Has the movie business reached peak superhero?

Make Me Smart November 13, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello, everyone. I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense. Kai is out today but joining me is Marketplace’s, Matt Levin. Hey, Matt.

Matt Levin 

Hey, Kimberly, great to be with you, as always, and thanks to all of our listeners for joining us today on this Monday, November 13. We’re halfway through November. Oh, my God.

Kimberly Adams 

No, we’re not.

Matt Levin 

We’re close to halfway through November so.

Kimberly Adams 

That’s not how the math maths.

Matt Levin 

We’re nearly halfway through November. That’s close enough.

Kimberly Adams 

I’ll take the optimism. I mean, like we are, we are getting close. It’s getting it’s actually starting to get chilly here in DC, which it hasn’t been as it was like, 80, like, a weekend ago. And I was just like, that’s not right. But anyway, before we devolve in depression, about climate change, let’s do some news. And then we’re gonna do some smiles. So why don’t you go first? What caught your eye in the news today or the weekend?

Matt Levin 

I am a big movie fan. What’s, what’s the last superhero movie you’ve gone to Kimberly?

Kimberly Adams 

Gone to like in the theater?

Matt Levin 

Yes. In the theater? Like it’s 1997.

Kimberly Adams 

Ooh so actually went to the movies this weekend. And I saw like an indie French film called “Anatomy of a Fall,” which was Oh, yeah. Then before that, the last thing I saw was Dune, which is not a superhero movie.

Matt Levin 

And that was a year ago.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, I know, at the last last superhero movie I went to see in a theater was “Black Panther.”

Matt Levin 

Okay. I think yeah, exactly. And I think that was the last superhero movie I actually went to go see in a theater as well. So it’s been a while for me to make it in there. So there was but the reason I am asking you that question is that the latest incarnation of the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this was “The Marvels” which is the follow up to “Captain Marvel,” which came out a few years ago, did not so great. It was the lowest performing Marvel movie in the history of the MCU. It only grossed 47 million in North America, which is pretty pretty low for a Marvel movie. And it costs $220 million to produce. So what why should anyone care? Here? Here’s why people should care. One, I am of two minds on this. If you care about movies, I love going to the movies. I like taking my phone, putting it on silent and forcing myself to like actually be engaged with content without distraction for two and a half to three hours. Or actually, hopefully less, unless it’s a Scorsese movie. I this is not so great news for movie theaters. There’s a reason they call these MCU movies, tent poles. Right? The movie theaters have become increasingly reliant on your Ant Mans, your Doctor Strange’s your other, your Avengers for their revenues. And there is an open question as to whether theaters can kind of continue to exist without the you know, money stream that these superhero movies no matter how you may feel about them. If they’re not performing, like they used to. The other part of this is that’s kind of interesting to me is I kind of despise these superhero movies. And I’m wondering if they’re actually the long-awaited cultural exhaustion, that you know, those of us who remember when there were more than superhero movies at the box office that we’ve kind of been rooting for maybe that’s finally arrived. It’s not only the Marvel’s that have underperformed the other Marvel movies that came out this year and Ant Man sequel and Guardians of the Galaxy, they did better than this Marvel movie, but they they underperformed as well. So there’s this kind of feeling that maybe we finally reached peak superhero and maybe it’s time for something else.

Kimberly Adams 

See I actually do want to go see this movie. I watched Miss Marvel which is the show on Disney+ that one of the characters from “The Marvels” and that was extraordinarily good and then the character and one of the other characters who’s in this was in the the Marvel TV show about the witch anyway, the I don’t know all the characters anyhow, I actually am excited to see this movie. Because a I love the fact that they’ve got, you know, three women leads and two of them are women of color and I’m a bit worried about how this sort of landing with a thud how people are going to, you know, potentially uses use it as an excuse to not invest in movies, “WandaVision”, thank you Bridget Bogner, “WandaVision” with a TV show I was thinking of one of the other main characters it was in “WandaVision.” Anyhow, I wonder though how much this poor opening is reflective of how people are feeling about superhero movies, as opposed to the effect of the SAG-AFTRA strikes and the fact that the these promotion, the actors, they couldn’t go out and promote it, they couldn’t walk the red carpet, they couldn’t do events. They couldn’t be on social media, they couldn’t do late night talk shows. And that is something that all the other Marvel movies have had in their rollout. And so I just, I don’t know how big of an impact that had, but I’m sure it had something. And so I hope that, you know, this makes up some ground, I do plan to go see it. Now. I feel a little sad. A little guilty. I didn’t go see it on opening weekend. That’s when they care about the numbers. But you know, I’ll go see it. I’ll go see it.

Matt Levin 

Well, I suppose good for you. The the the counter argument would be in terms of the promotion argument. Barbie and Oppenheimer, right. Like those were two movies that were also happening are very early on in the strike right.

