10 Reasons Why 2016's Blockbusters Are Failing

This year has seen one of the biggest car crash blockbuster seasons in living memory, with a practically unprecedented number of big budget studio tentpole movies conspicuously failing to either set the box office alight or capture the hearts and minds of critics and filmgoers.

It’s been an ugly, divisive year too, with Marvel and DC fandoms at war with one another in a way we hadn’t seen since the bitter feuding of the mid-eighties, and the hate campaign directed at the Ghostbusters remake reaching new lows in online trolling.

Billions of dollars have been spent on producing and marketing these films, supposedly aimed at a broad, mainstream audience that will allow them to recoup such massive costs - yet the number of blockbuster films released this year that are forecast to make a significant profit can be counted on one hand.

So what’s gone wrong? Well, there’s no single problem responsible for this kind of calamity, and no magic bullet that explains it all. The true explanation is varied: a comedy of errors, affecting different movies in different ways, but this time with no contrived happy ending.

Can Hollywood learn from these mistakes in time to prevent 2017 from following suit, or are we looking at the trend for the next couple of years, until the studios can course correct upcoming projects? Let’s see...

Some of the most gargantuan box office hits of all time received fairly ropey reviews. Titanic and Avatar were two of James Cameron’s biggest critical misfires - yet they’re the two biggest movies of all time, if you don’t adjust for inflation.

Tim Burton’s 2010 ‘reimagining’ of Alice In Wonderland is another case in point, receiving decidedly mixed reviews and netting well over a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. This year, Suicide Squad is repeating that slender trend: despite some of the worst reviews for any superhero movie, it’s comfortably slid over the $700million mark worldwide without any recognisable capes or costumes in the main cast.

The thing is, critical consensus is still the benchmark when it comes to deciding to go and see a movie in theatres. It’s an expensive night out these days, the flicks… and given that the whole of that night out will revolve around the two hours and change you spend sitting in that cramped seat being shouted at by giants on a wall, if it’s not a good film then that’s the night ruined and all that money wasted.

That’s why so many obsess over sites like Rotten Tomatoes, despite the fact that most people don’t understand how it works. That percentage isn’t exactly scientific, you know.

But no one really understands why a few movies are review-proof and most aren’t. It’s never something you can rely on, and the alarming reviews for so many of the turkeys released to great fanfare this year have effectively cut the legs off most of them before they could get out of the front door.