Does Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny mark the era of the 'flopbuster'?

Indiana Jones might be able to unearth the Ark of the Covenant, but can he fill cinemas? Apparently not. Fifteen years on from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford's whip-cracking archaeologist is back in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but, so far, audiences haven't come back with him. The film made $130m (£102m) at the global box office on its opening weekend, which may sound impressive, but which is actually "underwhelming", Rebecca Rubin wrote in Variety. This is, she pointed out, "one of the most expensive movies ever, [costing] $295m before marketing", so it is unlikely to make a profit in cinemas. Anthony D'Alessandro at Deadline went further. It was, he said, a "disastrous result".

The sad fact is that The Dial of Destiny didn't deserve to do any better: the film is a dour, dreary, and largely pointless rehash of Indy's other escapades. But he wasn't the only hero to fall short last weekend. According to Rubin, DC's beleaguered superhero blockbuster, The Flash, had an "embarrassing" showing; DreamWorks and Universal's Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, "cratered"; and another animation, Elemental, "hasn't lived up to Pixar standards". In his review of Elemental in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw pondered "the question of whether Pixar's golden age is irrevocably behind us" – the film was Pixar's worst US box office opening weekend since their very first film, the original Toy Story.

Overall, said Rubin, this summer has so far had "a series of underwhelming tentpoles". And before the summer, things were hardly overwhelming, either. Both DC's Black Adam and Marvel's Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania fared badly, leading to claims that audiences might have "superhero fatigue". Bucking the trend, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has done even better than the first film in the series, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. But there are too many "flopbusters" coming out these days to ignore. Ever since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019, Hollywood seems to be in some sort of endgame itself.

Mark Harris is the author of Pictures at a Revolution, a book about Bonnie and Clyde and the other radical "New Hollywood" dramas that took over in the mid-1960s when the traditional studio system was faltering. What's happening in the film industry now, he said on Twitter this week, is frighteningly reminiscent of what happened just before the New Hollywood revival: "I don't think any moment since [20 years ago] has resembled the pre-revolution crisis as much as this one does. Bigger, longer, more bloated movies, most of which are lesser versions of what worked 20 years ago, a panic about the waning clout of movie stars, a fearful understanding that old marketing approaches are simply failing to reach or excite vast swathes of the moviegoing audience, a dread that Hollywood's best creative days are behind it ... Dark times!"

Streaming is undoubtedly a factor. All four of Indiana Jones's previous adventures are currently available on Disney+ at the touch of a button, so why buy tickets to see an inferior version? Besides, so much money and talent is being shovelled into high-profile TV series, and so many A-list stars are signing up to appear in them, that films are left looking like the poor relation. It's significant that Britain's biggest film magazine, Empire, has put such Disney+ TV shows as The Mandalorian, Ahsoka and Secret Invasion on its front covers in recent months, rather than actual cinema releases.

Television aside, the WGA writers' strike has stalled numerous productions, including Marvel's Blade and Thunderbolts. And budgets on the films which are being made have skyrocketed, largely due to the huge sums spent on visual effects. As Robbie Collin noted in The Telegraph, Fast X cost ten times as much as the original The Fast and The Furious, and the new Indiana Jones cost more than the previous four put together. No wonder these films struggle to break even. "By the end of this summer," said Collin, "the preceding 12 months will have seen four of the 10 most expensive films ever made."

The Covid-19 pandemic and other global events are factors, too, Charles Gant, Screen International's box office editor, tells BBC Culture. "Cinemas' recovery from pandemic-blighted 2020 is taking longer than everyone had hoped," says Gant, "and it's concerning that in the UK and Ireland, the recovery has essentially stalled, with box office for 2023 so far level with the same period of 2022. China is a worry, too – most Hollywood titles are not performing strongly there – and of course Russia is missing."

Still, says Gant, we shouldn't read too much into Indy's duff weekend. "I don't think Hollywood is in crisis because the revival of a franchise didn't do as well as the last revival of said franchise. Let's see what happens with the new Mission: Impossible, and the Barbie/Oppenheimer head-to-head, then we'll have a clearer picture."

Could those three films be the saviours of cinema this summer? "I am rooting for all three of these movies to succeed, because we are definitely in the 'A rising tide lifts all boats' phase of the crisis, and it is a crisis," said Harris on Twitter. "But the thing is, none of these three movies are going to fix the cracks in the hull." However well they do, it's worth noting that Mission: Impossible is the seventh instalment of a franchise that was itself based on a TV show from 1966, and Barbie is based on a doll brand that was launched in 1959. Neither of them suggests that Hollywood is bursting with creativity and drive.

Maybe all of this means that the industry is due to have a New Hollywood-style resurgence, as it did in the 1960s, but there is no sign of it yet. And, as Harris said, "the business cannot go on like this indefinitely". We used to think of the cinema as a dream palace. At the moment, it's more like a temple of doom.

-bbc