Surprising no one, Damien Chazelle’s three-hour Hollywood epicBabylonhas bombed spectacularly at the box office. With a whopping production budget of $78 million (perVariety),Deadlinereports thatBabylonhas a break-even point of $250 million, and its opening weekend haul of $4.85 million suggests it won’t come close to turning a profit. The commercial disappointment ofBabylonis no fluke; it follows a pattern of big-budget prestige movies failing because the studios refused to rein in the indulgent creative whims of a famous director.
It was a bold move for Paramount to openBabylonagainstAvatar: The Way of Water. After scoring hits all year withScream,Jackass Forever,The Lost City,Sonic the Hedgehog 2,Top Gun: Maverick, andSmile, the studio made a big mistake with its final major release of 2022.Babylonhad no business competing withThe Way of Water. LikeBabylon, theAvatarsequel is the passion project of a revered director that runs over three hours long. But unlikeBabylon, James Cameron’s aquatic sci-fi actioner provides some much-needed escapist entertainment. Moviegoers are increasingly disinterested in prestige pictures.
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In a post-pandemic world ravaged by economic turmoil, if audiences are going to shell out some of their precious disposable income to watch a movie on the big screen, then they expect to be entertained.Babylonhas some wild party scenes and a couple of laughs, but it doesn’t haveAvatar’s relatable themes of family and conservation; it’s about the absurd excess of Hollywood millionaires.The Way of Waterjustifies its taxing runtime with an epic narrative that transports audiences to an entirely imagined world for a war between colonizing humans and vengeful aliens.Babylon, on the other hand, doesn’t justify its runtime; it manages to be both overstuffed and undercooked, with thinly drawn characters and hardly any plot to speak of.
The past year has seen a trend of auteur-helmed vanity projects tanking at the box office. According to/Film, Robert Eggers’The Northmancost $90 million to produce and grossed just $69.6 million worldwide;David O. Russell’sAmsterdam(also starring Margot Robbie) cost $90 million and grossed $31.1 million; and George Miller’sThree Thousand Years of Longingcost $60 million and grossed less than $20 million. LikeBabylon, all of these movies were bolstered by star power and dazzling visuals, but let down by a director using their creative freedom to indulge themselves.
Chazelle broke out in 2014 with the critical and financial success of his drumming dramaWhiplash. Withhis follow-up film,La La Land, an even bigger hit harking back to the Golden Age Hollywood musicals of yesteryear, he became the youngest filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Director at the age of 32. Since then, Chazelle has quickly earned a place as one of the most sought-after directors in Tinseltown with the lucrative ability to secure funding for whatever ambitious project he dreamt up. Out-of-touch studio executives gave him a blank check to makeFirst Man, a big-budget biopic of astronaut Neil Armstrong that failed at the box office, and then they gave him a blank check to makeBabylon, a big-budget retelling of Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies that has similarly failed at the box office. They didn’t learn the right lesson from the failure ofFirst Man; maybe they’ll learn that lesson from the failure ofBabylon.
Studios tend to have as much faith in big-name directors as they have in franchises and intellectual properties, and that’s a mistake. The Marvel brand and theStar Warsbrand andtheFast & Furiousbrandare as close to guaranteed moneymakers as Hollywood can get its hands on. The same doesn’t apply to the Damien Chazelle brand or the David O. Russell brand or the George Miller brand. Most casual moviegoers have no idea what the job of director entails, so they don’t choose which films to watch based on who directed them. Some filmmakers can attract viewers based on their involvement alone, like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg, but even they’ve stumbled at the box office in recent years.
Babylonhas been compared toQuentin Tarantino’sOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood, another lengthy, nostalgic love letter to a bygone era of the film industry starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. But there are a few key differences that madeOnce Upon a Time in Hollywooda hit andBabylona failure. Tarantino has a bigger fan base and a stronger track record than Chazelle.Once Upon a Timeactually has real affection for the early days of Hollywood, whereasBabylonis more of an ode to decadence and debauchery than an ode to movie magic.Once Upon a Time in Hollywoodhit theaters at the height of the summer season when its closest competition was the live-actionLion Kingremake, an example of the creative bankruptcy of the I.P.-driven studio system at its worst, whileBabylonwas released in the dreary winter window againstAvatar: The Way of Water, an example of the effects-heavy franchise machine at its best.
If Chazelle had paid as much attention to the audience’s experience when he madeBabylonas Cameron did when he madeAvatar, then the movie could’ve had a chance at hitting its break-even point. The auteurs who have succeeded at the box office this year, fromThe Batman’s Matt ReevestoTop Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski toEverything Everywhere All at Once’s Daniels, have put their audience’s enjoyment first and their artistic ambitions second.
