POP-CULTURE COLUMN: This Column is Based on an Incredible True Story
By Dan Brown Based on a true story. Inspired by real events. Based on the incredible true life story. When it comes to marketing movies, phrases like these matter a lot. How do I know? Because no studio marketing team in Hollywood history has ever passed up a chance to use them in their ad campaigns, even if the film in question bears only a passing resemblance to the truth. But my purpose today isn’t to argue movies inspired by real-life events aren’t all that real or true. It’s to try to understand why these phrases keep popping up on movie posters and in trailers. So here’s the thing: When a motion picture is marketed as a true story, it lands differently. In the minds of movie fans, it’s not in the same category as fictional stories. It’s more compelling. In 1976, the film version of All the President’s Men debuted. It was based on the reporting of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who were real journalists whose Watergate stories helped to force Richard Nixon, an actual U.S. president, to resign. About a year later, a George Lucas movie called Star Wars was released. It featured actors playing aliens, starship dogfights in space, laser swords, and a mystical power called the Force. None of that stuff is real. These two studio productions were received by audiences in radically different ways, and no discerning movie fan would put them in the same category. All the President’s Men horrified audiences because it told a story that everyone had lived through in real life. Even if Star Wars enthusiasts loved wookies or droids or Jedi Knights, no one expected to bump into them on the street. All the President’s Men appealed to a different part of an audience member’s brain, the part that detects BS. As I’ve noted in this space before, I work with young adults in both of my day jobs. And the word I hear the most from university students these days is “authenticity.” They are starved for it. They distrust its opposite – the fake, the plastic, the constructed. If a product is perceived as authentic, they will want to try it. If a celebrity is suspected of being a different person from how they outwardly present themselves, they are repelled. They distrust slick, surface representations. They want the real deal. And the big brains who work in the marketing departments in Tinseltown are aware of this, and they use this knowledge to their advantage. That’s why you still see films being sold on the fact they are true stories. That is, they are authentic. Which is why another 1970s release, The Amityville Horror, had the tagline “The terrifying truth behind a real-life haunted house.” The 1993 UFO-abduction flick Fire in the Sky had a similar advertising prompt: “Based on a true story. White Mountains, Arizona . . . Six workmen entered the forest. One didn’t come out. What really happened?” And it’s never going to stop. Even decades from now, when hologram technology has been perfected, or the studios invent a way to beam movies directly into the human brain, you can bet future marketing professionals will be making the same claims. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Pop-Culture Column: Tom Cruise Isn’t The Only One Who Can’t Open A Movie
By Dan Brown There are no more A-list celebrities. Not if you define the term as an actor whose appeal is so broad, they can put enough bums in seats to ensure their new motion picture debuts in the top slot at the box office on its opening weekend. According to this definition, guess who’s not on the A-list? Some big names. Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt. Anne Hathaway. You may have heard how Cruise, the performer known for starring in the Mission Impossible and Top Gun franchises, came out with a new movie a couple weeks ago. Known for marketing the hell out of his work, Cruise’s megawatt smile and fetish for doing his own stunts couldn’t compel enough moviegoers to march to movie theatres earlier this month for a No. 1 debut. His environmental satire Digger pulled in just $8 million when it opened in theatres on the weekend of Oct. 2. You read that right – not $80 million, but $8 million. That amount made it the No. 4 movie that weekend. It’s expected, according to such news sources as Variety and Forbes, Digger will lose $245 million, making it one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. And Cruise isn’t the only celeb who has been kicked off the A-list in recent weeks. Pitt’s Heart of the Beast, in which he co-stars with a German Shepherd, earned the third slot with $20 million when it opened on the weekend of Sept. 25. That may seem like a solid number, but consider this: The re-released Avengers: Endgame pulled in $26 million to win that weekend – and it’s a movie from 2019. There were signs Heart of the Beast was in trouble when the marketing campaign began to focus on Pitt’s canine co-star. That’s right: The cute dog was featured more prominently than Pitt himself. That’s how little confidence the film’s makers had in the laconic actor’s ability to draw an audience. Oh, and did you know Anne Hathaway had a movie out earlier this year? Not Verity or the Devil Wears Prada sequel or The End of Oak Street, but Mother Mary, which premiered