Maple
Member
- Oct 27, 2017
- 12,351
- Dec 8, 2023
- #1
Winners
- Taylor Swift
Arguably, Taylor Swift had one of the best years for a person working in the entertainment industry ever. She became a queen of all media with her blockbuster Eras concert tour (which would earn her a staggering $4.1 billion), released a concert movie that broke through the traditional studio distribution system (and grossed $250 million), she became Spotify's most streamed artist of the year (toppling Bad Bunny) and a 12-time winner at the Grammys (this time for directing, which is a nice flex), and was just named Time's "Person of the Year." Not to mention, Swift boosted NFL rating thanks to her romance with Kansas City Chiefs' tight end Travis Kelce. Yet so much success going to a single person went down easy thanks to Swift's generosity to her support crew (dishing out $50 million in bonuses) and to charities at her concert tour stops — everywhere Swift went, she left people richer in her wake, banking a ton of good karma.
- Greta Gerwig/Margot Robbie
Greta Gerwig not only co-wrote and directed the biggest hit and pop culture sensation of the year with Barbie, which also became Warners' biggest global hit ever, but she also became the first female director in history to have a title cross the billion-dollar mark. And Margot Robbie not only starred in Barbie, but produced the film as well — and reportedly made $50 million for her efforts. (As part of Robbie's continuing effort to champion female filmmakers, she also produced Emerald Fennell's buzzy indie thriller Saltburn). It may be "impossible to be a woman," but Gerwig and Robbie proved Hollywood's billion-dollar glass ceiling is very possible to break.
- Netflix/Jenna Ortega
Last year, things were looking grim for Netflix. The streamer's stock crashed, its revenue fell for the first time and rivals studios were attacking with as much IP as they could find. But Netflix roared back in 2023, it's stock up 60 percent and its third-quarter revenue spiking (partly due to cracking down on password sharing). Helping matters: The launch of Wednesday, the streamer's most watched non-Squid Game original series ever, which propelled lead Jenna Ortega to serious stardom (even if she now has to write the whole show herself).
- Video Game Adaptations
Video game adaptations never seemed to work, until suddenly they did, with a trio of smart takes that were wildly different from each other, yet true to the spirit of their source material: There was HBO's acclaimed drama The Last of Us in January, the animated pop of Universal's The Super Mario Bros. Movie in April (which became the second-biggest movie of the year, earning $1.36 billion globally), and Universal's teen-targeted horror thriller Five Nights at Freddy's in October — a title that seemingly came out of nowhere to earn $295 million at the box office despite being released simultaneously on streamer Peacock, which just goes to show: Nobody actually subscribes to Peacock.
- Horror
You almost couldn't go wrong with a horror title in 2023 (that's almost — we'll never forget you, Exorcist: Believer). On the big screen there was M3GAN, Talk to Me, Insidious: The Red Door, Scream VI, Evil Dead Rise, The Nun II, Cocaine Bear' proving yet again that a low-budget-for-medium-returns strategy still works. Meanwhile, on the on small screen, Hulu's No One Will Save You and Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher were frighteningly popular.
- Christopher Nolan
The only thing better than having the biggest non-Batman hit of your career in Oppenheimer is having its success validate so many things you're passionate about — like the wisdom of taking chances on original adult dramas that the industry typically believes won't work (in this case, a long, talky, period drama biopic with an unlikely lead), and proving audiences value premium format experiences (Oppenheimer is the fourth-highest grossing Imax release of all time despite not being an action film). Bonus schadenfreude points for Nolan pulling this off after leaving his former studio home, Warner Bros., following its embrace of releasing movies on streaming instead of theaters, and after said studio seemingly tried to nuke Oppenheimer by scheduling it against Barbie — only for the two to feed off each other like some unpredictable fusion reaction. (Fun fact: The movie that Warner Bros. had originally slotted for July 21? Coyote vs. Acme).
Losers
- Disney
Who wants to bet Bob Iger wishes he stayed retired? Disney got pummeled in 2023. The company's stock extended last year's doldrums and trades near its six-year low. Its Disney+ streaming service soared out of the gate in 2019, but has since hit growing pains. A
fter having an extraordinary seven films cross the billion-dollar mark in 2019, the studio didn't have one this year (for the first time since 2014, pandemic years excluded). Disney's usual movie magic seemed to fizzle, from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to Haunted Mansion to Wish to The Marvels (don't worry, the MCU earns its own "Lost" entry, below).
Disney also managed to become a culture war target, and while it's tough to say how much of that is the company's fault, it doesn't help when your own Snow White star can't stop telling people how much she hates Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The company's normally optically savvy CEO likewise stumbled, with Iger saying striking actors demands were "not realistic" as he was attending Allen & Co.'s billionaire summer camp and enjoying his $27 million compensation package. (Come to think of it, Disney's Star Wars franchise isn't doing so hot either, but we don't want to pile on).