Kimberly Adams 

And they had been promoting it up until, you know, they came out very soon after the strike started. So it’s not like they missed a big run up in the promotion. So Barbie had been heavily promoted leading up to it although I also didn’t see a lot of billboards and things for you know, The Marvels in the way that you saw for the Barbie movie and Oppenheimer and stuff.

Matt Levin 

Yeah that’s right. I guess what I meant was it wasn’t like Margot Robbie was out there, or Robbie. I’m sorry, I was out there on like late night television shows before the movie actually came out.

Kimberly Adams 

I just think that maybe there was even a bigger marketing budget allotted to it, because how much promotional material did you see for the Barbie movie compared to the promotional material you saw for the Marvels?

Matt Levin 

Yeah, well, you can you can stand on Marvel’s Island. Let me know how it is. I’m curious to see if it’s any good.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I will let you know once I actually go see it. All right. We went on for a very long time about that. I had strong feelings, strong feelings. Okay, so I have two little bits of news. Number one was an interesting story I saw in Reuters about the banks connected to the Zell payment app, actually starting to refund people for scams. Now. There had been scams going around for the longest on Zell. And a lot of times, people were not able to get their money back, because it was just, it was sort of like an as cash thing. And so there was a lot of pressure from Washington and investigations. And there was an increasing risk that there was going to be some regulatory crackdowns on these apps and things like that. And so now all of a sudden, Zell, and a lot of the banks connected to it are starting to refund people for the money they lost to scams. So if that was you, you may want to double check and see if you might be eligible. Yes so and the reason one of these, the reason these scams were particularly successful, is because they actually did get the users to authorize the payments through the app, but it was often just like, not who they thought they were sending money to. So so now it says lenders on Zell are also now required to implement a tool that flags transfer transfers with risky attributes, such as payment to an account that has never transacted on the Zell network, and that Zell has seen a step change reduction in fraud and scam rates this year, but declined to provide more details to warriors.

Matt Levin 

Are you on Venmo Kimberly?

Kimberly Adams

Yes.

Matt Levin 

Have you ever received money accidentally or delivered money accidentally to someone on Venmo?

Kimberly Adams

No.

Matt Levin 

I have. Someone gave me $1,000 I think it was 1,000. It was at least multiple hundreds.

Kimberly Adams 

Ooh ethical dilemma. What did you do?

Matt Levin 

I don’t know. I don’t know how much of a dilemma it is. I gave it back. But there was nothing.

Kimberly Adams 

I was going to say, did you not feel? That could have gone a couple different ways. I’m so glad you gave it back. I would have felt terrible. I wouldn’t trust you ever again. Terrible colleague.

Matt Levin 

But that’s the thing. There’s no, there wasn’t any recourse at least when that happened on Venmo. Like, the guy just was like you’re the wrong Matt Levin, can you please give me my money back? It was I felt really bad for him. It’s like, oh, you’re lucky I’m, you know, I can actually do this for you.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, and lucky that you’re a good person.

Matt Levin 

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Kimberly Adams 

All right. Well, one more news item that I had. And I lost it now. Here we go. So as we’ve talked about here before, and we will probably talk about again, we are on our way, potentially to another partial government shutdown, because government funding runs out at the end of the week. Obviously, the House Republicans are working on a plan to try to get some sort of funding package through perhaps a laddered continuing resolution, which is weird. But one of the things I hadn’t thought about until I read it about it in The Hill today is that if there is a shutdown, it’s going to coincide with the Thanksgiving travel season, which is expected to be the busiest since before the pandemic. And that means that all of those air traffic controllers, all those TSA agents will have to be working without pay now, they probably will get their paycheck that like even if there’s a shutdown on once funding runs out the end of the week, they still will get another paycheck during the shutdown from you know, time work before, so they won’t feel the hit immediately. A shutdown would have to go for a while before they’d have actually miss a paycheck. But we could just throw an extra snarl into Thanksgiving travel, which is worth monitoring if this indeed does end up getting messier.

Matt Levin 

So yeah, I’m sure Congress’s approval ratings will, if they could go negative, if people get stuck at the airport.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, thanks, Congress you made me miss Thanksgiving with my family, which gives even more fodder for those complicated political discussions around the Thanksgiving table. All right, let’s move on to some smiles. All right, you go ahead.

Matt Levin 

Okay, so some good news, I suppose on the climate change front, apparently deforestation.

Kimberly Adams 

Hooray!