the weekend of April 24. You likely aren’t the only person who hasn’t heard of it. Mother Mary was rejected by movie fans, coming in ninth that weekend with a total of $1.3 million. Hathaway probably owns houses worth more than that. The through line here is how having a big star in your motion picture isn’t a guarantee when it comes to performing well at the box office. We are conditioned to think such celebrities as Tom Cruise are sure bets when it comes to drawing a crowd, but it ain’t so. Their gravitational pull isn’t all that reliable. This is happening in the same year when feature films without big names – think Backrooms and Obsession – became wildly profitable after being marketed on the strength of their “concept” (Hollywood’s buzzword for a film’s genre), and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in box-office revenue. The unavoidable conclusion: Star power isn’t working at the multiplex right now. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: The Summer of IMAX
By Dan Brown Now that fall has arrived, the question can be asked: Who, or what, had the best summer this year in the entertainment industry? Was it Ella Langley, who’s ubiquitous number Choosin’ Texas was clearly the song of the season? Was it the suffix “-maxxing,” which got added to virtually every noun and verb in the English language during the warmer months? Was it Tomdaya, the celeb couple du jour who seemingly appeared on every red carpet on Earth? Nope, it was none of these. The hottest summer personality/event/trend/franchise was . . . IMAX. Out of all the people and things that make up the entertainment business, the one that had a better summer than anyone or anything else was a formerly obscure film format that has transcended its weird origins – this summer, it moved to the centre of the cultural conversation. If you didn’t know what IMAX was before this summer, by the end you may have been an expert. That’s thanks largely to two summer releases, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Just look at the numbers. Of the more than $1.7 billion dollars The Odyssey has grossed since it was released on July 17, $521 million of that amount has come from the sale of IMAX tickets – which makes it the highest-grossing IMAX movie ever, higher even than Avatar. Of the $360 million that Brand New Day pulled in on its opening weekend at the end of July, fully 24 per cent came from IMAX and other PLFs (premium large formats). It’s fair to say more people paid more money to see films in IMAX this summer than ever before. This column won’t go into the technical specifics of IMAX, except to note that Nolan had to have a special camera built to realize his dream of adapting Homer’s epic. Nolan has been working his way toward filming an entire movie in IMAX, previously filming select sequences in movies such as The Dark Knight Rises. IMAX has been around for decades, but it went mainstream in 2026, along with other premium formats. For a long time IMAX seemed like a curiousity that was limited to nature documentaries and the NASA space shuttle. There have even been moments when the company’s future was in doubt. It has met its moment. And you can bet, come awards season, IMAX will be getting thanked in multiple acceptance speeches. Why the mass appeal? The explanation may be as simple as, there are now entire generations who grew up watching motion pictures on their laptops and cellphones. Those movie lovers are hungering for as big a picture as possible, and IMAX is a revelation to them. The big brains in Hollywood have been trying new ways to get people back into movie houses. 3D movies were a thing for a while, but then the studios got so desperate, they even tried guilting people into watching movies in the theatre. Even before COVID-19, movie fans were shifting away from the traditional movie-watching experience. Now theatres are back, in a big way. And there is a hunger like never before for specialized formats. You might even say movie fans were IMAX-maxxing all summer long. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Some Theories About Superhero Movie Fatigue
Some Theories About Superhero Movie Fatigue By Dan Brown You’ve probably heard of “superhero movie fatigue.” It’s the idea that the public has grown tired of motion pictures featuring the costumed do-gooders who first appeared in comic books, then made the leap to the big screen. The theory goes something like this: Superhero burnout is the reason why big-budget effects pictures starring these superpowered champions of justice are a risky bet for studios after years of sequels (and TV shows, in Marvel’s case). That’s why the superhero moment has passed at the multiplex. But is it real? Or is superhero movie fatigue a press creation? I have some theories. Theory No. 1: It’s real. The fatigue is genuine. Exhibit A would be this June’s Supergirl movie, which came and went without making a ripple in the pop culture. Made on an estimated budget of $170 million, it came nowhere close to earning its costs back with a worldwide gross of $126 million. (Numbers from the Internet Movie Database.) But if moviegoers are sick of superheroes right now, then you’d have to account for the staggering success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which