OPINION: The numbers game

For movies, 2025 has been rough for the first three months of the year, especially financially. It’s hard to get worse than 2024′s first three months, but 2025 delivered a 13% smaller industry performance.

One minor thought first. Many of the box-office beloveds have been family-facing movies starting all the way back in November 2024 with “Wicked,” followed by “Moana 2,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” “Mufasa” and “Dog Man” before bombing at “Snow White,” dropping 66% of gross in the second weekend. It’s an unbelievable stat for a family film which typically rely on small drops as the buoy for long theatrical stretches.

Is there exhaustion for family-friendly movies? Probably not, but there certainly is a level of oversaturation. Do families really want to spend every other week taking the kids to the movies? Maybe, maybe not. Whether the unfortunate bomb of “Snow White” is to be blamed on the market or the concept of Disney strangling its own legacy to shake out quarters, it probably has nothing to do with the quality of the movie.

It’s a hard thing to focus on when discussing box office. Quality isn’t really an expectation, it’s a bonus.

Lorne Michaels of SNL fame once had a conversation with an NBC executive to discuss why they were reducing the budget of Saturday Night Live in 1979. Michaels explained how he thought the show was being creatively snuffed, carefully outlining his argument. The executive listened and explained to Michaels how NBC only cared about very few things for their programs.

One, the ratings. Were people watching? They can sell ads then. Two, how often can they show the program? More shows, more money. Three, how much does it cost to make? Lower budget, more profit. Quality, and what the executive described as Michaels’s “neuroticism” toward quality, were a bonus.

Quality, despite the prestige and how much we associate our fondest memories of movies with the good ones, is optional. As much as it’s easy to delude our minds to optimism and how the best movies should make the most money, this is rarely true.

Warner Bros. is in a weird state. In March and April, they’ve already released three movies, one more this weekend. Three of them, “Mickey 17,” “The Alto Knights” and “Sinners” involve actors playing multiple parts as clones and families. The fourth, and one your children have probably begged you to see, is “A Minecraft Movie.”

Unpacking why “A Minecraft Movie” is doing so well is a real tough conversation for my artsy background. A video game movie doing well financially, especially one which looks so cheap for the greatest common denominator, is a knife to my ideal movie world. As movies look toward franchises and intellectual property to give inherited revenue, “A Minecraft Movie” doing well is less triumph in a box office which needs a boost but a reminder how movies need a recognizable name to sell.

It hurts a little more knowing how the three movies I mentioned before won’t reach the same heights. “The Alto Knights” is a critical flop, so the bombing doesn’t hurt as much. Yet, “Mickey 17″ underperforming is downright devastating to my perfect movie world.

“Mickey 17″ is a wonderful science fiction screwball comedy about a dweeby expendable, a human who is cloned over and over to be a human lab rat. Mickey Barnes in each of his numbered lives undergoes deadly tasks like testing experimental medicine or exposing himself to the sun’s radiation before he’s reprinted to go die again. It’s a great way to explore existentialism and how it clashes with our capitalistic world.

The concept is lightning in a bottle, a great idea from a great novel by Edward Ashton, picked up by Bong Joon Ho of “Parasite” fame and Robert Pattinson is kinetically wild in his performance. From a vocal accent which can only be described as squirrelly combined with a robust physicality (watching Pattinson’s nude body flop out of the expendable printer like a sausage is great), Pattinson is one of a kind.

It’s a movie which is gross, wicked, slapstick, satirical, bonkers and finally thoughtful. “Mickey 17″ is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year, and it hurts to see such an underperformance. Quality doesn’t matter to a box office. It’s a problem with both studios and moviegoers. “Mickey 17″ going on to only debut to $19 million on the first weekend is disappointing. It’s even tough to see Warner Bros. release “A Minecraft Movie” a month later to $157 million on the first weekend.

I’m a snob, I know, but I doubt “Snow White” or “A Minecraft Movie” will be remembered as fondly as “Mickey 17.” I discussed “Snow White” underperforming, but even the Disney princess was able to make $43 million in the first weekend. Reducing movies down to the number game is depressing, but it’s the reality of the industry. Why should any studio spend $110 million for a “Mickey 17″ when $150 million can go to “A Minecraft Movie” and make way more money?

“Sinners” in its release this weekend looks to make a bit more money than “Mickey 17,″ but it’s a reminder of how original movies are now a risk in this version of Hollywood. Apple TV’s series “The Studio” parodying the production of a Kool-Aid movie is biting only because of how close it is to reality. You can meme a box office success, or creatives can work their butts off to make a good movie. You may or may not be surprised which one audiences would choose to see.