Variety's chief film critic Owen Gleiberman reflects on the week-to-week excitement of the box office report and how much film fans have missed it while theaters are shut down
The blockbuster age, it’s usually said, began with the release of “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” But you could argue that the blockbusterdidn’t fully kick in until ordinary moviegoers began to fixate on the question of what was doing well at the box office.
At one point in the late ’80s, I was talking to a colleague before a screening, and he mentioned how “disappointing” the box-office performance of a recent movie had been. I said, “Really? Why are you disappointed?” I got what he was meant: that the film had performed below expectations. Yet it struck me that there was something faintly ridiculous about a person who wasn’t in the industry discussing the box-office tally of a film as if he was the one who’d produced it.
Why don’t we know how well movies are doing on streaming services? Because a decision has been made, at the corporate level, not to reveal those numbers. It started with Netflix, the company that set the template for the new era. Netflix was all about subscribers, rather than the performance of any individual film or series, and so, to bolster that image, they mostly kept those numbers under wraps.
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