On 13 October, a very, very niche subset of you will have noticed, two very different films are arriving in UK cinemas.
David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer and feature-length children’s cartoon Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie might not have much in common on the surface. In fact, the only thing that unites them is that the first cinemagoers on that Friday morning will be able to watch a possessed girl’s head spin around and vomit pea soup at the exact same time that Skye, Chase, Marshall, Rubble, Rocky, Zuma, and Liberty will be trying to save Adventure City from the evil Mayor Humdinger. Yes, my IMDB tab is open, why do you ask?
Obviously, that shared release date won’t be giving execs at Paramount and Universal many restless nights. The audience crossover between the two is, and I say this with some degree of confidence, near zero.
But canines and Catholicism aside, distributors on both sides of the pond seem strangely reticent to try and recapture Barbie and Oppenheimer’s simultaneous release magic. That’s becoming increasingly clear stateside, where The Exorcist: Believer just yesterday ducked its thematically appropriate Friday 13th release date to make way for Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour concert film. Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour doesn’t yet have a UK release scheduled; hence we’re keeping our spooky day appropriately devilish (sorry, Swifties).
In the halcyon days of summer 2008, a similarly anticipated Nolan movie, The Dark Knight, missed a trick by releasing a week after the singalong juggernaut that is Mamma Mia in the US. Imagine the headlines – ‘Batman After Midnight’, ‘Here we go, a Wayne’, ‘Waterloo-k over there, it’s Batman’ (on second thoughts, this viral marketing thing is harder than it looks). In the UK, the studios decided on a two-week gap between the two, amusingly demonstrating both the vice-like grip ABBA have on the British psyche and the tangible difference between us and the States in one fell swoop.
Not even the Joker could scare away ABBA fans in 2008 (credit: Warner Bros)
Crucially, though, with similar battles like that between Bridesmaids and the first Thor movie in 2011, even as little as a decade ago studios weren’t so afraid of a rival film sweeping in to steal some of their much-needed box office gold.
So, what happened? Why do most weekends at the cinema now feel devoid of choice where there was once so much? Why did what used to be a common quirk of cinematic releasing on 21 July set the internet on fire in such novel, spectacular fashion?
With superhero movies and films based on existing IP consistently dominating the box office, and cinemas themselves increasingly lowering capacity in favour of larger, more deluxe seats and fancy screening options, the consensus in Hollywood seems to have become that there’s only room for one, massive horse in the paddock at once. As studios fight for each (very expensive) film to earn upwards of a billion dollars, the prospect of sharing even a tiny fraction of their box office returns with other blockbusters becomes unfathomable, even if the two realistically won’t share many audience members in common.
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But there is still one area where counterprogramming is not only still happening, but thriving. Though the practice has long since faded out of the blockbuster cinema scene, the idea of scheduling two films for different audiences on the same weekend never really went away – it just shifted genres. In the last few years, the only films consistently making big returns on their budgets have, as a rule, been massive, superhero blockbusters and A24, Blumhouse-adjacent horror flicks. The mainstream and the counter-culture, summed up in two thematically opposed packages.
How else could The Black Phone make ten-times its original budget smack-bang in between new films from Doctor Strange and Thor? How could Barbarian and Smile compete against Harry Styles/Florence Pugh juggernaut Don’t Worry Darling?
While Warner Bros. might not want two of its’ big 2024 tentpoles (Dune: Part Two and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire) battling out for the same release date, Insidious: The Red Door had no problem opening in the UK the same day as Pixar’s Elemental. Australian possession flick Talk to Me, meanwhile, has broken all sorts of box office records for A24 (and Altitude in the UK) despite manifesting just a few days before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem – and just a week after Barbie and Oppenheimer swept all before them in July.
Talk to Me is currently one of A24’s highest-grossing films stateside (credit: Altitude)
By pitching itself against whatever it is the mainstream are interested in, the horror genre continues to demonstrate that counter-programming, admittedly often at its most extreme, works. The Exorcist: Believer’s squeamishness this week definitely seems to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Between the ghosts, ghouls and ‘Barbenheimer’s of the cinematic landscape, a select few films are proving that counter-programming not only works, but might even be essential to the box office’s survival. When studios accept that, make cheaper blockbusters and stop moving Saw X away from Paw Patrol, cinema might just be able to save itself.
