The age of the comic book superhero movie is over. I don’t say this with glee. I am a huge fan of superhero movies and will probably still go to see the latest MCU film till the day I die. And there probably always will be superhero movies made—but they will never be what they were in their heyday. Between 2016 and 2019, studios were releasing around six superhero movies a year, with multiple entries—such as Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame in 2019—making over $1 billion. Yet this year, four superhero films were released—Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps—not one of which grossed more than $700 million. This is the first time this has happened since 2011.
So if superhero movies are dying, what’s going to replace them? Surprisingly, it will almost certainly be two genres that few people would expect: faith-based and horror. This might surprise people because these would seem to attract very different audiences. But the changing realities of both the economics of the film business and American demographics is such that the dominance of both these genres—and potentially a hybrid of the two—is all but inevitable.
This has already been a big year for both faith-based films and horror films. And even some faith-based horror. Jesus ruled the box office during Easter, with the latest season of The Chosen and the animated King of Kings taking multiple spots on the Top 10 box office over the course of their runs. Meanwhile, horror films like Sinners, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Weapons, and Conjuring: Last Rites grossed $366.7 million, $313 million, $263.4 million, and $400 million, respectively.
But why are these films considered successes and the superhero movies disappointments? The key is ROI—return on investment. How much a movie makes—like in any other market exchange—depends on both box office grosses andhow much it costs to produce. Everyone gets this. If a movie made $1 billion but cost $2 billion, then it was less profitable than a film that made $10 million but cost only $5 million.
Most people also get that movies are very expensive to make generally. But they don’t always think about how many line items there are on a film budget. Movies are one of the most collaborative industries in existence. You can’t just pick up a paintbrush or a guitar and make one. You have to pay for writers, directors, producers, actors—and more than just leads but also the extras who walk by virtually unnoticed—lighting, makeup, every crewmember, visual effects, everybody’s lunch, etc. (I discovered this myself the hard way while making my own extremely microbudget film over the past two years. There are dozens of things you have to pay for that you don’t even think about until you make a movie yourself.)
But there are other costs that are easy to forget. One of them is marketing. Movies are a democratic medium, so movies make their money back not from one rich buyer but from countless people around the world buying tickets to see it. Most people realize that it costs money to market or advertise a movie—from buying ads on YouTube to producing and distributing theater trailers and making deals with McDonald’s to carry Superman toys. After all, before people can see your movie, they have to know it exists in the first place. Yet what most film fans may not know is just how expensive marketing is. As Investopedia explains, “The average cost to produce a major studio movie has been around $65 million. But the production costs don’t cover distribution and marketing, which adds another $35 million or so, on average, bringing the total cost to produce and market a major movie to about $100 million.”
Then you have the movie-theater splits. When a film is in theaters, the studio and the theater split the profits. So not all the money goes back to the studio. These splits are negotiated between theaters and the studios, so obviously whoever needs the other less gets the biggest percentage of the ticket money. Typically, a movie studio takes between 100% and 80% of the ticket sales in the first few weeks, which then gradually declines to a 50/50 split. (The fact that this is so weighted toward studios initially is one of the reasons opening weekend grosses have become so important to them.)
Add all that together and the conventional wisdom is that, for a film to turn a profit, it needs to make double its production budget. So because Superman cost $225 million to make, it needed to make $450 million to turn a profit. The Conjuring: Last Rites cost $55 to make, meaning its opening weekend haul of $187 million made it profitable in mere days.
Hearing that, you might think it would always make sense to spend as little money on a movie as possible to make as much money as possible. But that creates diminishing returns. Often, the more money you put into a movie, the more money you pull out of it, sometimes exponentially more, to the extent that it dwarfs the profit you ever could have made by keeping costs low. After all, the highest-grossing movies of all time are:
1. Avatar ($2,923,710,708)
2. Avengers: Endgame ($2,799,439,100)
3. Avatar: The Way of Water ($2,320,250,281)
4. Titanic ($2,264,812,968)
5. Ne Zha 2 ($2,150,000,000)
6. Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($2,071,310,218)
7. Avengers: Infinity War ($2,052,415,039)
8. Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1,921,426,073)
9. Inside Out 2 ($1,698,863,816)
10. Jurassic World ($1,671,537,444)
All these are textbook examples of films with massive budgets bolstered by massive marketing campaigns.
