How Clint Eastwood’s big movie was let down by the studio.

In Slate’s annual Film clubfilm critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2024, Bilge Ebiri, K. Austin Collins, Alison Willmore, and Odie Henderson—about the year at the movies. Read the first post here.

How are you fellow good writers,

The question of what people go to the cinema to look for is an interesting one, and yet perhaps also impossible for a critic to answer. At least this critic. I go to the cinema all the time – for work, for pleasure, because I’m a parent, because I have time to kill, etc. – but I rarely ask myself: What do I really want? see? Of course, I’m lucky: the kinds of movies I like are often the kinds of movies I end up watching and writing about in one way or another, and I suspect you might be in a similar boat. But when I think back to the 2024 movies that I might have put on a most anticipated list early in the year, I draw a bit of a blank – which is funny, as Alison can tell you, because as part of our job during year, we are both regularly asked to contribute blurbs to various most anticipated lists.

But also, I moved out of New York City at the end of last year, so the question of what I want to see in a theater is almost unclear. The two suburbs near me would never show Close your eyesI can tell you this much. Or Green border. Or Girls will be girls. As I write this, Nickel boys is about to open theatrically, but good luck finding it playing anywhere near New Haven, Connecticut. I assume when the film gets wider (will it gets wider?), it can find its way here. When can it happen? Fandango doesn’t know. The Cinemark app doesn’t know. Remember when people just knew when movies opened and where? Or for that matter, that these movies even existed?

We’ve talked a bit about the current state of film adaptation (and I agree, Alison, it gets tiresome and predictable sometimes when every critical conversation turns into a meditation on the fate of the theatrical experience), but more often than not, what I find out that most people just don’t even know what movies are playing for them to go to. Allow me to illustrate this with a story I’ve probably shared elsewhere. Sometime in May, I found myself in an extended conversation with an Uber driver, a middle-aged gentleman who I believe was a few years older than me. (That probably means he was a few years younger than me, but I digress.) We got to talking about movies and he mentioned that he loves going to the movies. He asked me for some recommendations. I immediately suggested The fall guywhich had opened earlier that month. “The fall guylike the old TV show?” he asked. I said yes. “It was my favorite show!” he exclaimed. He asked me who was in it. I told him Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Then he exclaimed that he loved Ryan Gosling. “I had no idea they were making a movie out of it,” he muttered.

All I could think was: We as a society have failed this man. Here is a guy who goes to the cinema, who loved The fall guy TV show that loves Ryan Gosling, that loves action … and yet had no idea The fall guy was in the cinema, or even that it existed. And we’re not talking about some random, barely marketed indie oddities here. If anything, The fall guy was marketed to death: There were several trailers, ads everywhere, an Oscar promotion (by the two Oscar-nominated stars), a Saturday Night Live hosting gig by Gosling (a good-tier repeat SNL host), a fancy festival premiere, positive reviews galore. Not to mention good word of mouth: The people who did see it tended to like it, which was reflected in its solid legs after a not-so-good first weekend. I know that in the wake of the film’s release, there were some on social media who smugly declared that its soft opening proved that it was bad or mediocre; funny/tragically, a few weeks later, some of the same people decided that Furious‘s soft opening was proof that audiences were stupid, or that Warner Bros. had dumped the film.

Look, we’re all human and we love to build narratives out of the things that happen around us, and those narratives often just serve to confirm our own assumptions. I’m probably doing a bit of the same thing when I say there’s a crisis going on in film marketing. One of the reasons big franchises still do so well is that large existing fan bases are easier to market to. (But they’ll also turn you on quickly, like The collar the hunter and Madame Web people found out; even Marvel ended up in the desert before Deadpool and Wolverine saved its ass.)

