Nobody Knows When Movies Come Out Anymore
The Proud American Taxpayer Deserves Better
Imagine being on your knees, your hands bound tightly behind you, as Anton Chigurh calmly shoves the barrel of a Remington Model 11-87 shotgun in your mouth. You can taste the cold steel, smell the stinging aroma of the gun oil - your life flashes before your eyes. You think of all the things you could have done, all the things you still want to do. But Chirgurh looks down and offers you an opportunity to save yourself: a 50-50 game of chance. If you answer correctly, he spares you. If you answer incorrectly, he pulls the trigger. He bends over and, in a gravelly whisper, asks: “has the Barbie movie come out yet?”
Speaking personally, I’d be a headless corpse lying in a puddle of meat soup, because I could’ve sworn that the Barbie movie came out like, June 2022. Maybe even Fall 2021. It would never cross my mind that it might not be coming out for nearly a year (if not longer). The same goes for Brendan Frasier’s “The Whale” - which dominated social media for a full week this summer when it premiered to a festival of cheering Italians, or the Timothee Chalamet Willy Wonka movie everyone made fun of at some point last year. All of these movies *feel* like they’re already out, but they aren’t! Some of them won’t be out for a very, very long time, actually.
The problem is multi-faceted, but like with most things the majority of the fault lies with the fucking phones. We are bombarded daily with behind-the-scenes sneak peaks of movies coming out in 2025, 45 second fancam reels somehow produced from nothing more than 4 seconds of trailer footage, Vanity Fair “First Look” cast shots, casting announcements, on-set drama, star dating rumors, character design previews, paparazzi snaps, Mario Lopez surprise lunch visits, family court hearings and a litany of other ancillary content theoretically intended to whet our appetites for the film in question. It creates a nonstop low-resonance din of marketing - one where a movie’s release is not a singular event we collectively anticipate, but an endless, Great Salt Lake-esque pool of short-form media we are all just floating in, forever.
A good example of this phenomenon is the marketing for the much-maligned Super Mario Bros animated movie starring everyone’s favorite Chris, Chris Pratt. The official Twitter account for this movie started posting in January 2021, despite the fact that the movie isn’t scheduled to hit theaters until April 2023 - meaning that by the time audiences can actually *see* this movie, they will have been subjected to nearly TWO AND A HALF YEARS of relatively stupid content - and even worse, TWO AND A HALF YEARS of online conversations about that relatively stupid content. We all remember the day they revealed how Chris Pratt’s voice would sound in the movie (which is apparently a carbon copy of Linda Belcher’s voice in Bob’s Burgers). That was a different day than the day when they revealed how Chris Pratt would pronounce “woohoo” in the movie. Or the day when they revealed what Princess Peach’s voice would sound like in the movie. Or the eight million Youtube videos and IGN articles about those things. Oh and also Chris Pratt is the voice of Garfield? But that may be a different movie…there’s really no way to know for sure. But you get my point.
When the Mario movie (and many of the other films mentioned above) finally become publicly-viewable, they will most likely burst onto the scene not with a bang but with a whimper, their audiences exhausted from years of Tiktok posts, overproduced teaser trailers, music festival experiences, co-branded cereals and ad-blocked banner ads. It will have a run in theaters, hit streaming, and most people will discover that it already came out when they open up Hulu one day and see it featured in the “new additions” carousel. And we as a society will have moved on by that point! Fully engaged with another 30-month-long slog of bullshit from some other godforsaken franchises. Maybe it will be a Hot Wheels movie starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the sassy fire truck. Maybe they’ll reboot Ace Ventura with Yung Gravy playing the titular role. Maybe it will actually be something fun to watch, big studio releases you leave the theater feeling exhilarated by, like Mad Max: Fury Road or Casino Royale. Who knows what the future holds? But these movies - movies we WANT to see, are genuinely hurt by this new system everyone is buying into, and that sucks.
So what do we do? In a lot of ways, we need to go back. We need to return to a time when we found out about a movie a month or two before it released, tipped off by commercials, trailers and advertisements that actually show the date of the fucking release on them. They did this in 2014! It wasn’t that long ago! So if you are a studio marketer, and you find yourself listing the release date on your theater poster as “Summer 2025” - piss off and come back in 28 months. Save your marketing dollars, and when the time is right, blow everyone’s dick off with an absolute firebombing of advertising. Light our shit up. Because nobody can possibly be excited for something for two and a half years, and certainly not when that something is a Super Mario movie starring Chris Pratt.
* as with all my writings, if anyone has hard data that refutes my subjective opinions here, I consider that data fake and that person a liar