After Barbenheimer, what’s next for Hollywood?

As the Barbenheimer juggernaut continues to push Warner Brothers’ Greta Gerwig directed film about a toy and Universal’s Christopher Nolan biopic about a complicated scientist into billions of dollars of ticket sales at cinemas, the bigger questions are what, if anything, Hollywood may learn from this phenomenon and, in the light of the continuing writers’ and actors’ strikes, what happens next?

Historically the movie industry has proved itself to be a slow and misdirected learner from profitable explosions it never saw coming. It has also proved to be a corporatised industry that has fallen under the pressures of Wall Street to ignore the creative potential of its product in favour of profitability by whatever easiest means are available and necessary.

Hollywood has a tendency to try to lazily replicate unforeseen success rather than bet on the possibility that lightning can strike twice if you give audiences the benefit of the doubt and allow them to demonstrate that they may not be the mindless sheep so many studio executives seem to think they are.

What this means for cinemagoers is most depressingly the unleashing of a new version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which we will now live not in a movie age of endless Marvel characters but rather one populated by Mattel Toy creations and endless Barbie sequels.

The Barbenheimer phenomenon rests on anomalies that can’t necessarily be reproduced — most significantly, the coincidence of a big summer “girls’ movie” and a big summer “boys’ movie” released on the same weekend isn’t usual for an industry that likes to ensure that its summer blockbusters don’t end up having to compete with each other for the same audiences at the same time.

That hasn’t stopped marketers already trying to repeat the formula for the upcoming release of two films so dissimilar that there’s no chance they would attract the same demographics — the tent instalment of the gory horror franchise Saw and the solidly for children animated film Paw Patrol, linked in internet and publicity idiocy as Saw Patrol for their simultaneous opening weekend release.

Barbenheimer has also shown the more optimistic of industry observers that there is still audience hunger for films that aren’t part of the predictable franchise fare we’ve had little choice but to accept as the standard offerings of the US summer blockbuster season for far too many years.

Before the release of Barbie and Oppenheimer it seemed depressingly evident that no non-franchise releases had any chance of making serious money, but as the success of the two films has shown, that may have been less down to comic-obsessed fans than because of an aversion to allowing any other kinds of films to have a fair chance that has become the standard approach of major studios, particularly in the post-pandemic uncertainty riddled environment.

As 84-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola declared this week, as Barbenheimer offers hope for a different and more imaginative future for the movies: “The fact that people are filling big theatres to see them and that they are neither sequels nor prequels, no number attached to them, meaning they are true one-offs, is a victory for cinema ... My hunch is that we’re on the verge of a golden age. Wonderful and illuminating cinema seen in large theatres.”

But whether Coppola’s optimism will become a reality will depend on what Hollywood does about its other immediate problem — the strikes that have sent executives scurrying into boardrooms trying to work out the maths of what happens if they go ahead with their planned release schedule for the rest of this year, without any actors available to do promotion for the films.

While it was announced this week that the studios will have meetings today with the Writers Guild of America to begin a possible negotiation out of the mess, the actors, led by The Nanny star Fran Drescher, have declared that they are ready for a long strike, which would make a resolution with the writers a Pyrrhic victory. After all, what good is a script without anyone to bring the words on its pages to life in front of the cameras?

Though a resolution to the writers’ strike would allow for the reignition of US talk shows like The Tonight Show and The Late Show, these usually reliable platforms for the promotion of new films by stars, won’t be able to fulfil their PR function without any stars to appear on them.

Studios are faced with a dilemma of whether to allow audiences to decide the fate of their tentpole films without any real attending publicity or media hype or shelve these films until a resolution with SAG is reached.

They also can’t rely on the much easier than film critic assisted publicity of the legions of online influencers and social media stars who have been increasingly recruited for PR campaigns in recent years. That’s because the Screen Actors’ Guild has made it clear that if influencers use their platforms to promote films made by companies that are the subject of a strike — these influencers may get lifetime bans from the guild. That would restrict many influencers’ ambitions to one day move from internet stardom to movie stardom as actors.

The year 2023 may go down in movie history as the year of the Barbenheimer, but it may also be remembered as the moment in which the mainstream film industry was forced to take a long, hard look at itself and make substantial changes to the way it does business and how it treats those it relies on for the creation of its products and those who consume them.

What happens next will change everything ... or destroy it completely.