Matt Levin 

Hooray. That’s right. deforestation in the Amazon is at a five-year low, which sounds like a good thing. So Brazil said, I believe this was Friday that there’s been a 22% decrease in deforestation between August of last year and July of this year, which is believed to have reduced the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by seven and a half percent. This is mostly because there’s new political leadership in Brazil, which is a bit more environmentally friendly, and they’ve imposed higher penalties on deforestation so it’s, I’m always hungry for good climate change news. Shout out to How We Survive our climate change solutions podcasts.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, I will take the wins where we can get them.

Matt Levin 

Exactly, what do you got Kimberly?

Kimberly Adams 

Um, it’s a story about cocktails, because cocktails are something I enjoy. And I like it. This I actually spotted it last week and I had no idea that this was a thing. But state lawmakers in Wisconsin are making the old-fashioned cocktail, the official state, Wisconsin state cocktail. But but not a regular old fashioned. Apparently in Wisconsin, they make it with brandy, instead of whiskey or bourbon, which I did not know was a thing. So a bipartisan resolution declaring brandy the old fashioned as the brandy old fashioned is the official Wisconsin state cocktail won approval Thursday in the State Assembly. It’s a resolution not a bill. So it won’t make it onto the list of the other official state symbols. But getting that level of recognition is a lot more but anyway, this is so interesting. I’m just gonna read a little bit. So for those not familiar, the old fashioned cocktail in just about every, every place other than Wisconsin is traditionally made with a whiskey like bourbon, sugar and bitters. But in Wisconsin brandy usually replaces whiskey and it’s most often poured over a mixture of muddled cherries, orange slices, sugar and bitters, depending on how sweet or sour the imbiber likes it that concoction is then topped with a lemon lime soft drink, sour mix, club soda or some combination. Which just, no.

Matt Levin 

I guess that answers my, oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, Democratic Representative Ryan Clancy in a pun-filled and lighthearted speech said that adding savory ingredients to an old fashioned like pickled vegetables, which apparently they also do is, it says like pickled mushrooms and even brussel sprouts is an abomination that should be a felony offense, quote, “I felt stirred to speak today as a father, as a bartender, as an American,” Clancy said. “I need to be on record as saying there is only one acceptable style of drink — the brandy sweet old fashioned.”

Matt Levin 

Nice, take a stand.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah.

Matt Levin 

I was gonna ask if this was going to be your drink on Friday?

Kimberly Adams 

Of course it is. Of course it is. What else could I do with this information, but try to make a brand new old fashioned? Have you met me?

Matt Levin 

You sounded so disgusted by it though.

Kimberly Adams 

I’m disgusted by the idea of putting pickled vegetables into an old fashioned. But I mean people do with Bloody Mary. But also I don’t know how I feel about this. Sour Mix or lemon lime soda into an old fashioned. Like that’s, that’s doing a lot. But, you know, while we’re here, if you’re from Wisconsin and have thoughts on this and want to share that, please send us a voice memo. Give us a call. I mean, I need more information in details on this. And while we’re at it, I would love to hear from everyone what they think their their state cocktail, like their official state cocktail should be. Like, obviously, if you go down to Louisiana, they’re big on the sazerac and things like that. And in this article, I think there’s two other states that actually do. Yeah, only two states have an official state spirit. Alabama and Virginia both have whiskey as their official state spirit. But what would be your official state cocktail? I’m trying to think about what a state cocktail for Missouri would be. Yeah, I don’t know, man.

Matt Levin 

I don’t know. I don’t know for California either.

Kimberly Adams

Where are you originally from?

Matt Levin 

Southern California.

Kimberly Adams 

Maybe it would be like a wine-based cocktail. Can you have a wine-based cocktail? No because you need a spirit for a cocktail?

Matt Levin 

Yeah, exactly. You need a spirit for a cocktail. I’m sure this is high on the priority list for Gavin Newsom here to get.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, yeah. Anyway folks, let us know see what’s what do you think your state cocktail should be and if you have thoughts on the brandy old fashion, but yeah.

Matt Levin 

Marissa just nailed it for for California. It’s a michelada. That’s what it is.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, okay.

Matt Levin 

Yeah, okay. It’s a good call Marissa.

Kimberly Adams 

All right, well, that’s one down let’s get the rest. Okay, so that is it for us today. Tomorrow you can join us for our weekly deep dive we are going to continue our series on climate solutions because you know, Matt was bringing the good news. Last week we talked about carbon capture tomorrow we’re going to dig in on carbon credits. And that’s going to be with Nova Safo and I. And Nova is going to be here and we’re gonna get smart on what carbon credits are, how they work and why they can be so controversial. So please join us send in your questions you can reach us at [email protected] and 508-U-B-SMART. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Drew Jostad. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter and our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi

Matt Levin 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts and Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. Are you really going to see that movie Kimberly? It looks so bad.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. Maybe I’ll have a brandy old fashioned at the same time.

Matt Levin 

You might need one.