'Deadpool': Why Its Box Office Blowout Terrifies Me

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2016/02/18/deadpool-why-its-box-office-blow-out-terrifies-me/#bfbadffa91cd

As of Tuesday, Deadpool was the 24th biggest grossing R-rated movie of all time. As of today, it will probably be around 15th on the list and it could rise as high as fifth or sixth by the time its second weekend comes to a close. There are many reasons to celebrate this success and a few good lessons to learn. The unabashed crowd pleaser is somewhat unique in blending superhero origin tropes with bawdy comedy and slapstick ultra-violence. It features a slightly unconventional lead character and is an example of selling a cult-ish comic book character to mainstream audiences and an outright outside-the-box marketing triumph.

But here’s one reason to be a little disconcerted about its breakout success: Hollywood may take the worst possible lesson from it and ditch its efforts at demographic diversity because it arguably reinforces the most conventional of conventional wisdom.

If that sounds a bit melodramatic, I sincerely hope it is. And for the record, whatever trends (be they good or bad) that are seen in the wake of Deadpool are not the responsibility or fault of anyone (Ryan Reynolds, Tim Miller, Robert Liefeld, Fox’s ace marketing department, etc.) involved in making and selling the picture as they wished to do so. But we all know that Hollywood will react to Deadpool by chasing the proverbial “next Deadpool.”

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And, when you boil down its primal elements, what is Deadpool exactly?  It is (a pretty successful) bawdy and hyper-violent action comedy aimed at the Id of the stereotypical fifteen-year-old Caucasian male, be it literal or an older male indulging in a teenage mentality (47% of the audience was under-25 years old). It’s a mostly mainstream action comedy, with enough quirk to set it apart from the pack, aimed at the same audience demographic that Hollywood always seems to be chasing.

In just its first six days (presuming a new cume of at least $170 million), Deadpool surpassed the total domestic grosses of the likes of Gone Girl, Fifty Shades of Grey, Django Unchained, Straight Outta Compton, The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Bridesmaids. It will soon top the likes of Pitch Perfect 2, Interstellar, Twilight, and The Help. We can cheer that it has already topped the worldwide cume of Fox’s Fantastic Four ($167m) just in America in the first six days. But what does it mean that it’s already topped the $170m worldwide total of Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.’s Creed so quickly and will soon top the global total of The Revenant?

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Those films, give or take Fury Road, are the kinds of films that we all say we want Hollywood to make more of beyond just direct pitches to the stereotypical teenage boy. And the success of those films is held up as proof that films for adults, films for and about women, films for and about minorities, can be every bit as successful as the conventional wisdom pitches.

We crow about the $288 million worldwide success of Pitch Perfect 2, the $577m global success of Fifty Shades of Grey, and the $200m+ worldwide success of Straight Outta Compton (all of which came from Universal/Comcast Corp.) as evidence that films aimed at “everyone else” can make a lot of money on a reasonable budget. We hold up Gone Girl and The Revenant (both, it should be noted, came from Fox ) as the triumph of the breakout leggy adult-skewing popcorn blockbuster.

But now along comes Deadpool, which not only is a massive blockbuster but also cost a mere $58 million. It’s a “reasonably budgeted” action comedy aimed specifically (but not exclusively, of course) at young white males. And it’s going to make unholy amounts of money here and abroad. That’s great for the filmmakers and the studio marketing team. But it’s also a big an example of “confirmation bias” as you can imagine.

It exists as a giant honking “See, we were right all along!” example of how much money studios can make when they craft a film aimed at 15-year old boys (or men old enough to buy a ticket to an R-rated movie but with the mentality of a teenager). It’s taken a decade for Hollywood to realize that smash hit films aimed at women and minorities aren’t standalone flukes but examples of a clear demographic demand. But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that nobody will think that Deadpool was any kind of fluke regarding demographics.

If I was a little hard on Star Wars: The Force Awakens back in December, it was partially because I was terrified that its particular template (a fan-service reboot/revival of a decades-old franchise fashioned to be basically a glorified remake of the first film) would become even more normalized as the go-to blockbuster “thing” at the expense of anything else. After all, somewhat simplistically speaking,  if you can make $395 million in a week with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, why bother taking a swing with Tomorrowland?

Same goes with Deadpool. It’s a film that, artistic worth notwithstanding, is aggressively pitched at the audience that most pop culture is targeted at and has become something of a multi-quadrant blockbuster. If you can make (spit-ball guess here) $550m-$700m worldwide on a $58 million Deadpool, why would studios bother with a $66m Gone Girl, a $37m Creed, or a $25m Straight Outta Compton? Why would you bother with anything that was pitched to a (stereotypically) niche audience when you can just make overly young male-centric entertainment (complete with “rescue the princess” fantasies) for the same small budget, with an R-rating no less, and watch as everyone shows up?

If I am being overly paranoid or melodramatic, then consider this a preemptive plea to Hollywood at-large to not use the success of Deadpool as an excuse to walk back from the (admittedly token) progress they’ve made in terms of making movies about more than just young white males and their hero’s journeys. But that’s what I fear, irrationally perhaps, that the success of Deadpool will bring about. Because, again through no fault of its own as a stand-alone motion picture, it is an ode to conventional demographic wisdom being proven correct.

That’s the mentality that gripped Hollywood in the early 2000’s after the successes of Spider-Man and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as the studios realized they could make all-audiences PG-13 fantasy blockbusters and rake in hundreds-of-millions at the expense of all other movies on their slates. It took over a decade to even somewhat snap out of that mentality, and I fear that Deadpool’s success will merely be a shining example of conventional wisdom proved correct.

It is just the kind of hit that will cause studio executives to potentially turn their back on attempting to find the (proverbial) next Creed, Gone Girl, The Fault in Our Stars, Pitch Perfect 2, or Twilight Saga. After all, why risk $20-$50 million on films aimed at women and minorities and hopefully make $150-$300m worldwide when you can spend $40-$70m on movies aimed at white males and make all the money from pretty much all demographics? The film played 38% female and 48% non-white on opening weekend, which (perhaps unfairly) further plays into the “white male hero’s journey movies play to everyone” mentality.

It’s not Walt Disney/Pixar or DreamWorks Animation’s fault that Toy Story and Shrek basically killed the female-led animated feature (and hand-drawn animation) for over a decade. And it’s not Steven Spielberg or George Lucas’s fault that Jaws and Star Wars ushered in a blockbuster mentality. But those reactions are surely part of their respective legacies. While Deadpool, which I enjoyed a little more than I expected to, is blameless as a stand-alone motion picture regarding the trends it may produce, its legacy may well be in providing an excuse to walk back the incremental progress Hollywood has made by existing as a triumph of demographic conventional wisdom.