- Marvel and DC
"I find this barely masked gloating over the low box office for The Marvels very unpleasant," wrote Stephen King on Twitter in a viral tweet in November after the film became the biggest bomb in MCU history. "Why gloat over failure?" Well, you see Steve, it's like this: Marvel has been going to the same creative well for years, putting out increasingly convoluted stories, amid weakening special effects and an increasing number of releases, in both theaters and TV, and you were expected to watch all of it just to understand what the heck is going on, and the studio seemed to think audiences would just keep showing up in droves despite all of this.
So by the time fans sat through Doctor Strange 2, She Hulk, Secret Invasion, Thor 4 and Ant-Man 3, some began to root against Marvel's success in hopes that Kevin Feige and Co. would stop taking audiences for granted and do better — because, ideally, "fix it in post" should be a last resort, not a creative blueprint. Meanwhile, DC still cannot catch a break. While we're excited to see what James Gunn brings to the table as co-chief of DC Films, the lousy Shazam! Fury of the Gods bombed, the actually-pretty-good The Flash bombed, Blue Beetle did modestly, and Dec. 22's Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom hasn't yet had the opportunity to disappoint, buuuuuut …
- Jonathan Majors and Ezra Miller
Playing a major Marvel/DC character across a multitude of films is a Hollywood brass ring. In addition to being an incredibly cool gig, you become downright iconic to millions of fans worldwide, which, in turn, gives you a level of casting bankability for your career moving forward. Unless, of course, you end up blowing it. Majors is supposed to help headline the next phase of the MCU as Kang the Conquerer and has already been introduced in the first season of Loki and continuing into Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — where critics called him the best thing about the film. Yet he's currently on trial for misdemeanor assault and harassment charges (he's pleaded not-guilty) and his career is hanging in the balance. Meanwhile, Miller played Barry Allen/The Flash as a scene-stealer in Justice League and then had their top-line debut in June's The Flash, but steadily chipped away at their reputation amid multiple alleged instances of erratic and illegal behavior (they've said they're undergoing mental health treatment).
- Los Angeles
While Hollywood keeps making more and more content, the amount of filming in L.A. has remained flat in recent years. Plus, the City of Angels has been getting plenty of bad press due to street homelessness and crime (violent crime is actually down, but theft is up) making it appear like the city is San Francisco's slightly less postapocalyptic sibling. As a major company's top production executive recently told THR: "Unless there's some specific reason to be in Los Angeles, we don't shoot there anymore."
- Harry and Meghan
In 2020, the royal duo fled a life of ceremonial public service to cash in their celebrity status in the States. But after a whiny Netflix documentary, a whiny biography (Spare — even the title is a pouty gripe) and an inert podcast, the Harry and Meghan brand swelled into a sanctimonious bubble just begging to be popped — and South Park was the pin. The show's 20-minute "World-Wide Privacy Tour" takedown in March was savage, and was followed by Spotify dropping Archetypes, with a top executive labeling the duo "grifters." Still, all the scorn and mockery beats otherwise having to attend 200-plus official royal family engagements a year, which sounds hellish.
- AI Characters
AI is the next big thing and it's already boring. This year saw the evil screensaver in the mildly underperforming Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One, AI-as-deity in Peacock's well-reviewed, little-seen Mrs. Davis, and the sci-fi flop The Creator (yes, that movie came out). Perhaps the problem is that menacing, sentient AI characters aren't new, even if ChatGPT is — 2001: A Space Odyssey crushed that trope with HAL 9000 nearly six decades ago and Hollywood's been doing them ever since. Just because we now have AI tools that can show us what a rave at Hogwarts would look like, doesn't mean we want even more AI in stories.
- Yellowstone
The most popular drama on TV was nowhere to be seen amid production delays and infighting, with star Kevin Costner riding off into the Horizon (while threatening to sue Paramount), and showrunner Taylor Sheridan trying to juggle enough shows to let him purchase the rest of Texas. Paramount announced two spinoffs, but while fans will certainly show up for whatever Sheridan creates next in the Dutton-verse, prematurely packing up a massive flagship that could have run for several more years is a real loss (even if Yellowstone eventually serves up those final episodes, and we'll believe that when we see it).
- Scream franchise
Here's franchise that initially seemed to buck the year's downward trend: Released in March, Scream VI , starring Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, scored the saga's biggest box office ($168 million) since 1997's Scream 2. All the pieces were seemingly in place for a current-trilogy-wrapping seventh film when, in November, Barrera was fired for her social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war. Then news broke that Ortega had also quietly left the film following a salary dispute — which, in turn, reminded everyone that original franchise star had Neve Campbell likewise left after producers made an offer that, she says, "did not equate to the value I brought to the franchise." So the current creative concept is wiped out, but also, the whole thing kind of smacks of "We don't want to pay popular lead actresses a lot of money, we just want to watch them get chased around and stabbed with knives." The worst part: All the groaner meta jokes and commentary about this we'll have to endure while watching Scream 7.
The Biggest Hollywood Winners and Losers of 2023: From Margot Robbie to Marvel
A brutally honest rundown of who had the best and worst year in entertainment.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