came out in August and has grossed more than $2.4 billion (on an estimated budget of $225 million). Theory No. 2: It’s real – but it’s a superhero thing, not a superhero-movie thing. According to this line of thinking, the fatigue is part of a larger cultural reaction against superheroes. The popularity of superheroes is always waxing and waning. We may be in a period similar to the middle decades of the 20th century, when comic-book publishers moved away from superhero titles in favour of horror and romance comics. So it has little to do with the ubiquity or quality of the films being released, superpowered beings just aren’t working right now in any format. Theory No. 3: It isn’t real. Perhaps superhero movie fatigue is entirely a press creation. It’s one of those trends that media types latch onto and repeat without thought. It’s just the latest example of the conventional wisdom circulated by journalists and pundits that sounds valid, but falls apart on closer inspection and has no actual bearing on reality. If so, then you have to account for the failure of Supergirl this summer, which not even co-star Jason Momoa could save from fading into obscurity. Why wasn’t Kara Zor-el able to draw a crowd? Theory No. 4: Movie fans are way more discerning than we give them credit for being. Maybe moviegoers judge each Hollywood release on its own merits, in which case we can’t blame the box-office failures on any given movie’s genre. Genre doesn’t enter into their decisions, or at least it’s not the determining factor it may have been in the past. This would explain why some superhero flicks fail, yet others generate billions of dollars in ticket sales. Hence their selective appeal. Theory No. 5: The superhero movie as a genre doesn’t exist anymore. Movies like 1978’s Superman and 1989’s Batman and even 2002’s Spider-Man were recognizably part of the same genre. Those days may be over. You’ve probably noticed this. There are so many superhero releases now – some are comedies, some dramas, some mysteries, some kung-fu movies, some horror flicks, some space fantasies. So “superhero movie” may not be a term that applies anymore, and a film’s track record can be explained by the subgenre it belongs to. So Supergirl failed earlier this year not because it starred a superhero, but because it has a lot in common with a specific western, True Grit, and movie fans weren’t in the mood for a space western this summer. You may be asking: Why does any of this matter? Well, there’s a big superhero movie coming out at the end of year called Avengers: Doomsday, which could be the difference between a decent year for Hollywood and a great year. Not to overstate its importance, but a lot is riding on it. In fact, if Doomsday is a flop, you can bet the online pundits will scream that it was foolish of Marvel Studios to make a big superhero movie for the silver screen. On the other hand, if it does bonkers business, that will guarantee more of the same will be coming soon to a theatre near you. What do you think? I would love to hear your own theories in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Beware the Movie Marketed On the Strength Of Its Low Budget
By Dan Brown A movie’s ultra-low budget is not a good enough reason, on its own, to see it. It’s a legitimate reason for the entertainment press to talk about the movie — because in 2026, a low-budget, microbudget, or no-budget film that takes the box office by storm is a novelty. The latest examples of the Hollywood media buzzing over films with minuscule production costs both happened this spring. May 15 saw the release of the horror movie Obsession. Made for about US $750,000, Obsession has grossed more than $427 million worldwide. Two weeks later, the horror film Backrooms – budgeted at roughly US $10 million – debuted in cinemas. To date, it has made over $365 million globally. These two films have prompted hundreds of headlines along the lines of: * “How ‘Obsession’ became an unprecedented box office horror hit – and one of the year’s most profitable movies” (Variety) * “Backrooms and Obsession: How two low-budget horror films caused a Hollywood earthquake” (BBC) * “‘Wildly unpredictable’ low-budget horror hit fans are flocking to the cinema to see” (Yahoo) * “Small-budget horror is the winning ticket these days” (Darden Report) If you know one thing about these horror hits, it’s that they were cheap to make. What you don’t know from reading the blanket coverage is whether they’re actually worth the trouble of schlepping your butt to the local multiplex, then buying a ticket. Despite all the column inches, the minutes of airtime, the bandwidth, we don’t know if they’re any good. Readers with long memories have seen this movie before. When it came out in 1993, it was called El Mariachi. That Mexploitation flick’s remarkably low budget isn’t in the first sentence of the film’s Wikipedia page, but the fourth: “The US $7,225 production was originally intended for the Mexican home-video market, but executives at Columbia Pictures liked the film and bought the American distribution rights.” As I recall, every time the picture appeared in the media back then, some talking head would inevitably mention, “Did you know Robert Rodgriguez made that thing for $7,000?” The