Monday, 18 November 2024

Nolte: Movies for Normal People, Like ‘Ghostbusters,’ Are Box Office Hits


Nolte: Movies for Normal People, Like ‘Ghostbusters,’ Are Box Office Hits
GhostbustersJaap Buitendijk/Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures, DreamWorks Animation

Three movies made for normal people — Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Dune: Part Two, and Kung Fu Panda 4 — are hitting their numbers at the box office, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

All the excuses the fake media fabricate to explain away all those woke box office flops fall apart when you look at the opening weekend for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire….

  • Post-pandemic = check. (Yes, the entertainment media are so willing to whore out their credibility to protect Hollywood the pandemic is still blamed.)
  • Tired franchise = check.
  • Decades-old franchise = check.
  • Lousy reviews = check.
  • And yet… Frozen Empire will open to around $42 million or $44 million, which is at the high end of the $35 million to $45 million projections.

    So what happened? I’ll tell you what happened: nothing. Frozen Empire is just another Ghostbusters movie — that’s it — which is all it should be. There’s no political bullshit weighing it down — like all the gay stuff in Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which opened to a disastrous $30 million, or the feminist crap that unraveled Charlie’s Angels (2019) with an $8 million opening or the Disney Grooming Syndicate’s serial flops.

    Instead of punishing Ghostbusters fans with a social justice agenda, it’s a simple Ghostbusters movie that allows you to shut your brain off for a couple of hours.

    In other words, it’s a normal movie made for Normal People, those of us who find the politicization of absolutely everything grotesque, obnoxious, and exhausting.

    The same is true for Dune: Part Two. While I do not doubt that the movie is about Big Things, it’s obviously handling those issues in the way art should: through metaphor, theme, and subtext. After four weekends, Dune: Part Two is sitting at $233 million and is still going strong. People are already clamoring for a sequel, which is the excitement you no longer see around Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or anything Marvel-related.

    Then there’s Kung Fu Panda 4, which is making a fool out of Disney with a three-weekend gross of $132 million. That already tops Disney’s Lightyear ($118 million), Strange World ($68 million), and Wish ($63 million).

    So why would the fourth chapter of a non-Disney animated movie humiliate Disney? Well, unlike Lightyear and Strange World, Kung Fu Panda isn’t trying to groom kids by pushing adult sexuality on them by way of homosexual relationships — one involving a teen. And by the time Wish came out late in 2023, parents already knew Disney was a danger to their children and wisely stayed away.

    Normal People are desperate for normal movies, even more desperate than I expected. This new Ghostbusters looks terrible — tired, nostalgia-addicted, and Bill Murray wandering around thinking about his next golf game. Let’s face it: every Ghostbusters sequel has been pretty bad, but after nearly a decade of Hollywood ruining movies, anything that looks like it doesn’t push a social justice lecture is going to attract Normal People who still love going to the movies and genuinely miss them.

    This is not rocket science.

    Allow me to explain it this way…

    No one rewatches Stalin-era Soviet movies today. With the single exception of Sergei Eisenstein, who was a tad subversive, no one places those movies on their greatest foreign films lists. Why? Because propaganda sucks, and that’s all woke is — a $100 million political ad. Normal People will take those tired, ole’ Ghostbusters any day of the week over Indiana Jones and Girlboss Scolds.

    To be clear, I’m not arguing against political-themed movies. Oliver Stone and Spike Lee are two of my favorite working directors. This new movie, Civil War, looks pretty interesting. If there’s no gay sex, I plan to see it. And if Civil War provokes and makes me think about things, I’ll love it even if I disagree with it, as I frequently do Stone and Spike. But if Civil War lectures me and tells me what to think, I’ll hate it, even if I agree with the message.

    Seriously, this is not rocket science.

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