capacity, Tenet took in $20 million over the long Labor Day weekend — easily the highest box office number in five months, but far from what was needed to break even for a film that had cost hundreds of millions to make and market.
And profitability was hardly the only consideration. Almost forgotten now is the audience trauma those early pandemic-era films had to negotiate and address. Little Fish, released early in 2021, was completed before COVID-19, but its plot — about a worldwide plague of memory loss — resonated because it got the details of a pandemic right: masks in public, jams at hospitals, visits to family becoming difficult, workplaces feeling dicey.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, released not to theaters, but on Netflix, seemed inspired by out-of-touch celebrities gathering during the pandemic. Its characters arrived masked, indulged in pandemic gaming and hobbies, and took a then-still-theoretical oral vaccine.
And late in 2020, the British tabloid The Sun published a recording of Tom Cruise going ballistic on the set of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Two crew members, it seemed, had violated the production's strict COVID distancing protocols by standing too near each other at a computer terminal and Cruise let them know in a profanity-laced rant that their apologies wouldn't be enough if an outbreak forced them to suspend shooting.
"Tell it to the people who are losing their f****** homes because our industry is shut down," he shouted. "That's what I sleep with every night: the future of this f****** industry."
He wasn't wrong. Five years after the biggest attendance drop in cinematic history, Hollywood is still struggling to climb back from the depths. This year's first nine weeks of ticket sales in North America ($1.09 billion) are an improvement over last year, but they're still running well behind the pre-COVID weeks of 2020 ($1.67 billion).
Onward, as that Pixar title had it back in March 2020, and hopefully, upward.
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