focus of the coverage wasn’t on whether it was worth seeing, but rather the fact that a guy had made a whole feature for such a scant amount. It happened again five years later, when The Blair Witch Project received the attention of journalists and industry experts who fixated on its original production budget of US $35,000. Imagine that! (Midbudget movies don’t garner much press attention because, by definition, they aren’t newsworthy.) Now, it’s true Hollywood filmmaking has always been a battle between art and commerce. No question. But in the commotion surrounding these low-budget oddities, the art part gets left out. It’s all about the business aspect. And it’s still happening. That’s why I’m always cautious when its low budget is the first thing I learn via the web, newspaper or TV about a soon-to-release motion picture. It’s true, in the hands of an imaginative director, less of a budget can mean more of a movie. I do believe that. However, those cases are rare. And you wanna know a secret? I don’t care about a film’s production cost, be it low or high. It doesn’t enter into my film-watching experience. At all. After all, no one walked out of the theatre in 1994 after seeing Clerks (which cost Kevin Smith a mere $28,000 to make), and said, “I hated that movie, but I’m just glad they didn’t spend a ton of cash on it.” Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
One Actor, Two Superheroes
By Dan Brown They’ve made a ton of superhero movies. How many, exactly? Here's one measure: There are now multiple actors who have played at least two different comic-book characters in their careers. When Supergirl debuts in theatres on June 26, the list will grow even longer because it features Jason Momoa in a supporting role. You might be thinking, I see, Supergirl will be teaming up with Aquaman – the underseas hero who Momoa has played in movies like Justice League and the Lost Kingdom. Nope. Momoa now stars as Lobo, the interstellar mercenary, not the dude who can command whales to do his bidding. The DC movie universe rebooted with last summer’s Superman, so Momoa has in front of him a new acting challenge, if that’s the right word. Nor is he the only one. Perhaps the most famous example is Ben Affleck. In 2003, he appeared as brooding Marvel crime-fighter Daredevil. Thirteen years later, he donned the cape and cowl belonging to brooding DC crime-fighter Batman. In acting, they call that range. Ryan Reynolds has technically appeared as three different comic characters: Green Lantern, an early version of Deadpool (in X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and the actual Deadpool we all recognize now. In fact, in the latest Deadpool movie, there’s even a joke about the trend of performers appearing as more than one hero when the merc with a mouth mistakes the Human Torch for Captain America, who were both brought to life by Chris Evans. Other examples of the trend are Karl Urban and Elliot Page. If you include both heroes and supervillains, you can also add Michael B. Jordan and Michael Keaton. If you’re asking yourself, “So what?” there is a relevant point to be made here. What the growing list shows is fickle movie audiences are more than willing to give an actor a second chance. They don’t hold a stinky performance against them. Fans of superhero flicks are more than willing to embrace a performer who takes on a new persona. Green Lantern was a notorious bomb in 2011. Reynolds appearing in that role was clearly a career miscue, yet to this day theatregoers are more than happy to buy tickets to see him as Deadpool. Same with Affleck – although the Daredevil motion picture was aggressively mediocre, that failure didn’t stop fans from supporting him as the Dark Knight in multiple adventures. Heck, how many superhero/actor portmanteau nicknames are there? I’m talking about “Batfleck.” No one should be surprised how some actors are making a living by playing “the superhero type.” Exactly how many cowboy roles does Clint Eastwood have on his filmography? Along the same lines, Robert De Niro is the eternal gangster and Noah Wyle has played two different Emergency Room doctors, and has plenty of time left in his career for more. But perhaps the riskiest comic-book recasting is to come at the end of this year when Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theatres on December 18. You likely know by now that Robert Downey Jr. – formerly Iron Man — will appear as the titular bad guy, Victor Von Doom. However, no one knows how the creative team making the movie is going to handle his return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Tony Stark's death. Is this Doom a Stark variant from another reality? Will they even acknowledge that Doom has the same face as Stark? Will the other Avengers recognize him? Presumably he’s going to take his mask off at some point in the upcoming film, so stay tuned to see how Marvel diehards react to whatever plot device the filmmakers decide to use. As for the inverse of this trend – the Hollywood tradition of superheroes who have been played by more than one thespian – there’s not enough space here to name all of them. Superman alone has been played by, like, a kazillion different guys! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
