The world of cinema has been shocked by the incredible box office bomb of Babylon. The $5.3 million in profits thus far is a staggeringly low number considering the film’s estimated budget of $80 million. Production spared no expense in recreating, or rather re-imagining, the roaring twenties and the golden age of Hollywood. Trailers tease a hedonistic but liberated cast of characters as they make their way through the treacherous but thrilling landscape of the film industry.
No film is everyone’s cup of tea, but a box office failure of this magnitude is not typically seen in a film starring popular names like Margot Robbie, Tobey Maguire, and Brad Pitt, to name a few. Perhaps the star-studded cast is the very reason why the film hasn’t succeeded, with a plethora of big names to mask a shoddily constructed world and storyline. On the other hand, the film may well have been well executed, but rather suffered as the victim of poor marketing and a dying theater experience. What could have led this sort of project to under perform in this way?
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Movie Premise and Stars
Paramount Pictures
The IMDb page for Babylon describes the film: “Decadence, depravity, and outrageous excess lead to the rise and fall of several ambitious dreamers in 1920s Hollywood.” The film follows a range of silent film stars in 1920s Hollywood as they adjust to the demise of their art form and the rise of sound films. One of the main draws of the film is the unrestrained displays of extravagance and debauchery in which we find the characters indulging. One of the very first sequences is the planning of an outrageous bacchanal, where we meet Margot Robbie’s character of Nellie LaRoy. This immediately establishes the sort of characters and scenery we will be immersed in, and that this will not be a story about righteous working class people. It’s possible at this juncture that we will not be encountering very likable characters, or may be rooting for people that are objectively heavily flawed anti-heroes.
The stars of old Hollywood at the center of the drama watch as their stardom rises and falls, be it in a scandalous blaze or in fading away into irrelevance. Along with Margot Robbie’s Nellie, the film stars Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, Tobey Maguire as James McKay, Phoebe Tonkin as Jane Thornton, Olivia Wilde as Ina Conrad, and Samara Weaving as Constance Moore.
Marketing Tactics
The majority of the film’s marketing came from television advertisements and Tik Tok ads. The former is arguably the least effective of the two with the rise of ad-free streaming platforms. Tik Tok on the other hand, gives advertisers the advantage of a highly fine-tuned algorithm that can reach maximum numbers of the target audience. Unfortunately, the Tik Tok ads seemed to lack any real bait to draw these audiences in. One of the most circulated ads was a clip of Tobey Maguire laughing maniacally through rotted teeth. This definitely makes a statement to the audience. We will get to see Maguire in a rare villainous role, and the snippet sets the tone of the film effectively. The very short clip of Maguire’s character still manages to capture the essence of the washed-up star who has overindulged in debauchery and perhaps lost their soul to it.
The problem is, a lot of people scrolling through the popular social media platform just aren’t that enthusiastic about what sort of villainy Tobey Maguire is slated to personify. The performance may well be interesting enough, but this advertisement just doesn’t create the sort of hive mind support and anticipation that it would if, say, a younger or more trendy actor was featured in it. Perhaps the box office bomb has nothing to do with the marketing, but rather with the film not offering anything tantalizing enough to justify buying a movie ticket when, say, the epic and groundbreaking new Avatar movie is playing two screens down. In that case, the box office run cannot be attributed to the film itself, but to the death of Hollywood as we know it.
What This Says About the State of the Film Industry
The wicked irony of Babylon is that life has imitated art. A film about the demise of a sort of film star in a changing industry failed on account of the demise of a sort of film star in a changing industry. In the era of streaming platforms, people have become well-adjusted to watching unlimited content from the comfort of their homes for a monthly rate that is equal or less to that of a singular movie ticket. Television movies are no longer mid-budget showings, but fully funded and imaginative creations. Think of the recent release of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. This movie was released directly to Netflix, and received relatively little marketing from the streaming platform. When a movie fails at the box office, it is prematurely shuffled away to one streaming platform or another, such as Black Adam already being found on HBO Max.
It seems that the only way to draw audiences into theaters is to promise larger than life action and effects that cannot be fully enjoyed from a smaller screen and without surround sound. Films must also now have significant fan bases that come together for the occasion of a screening, wherein fans feel like the theater experience alone is as exciting as the film’s content. This can be seen in the draw that so many Marvel movies enjoy. The most recent Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: No Way Home, saw crowds cheering, hollering, laughing, and crying all together. Perhaps the promise of something new is not enough to pique interest, and audiences want the assurance of a shared group experience pertaining to something they already know and love.
The shift from the big screen to the home screen has changed the nature of an actor’s work. The divide between television actors and film stars grows ever more narrow as both find themselves in the employ of the same studios and with the same budgets. In some ways, and much like in Babylon, the idea of a Hollywood movie star as we know it is disappearing before our eyes.