Beyond that, it’s not that people don’t want to see the movies; it’s that they don’t really know the movies are there. Once upon a time we had newspaper ads for movies (which many of us loved to turn to as kids – can you name another industry whose advertising was so popular for so long?), we had trailers that people enjoyed watching (because they weren’t be inundated with them) and we had posters on streets and at bus stops and in malls that people noticed because they weren’t looking down at their phones all the time. I know this sounds like an “Old Man Yells at Cloud” situation, but I wouldn’t hold onto the past so much if these things had been replaced by something more tangible or effective. What has replaced these? Banner ads? Annoying pop-up videos that autoplay? Quick – name the last banner ad you remember seeing. Now we go out of our way to block this shit. How is anyone supposed to even know a movie is coming out, let alone that it exists? Even theater tents have kind of gone by the wayside. Remember when the marquees announced which movies were showing? Well, a lot of them not anymore do. Is it because changing the letters costs too much time, materials and labor?

And then there are the bizarre cases where the distributors themselves don’t want people to know about their film. i enjoyed Clint Eastwood’s Juror no. 2 quite a bit and was shocked along with everyone else that Warner Bros. seemed determined to bury it. Here was a well-plotted, well-acted, absorbing legal drama of the type no one makes anymore; it made both Kam’s and Alison’s lists, and while it didn’t end up being mine, I considered it. So what did Warner do? It released it in a small slice of theaters (stupid), with very little promotion (horrible), and didn’t report on the box office (weird). It seemed like the studio wasn’t even going to show it to critics until it caved in at the last minute and let a few of us see it one afternoon deep in the basement of AMC Lincoln Square, in the theater’s smallest room. The film was warmly received and seemed to do well even within its limited rollout – so much so that the studio ended up adding a few theaters. I saw it again at an Alamo Drafthouse a few days after its release and the theater was sold out. Hell, even the greater New Haven area eventually got it for a hot second, I seem to recall.

Speaking of distribution: Dana mentioned No other countrythe documentary about the ongoing destruction of a West Bank village, which spent the year winning awards at festivals (and is also currently cleaning up the critics’ circles), but still somehow couldn’t find a distributor, although in this case got a brief self-distribution in New York to qualify for awards, and it looks set to open at Film Forum in January.

But No other country‘s distribution problems for me are secondary to its spectacular performance as a film. It’s worth thinking about it in the context of our earlier discussion of scale and scope. No other country isn’t a “big” movie – it’s only 95 minutes long, but its scope is massive and it takes place over years. As the film’s protagonists remind us, no one in the outside world is interested in seeing a hen house destroyed or a well filled with concrete. And the Israel Defense Forces know this. By limiting its intrusion to these seemingly minor affairs, it gradually wipes entire villages off the map. But by compressing time, the filmmakers of No other country allow us to witness the overall pattern of destruction. Documentary is urgent, but it also makes for great art; its use of scope has both political and aesthetic power.

All of which leads me to ponder this question, which I submit to you: If there was one underseen movie from this year that you could magically get everyone to see, knowing they would probably enjoy it, what would it be? so be? For me it would not be my no. 1 movie, Close your eyesnor my no. 2, Nickel boysif only because they are the kind of formally bold works that divide audiences. It wouldn’t be that hugely entertaining either Fall guy (my #4) because America had a chance to see it. I think it could be my no. 3 films, Agnieszka Holland’s Green bordera brutal black-and-white drama about the treatment of refugees along Poland’s border with Belarus. It’s an expansive epic that confronts the problem from a wide range of perspectives, but it also has all the old-fashioned virtues: it’s moving, suspenseful and tragic, with compelling characters – it even ends on a somewhat hopeful note. (Holland is a director who has worked in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Hollywood, and she also helped helm some notable shows from the Peak TV era, including The Wire and House of Cards. (She’s an incredibly versatile director who makes accessible films.) People would hate me for making them see it, but I think they would end up loving the film.

There: I got through an entire post without mentioning it once Megalopolis … d’oh!

Bilge

Read all the entries in Slate’s 2024 Movie Club.