The Fall Box Office Crisis: A Phase, a Fluke, or the Future?

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.3 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt is joined by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw to investigate a historically bad fall season at the box office by highlighting which issues are actually real and which are insignificant. They look at larger industry-wide trends, like the shortening of theatrical windows and the rise of streaming, as well as smaller, more recent developments like releasing independent movies wide rather than platforming them. They discuss whether the "movie-star problem" excuse is overblown or legitimate, as well as if this could simply be explained by judging the actual quality of the films themselves (02:33). Matt finishes the show with an Academy Awards prediction after attending the premiere of Netflix’s ‘Jay Kelly’ (25:54). For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Email us your thoughts! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thetown@spotify.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Lucas Shaw Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you care about Hollywood, and I assume you do if you're listening to the town, you should really be getting the whole story about Hollywood. That's what you get with Puck. I'm a founding partner at Puck, and I write a newsletter called What I'm Hearing. It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories. Puck has a bunch of great journalists. We just hired Kim Masters, who also covers Hollywood from the inside, plus media, sports, fashion,
0:21.7	politics, and finance. It's a must have for plugged-in people. Fans of the town get a
0:26.6	discount on the description page of this episode or at puck.news slash the town. Go further into
0:32.1	Hollywood by becoming a puck member today. It is Monday, November 17th.
0:38.8	Stop me if you've heard this before.
0:40.6	It's been a pretty brutal couple months at the box office.
0:43.8	September and October,
0:45.0	grosses were down significantly from last year and about 40% from pre-COVID times.
0:50.7	Mostly because there weren't any big studio tent poles,
0:53.4	Disney's Tron, flop, Universal played it kind of small,
0:56.4	and Warner Brothers doesn't even have any movies for the rest of the year
0:59.5	after one battle after another in early October.
1:01.9	Kind of amazing.
1:03.2	But today we're talking about these smaller movies,
1:05.3	the independence, specialty movies, awards contenders, mid-budget stuff.
1:09.8	But the news is arguably bleaker. New York Times
1:12.8	noted last week that there have been zero hits, meaning $50 million or more in ticket sales at the
1:18.4	North American box office, of the 25 major comedy and drama releases in the past three months.
1:24.8	And this month, one after another, star-driven indies and mid-budget movies
1:28.8	like The Smashing Machine with The Rock, Christy with Sidney-Sweeney, die my love with Jennifer
1:34.0	Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, Bologna with Emma Stone, the Bruce Springsteen movie. All of them
1:39.5	kind of flopped. Those movies opened wide many of them, meaning on more than 2,000 screens, which
	...

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