Therefore, box office was disappointing.
But it could bounce back and it could sustain, depending upon word of mouth. But this is not how entertainment is made and marketed today.
There is a fiction that the wall to wall hype of the nineties still works. Now it occasionally does, last time with "Barbie," then again, the movie was based upon a well known doll that had been in the market for half a century. But if you want to break something brand new?
And it's not only movies, it's music too. All the focus is on that which is made for big bucks immediately. Whereas it's the little engines that could who are hoovering up all the dough, with low marketing costs and avid fans.
Used to be films were platformed. They opened in New York and L.A. and they might take months to hit the hinterlands. Then the paradigm shifted to opening in thousands of theatres and hoovering up all that dough on the first weekend. And then the film had another run in physical media, i.e. DVDs, then pay per view and cable/streaming...
That game was blown apart. But that's the game the studios are still playing. I know I'm just one of many piling on the studio heads, but they are so out of touch, crippled with short term thinking to boot. Remember when everybody laughed when Netflix switched to streaming? Who's crying now?
But Netflix has its own built-in marketing device. Its homepage. They serve up what they think you want and you don't have to scroll down very far to see the Top Ten. So you get a feel for the marketplace instantly. Albeit a walled-garden, but Netflix is the big kahuna here and you can survive on Netflix alone, which is why Disney+ and Hulu have their streaming bundle, you need to entice people to sign up, whereas word of mouth about their shows gets people to sign up for Netflix and keeps them paying every month.
So conventional wisdom is it's impossible to break an original movie and therefore sequelmania is the only option. Let's be clear, the sequels do business because the audience already knows what they are, they know what to expect, and the originals are successes, otherwise no sequels are made. Whereas if you start with something new...
Studios have to accept the fact that something new is going to take time to percolate in the market and therefore they must be marketed accordingly. An original script should be seen as a four to six month project. With a slow rollout. There should be no imminent pay per view or streaming. The film goes to secondary distribution before most people are even aware of it. The movie business thinks America is enthralled and is following their releases...NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH! Most people are out of the loop and don't care. How do you get them to care? By creating a product so good that it creates word of mouth and sustains.
But studios have giant contracts with the secondary markets, they get big bucks for these, but they're killing original productions.
And original label productions have fallen completely by the wayside in music. The old game of signing an unknown to a label and marketing the hell out of them is completely done. First the act must establish a fan base independently and then the major label will sign it and try to blow it up further.
And why is this so? The death of terrestrial radio, which had a lock on exhibition. And while we're at it, let's talk about TV being in the dumper. There's still a channel called MTV, but nobody watches it and it's got little to do with music. And late night talk shows' ratings have cratered and an appearance there means bupkes, so...
You can't rig the game anymore. Anybody can play.
So what are the labels doing? Buying independent distribution networks. Rob Stringer just boasted about all the data Sony gets from the indie companies it acquired, not only the Orchard, but Kobalt. And now Universal wants to buy Downtown... Thank god the indies in the U.K. are fighting this. How are you supposed to compete with someone who has all your data?
Entertainment survives on new product. Almost no one has a hit on the chart a few years after their breakthrough. No, we need a steady slew of new acts. But since they're so hard to break, the labels just promote that which sounds like everything else and most of the audience tunes out. Ditto on movies. SOME people like Marvel movies, many people don't care. Marvel is a NICHE! Just like Taylor Swift. But the press still believes in the old paradigm too, they employ the traditional charts... Recently publications have started releasing lists of their best tracks of 2025. It's laughable, all of them are from the Spotify Top 50. The acts selling tickets outside the pop/hip-hop genres are nowhere to be seen, even though they sell a boatload of tickets. We call this marginalization. Unless you're a fan of the Spotify Top 50 try listening to some of this dreck, you'll be horrified. As for the kind of music you want to hear, where the hell would you find it? The entire system is based on selling you a limited amount of tripe, and therefore you're' dependent upon friends to turn you on to the good stuff, and your friends might not be music aficionados, so you just spend time on TikTok, which is more exciting than the Spotify Top 50 anyway!
If you're an act, prepare for the long haul. There are exceptions, like Zach Bryan, but Zach's music was totally different from the Spotify Top 50, he was original and credible and people hungered for him and his music, most acts are not that desirable.
And most movies are not that good.
You've got to flip the script. Instead of working from the audience backward, you've got to start with the art. Create something incredible on its own terms and then wait for the public to find it. This is Netflix to a T. Meanwhile, if dropping episodes week by week was such a great strategy, Apple TV+ would have a zillion more subscribers. There's no heat. If every time I go to your platform I can't find something new, I'm not going to pay to subscribe to your service.
This is all evident to consumers. Consciously or unconsciously. It's only the purveyors and the attendant media who are brain dead.
Instead of declaring "Elio" a failure, expectations should have been low for the first weekend, with subsequent marketing to help enhance word of mouth. Hell, so much of the audience for this pic is under ten, good luck reaching them. As for their harried parents? They're too busy paying the bills and doing the laundry and schlepping the kids to pay attention to your marketing. This is not Thursday night Must See TV with tens of millions exposed to Hollywood's ads. And the dirty little secret is the audience HATES ads, they're a turn-off, they know when they're being marketed to, so it gets ever harder to market to them, your sales pitch must be the artwork itself, it must have intrinsic quality and appeal.
I'd say the landscape is going to change, but it's ALREADY changed.
Just like the "New York Times" releasing their Top 100 movies of the century. I never go to a movie theatre, almost no one I know does, who does this appeal to? A niche lost in the past. You want to interest people? Do the Top 100 TV shows of the twenty first century. And include all the foreign ones, just like you do with films. And most of these series can be instantly accessed on a platform that many are already paying for anyway. Barry Diller says the film business is dead, but the "New York Times" which wrote all about his autobiography did not get the message!
It's kind of like politics. The Democrats drove the car off the cliff and then were stunned when they lost. They thought the public would be happy having no choice in candidate, they thought the public was happy when in truth people were flipping out for economic reasons. It wasn't only Joe Biden who was out of the loop.
Now you can get the straight poop if you talk to the young 'uns. Even better, go on TikTok. But oldsters propping up the old model ABHOR TikTok! But what works on TikTok? Honesty, credibility, something different... If you do the same thing over and over on TikTok you lose views, you've got to constantly come up with new stuff, which used to be the studio's job. But now these crybabies say it's too difficult. Give me a break.
The business is disrupted by those who are digitally native. The Boomers and Gen-X'ers have to die off. They run on nostalgia. A boomer will tell me they like episodes dripped week by week, but I've never ever heard this from someone under forty. They want to BINGE! In today's world if the product is not available, people will go elsewhere!
How do you connect the consumer to the product. That's the most difficult thing to do. The only ones who've figured it out are the ultimate distributors, like Amazon and Spotify. They offer EVERYTHING! And when you add up everything, it works. But if you're just one product, one record on their service...
Digital boycotts? Ever find someone under forty who wants to start one? No, they know how good these services are!
"Elio" didn't stiff because of the movie, it didn't stiff because the public doesn't want original productions, it stiffed because the studio and the surrounding press are employing an ancient template in a modern world.
Quick, who runs the studios?
Lord knows.
But you know who Ted Sarandos is. And Daniel Ek. And it's only those who grew up in the old pre-internet system who rail against them. They want it the old way.
But the old way is never coming back.
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