Hits

We’re now in the thick of the fall movie season, but you wouldn’t know it from how skimpy the box office is, or how muted the chatter. Simply put: Where have all the indie hits gone?

Not so long ago, the slate of buzzy, critically acclaimed prestige movies that opened during the fall added up to something like the indie version of blockbuster season. There’s a reason the movie calendar was arranged that way. Critically acclaimed films tended to open in the last part of the year because that’s when they did well. And the trend crystallized in the ’90s, when Harvey Weinstein transformed the old awards season into the awards-industrial complex (welcome to your life, actors and directors who now have to spend five months on the road-to-the-Oscars campaign trail).

But the days when a buzzy fall movie could be a box-office bonanza are starting to look like a weirdly distant memory. The flameout has been creeping up for a while, ever since the pandemic produced its unhappy paradigm shift in moviegoing (i.e., more and more folks don’t like going). You could see it in the disconnect between praise and popularity that greeted such films as “Tár,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” and, last year, “Anora” — which crawled its way to $20 million, though that was a sobering reminder that in the indie-film world, $20 million is the new $50 million.

This fall, however, it has seriously begun to look like the bottom is falling out. One high-profile, high-prestige film after another has opened to a deafening thud at the box office, and the failures are so varied that each movie tends to come with its own elaborately tailored excuse.

“After the Hunt“? People didn’t want to see an anti-“woke” academic thriller starring Julia Roberts as a pill of a professor. “The Smashing Machine“? People didn’t want to see Dwayne Johnson in a serious role, looking like the Hulk’s damaged cousin, in a movie that felt like a staged documentary. “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere”? People didn’t want to see an “art-house” music biopic about the making of the Boss’s most austere record. And “Christy,” which is opening to the usual so-so grosses this weekend? People were more interested in scrutinizing Sydney Sweeney’s jeans commercial than they are in seeing her acclaimed performance in a gritty empowering boxing biopic.

And then there’s “Bugonia,” the most exciting movie of the bunch. It will have earned $12.5 million at the end of its second wide-release weekend — in other words, it’s no “Poor Things” (the previous, highly successful collaboration between Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos), but just maybe it will wind up joining the $20-is-the-new-$50-million club.   

What, exactly, is going on? Is indie film dying on the vine? I think that’s an overstatement, but before we get to the larger meaning of it all (and yes, there are signs of hope at the end of the rainbow), let’s run through the reasons this is happening.

The rise of streaming. Speaks for itself, at this point. People no longer need to go out to the movies because the movies are coming to them.

The closing of windows. If it took longer for films to move from theaters to home viewing, there would be more incentive to see them. The collapse of the window has been a Hollywood catastrophe. But can the industry collectively reverse course?

Theaters suck. An overhyped factor, in my book. But we all know the litany of gripes (the floors are scuzzy, people are on their phones, the trailers last 35 minutes, and there’s now less of an avid populated hum to the whole experience).

TV is the new indie film. Quality television, and even not-so-quality television, now fills the space that indie films used to.

It’s part of Netflix’s business plan to rob us of hits. I think “Frankenstein,” like “Nosferatu,” would have been a major hit in movie theaters. And “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”? A no-brainer — it’s the best “Knives Out” movie yet. “A House of Dynamite”? I’m not a fan, but everyone’s talking about it. It should have been in theaters.

Does the film-festival “blast-off” still matter? This year’s slate of buzzy Sundance movies, when released, has been barely visible. (Sorry, “Sorry, Baby,” but the world hardly knew you existed.) From “Eleanor the Great” to “Eddington,” the 2025 Cannes films have been met with a meh response (though “Sentimental Value” may prove a different story). Same for the Venice titles. Yet the one major prestige hit of the fall, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” didn’t even play at a festival. Is there a message here?

I think there’s a major message nestled in all of this, but it’s not about festivals, or streaming, or any of the other factors listed above. It’s about the kinds of movies that people are making. It’s a message that should echo through the indie-film world: If you build it, they will not come — unless you build it the right way.

There have been a small handful of daring and original movies that are hits this year, and what that adds up to is a story. A story about storytelling. Those hits are Celine Song’s “Materialists,” which had the audacity to be a romantic comedy about the real live current dating world; “One Battle After Another,” which is such an up-to-the-minute X-ray of what’s happening in America that it hits you like a thunderbolt; and, I predict, “Marty Supreme” (opening Dec. 25), Josh Safdie’s existential ping-pong thriller, starring a ferociously committed Timothée Chalamet — a movie that’s like “Uncut Gems” remade as a crowd-pleaser.

Here’s the message of those films. In a world of faltering attention spans and blockbuster numbness, indie filmmakers need to start thinking more about the audience. Not in a cautious, lame, pandering way but in a bold and adventurous way. They need to meet what the marketplace is telling them. They need to start thinking like entertainers again.

It may sound like I’m making a reactionary argument, or doing one of those anti-art-film polemics. But I’m not. This is what Hollywood, at its greatest, has always stood for. This is what the New Hollywood of the ’70s stood for. This is what the ’90s indie-film revolution, incarnated by Quentin Tarantino, stood for. This is what “Materialists” and “One Battle After Another” and (mark my words) “Marty Supreme” stand for.

There needs to be a place for small and highly idiosyncratic movies. No question. But if indie film is going to save itself, it’s going to have to get busy remembering that movies, before they do anything else, need to lift us out of ourselves. They need to reach for danger, for beauty, for the third rail of reality, for a higher love. And they need to start doing it now.

The stakes are too high.