Titanic is fitting here because it is often credited with creating the trend of these “mega-blockbusters” that have dominated the landscape ever since. In 1997, when Titanic came out, the majority of Paramount’s movies were made for tens of millions—including huge hits like Face/Off. In other words, Titanic’s $200 million budget (before marketing) was an outlier. By 2014, most films were being made for hundreds of millions. Titanic persuaded studios that providing massive budgets to get massive returns was the way to go.
Studios also had other reasons for switching to this model. Matt Damon noted in an interview on the popular Hot Onesshow that the death of the market for DVDs due to streaming meant that movies lost an alternative revenue avenue for their films.
So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream. Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.
And again, movies are a democratic medium, which means they must appeal across a wide spectrum of filmgoers if they are to be profitable. That’s one reason why superhero movies dominated in this era. Comic book films were heavy with both cutting-edge special effects and familiar characters, and based on established intellectual properties (IPs) with built-in fanbases. They were tailor-made to be massively budgeted spectacles with instantly recognizable archetypal tales of good versus evil that could also fit into that family-friendly PG-13 space. It was the perfect balance of the safe bet (established IP, broad audience) with massive investment leading to massive return in theaters alone, with everything after being gravy. And with established universes with dozens of heroes in them, as is the case with the MCU (Marvel Comic Universe), there’s a built-in audience for the next one, and the one after that.
But that was then. Now we’re entering a new era when spending hundreds of millions likely won’t turn a profit nearly as easily. Out of all the movies out this year, only Disney’s Lilo and Stitch made more than a billion dollars. People who chalk up recent MCU and DCU failures to “superhero fatigue” are missing the forest for the trees. The biggest problem is the death of monoculture.
As Jonathan Haidt notes in his book The Anxious Generation, the rise of the internet incentivized people to split further and further into more algorithmically personalized subcultures and entertainment—which meant we were splitting further and further from each other. This makes it harder and harder to craft entertainment that appeals to everyone. This isn’t just true domestically. Hollywood used to lean hard on foreign markets like China’s. But with China less interested in Hollywood content, that revenue is less reliable.
So why are horror and faith-based projects poised to be the biggest beneficiaries of this? The first reason is, again, ROI. Horror films and faith-based films have always been the movies with some of the highest levels of ROI. You can make a horror film or a faith-based film for the lowest budgets and make back more money (percentage-wise) than you can in maybe any other genre. If we are returning to an era when bigger budgets are too risky and the ceiling for a film’s box office success is lower, then we’re also returning to minimum budgets for maximum returns. Films that capitalize on ROI this way will have a huge advantage.
You see, movies have always relied to some degree on “awe,” and the further filmmakers leaned into awing their audience, the more successful they became. This is why, throughout film history, short films gave way to features, which gave way to epics, which gave way to blockbusters, which gave way to the mega-blockbusters. But this “awe effect” comes with a big price tag. We have to see Spider-Man swing, Superman fly, and Batman punch people throughout the film or we feel unsatisfied. And this costs a lot of money to do over and over again.
But this isn’t true of horror and faith-based films, where the biggest awe factor is the thing we don’t see. In faith-based films, that’s God. You can have a faith-based film that deals simply with ordinary people doing normal things, but as they get closer to God or God acts dramatically in their lives, fans of the genre feel the same elation as they do when seeing the Millennium Falcon shoot into hyperspace. Likewise, in horror films, we are often there to see the monster. But we also expect—and want—to not see the monster most of the time, because a lot of the entertainment is in the fear of anticipation that the monster’s hiddenness brings. So again, it’s much cheaper to make a monster in a horror film because we don’t expect to see it throughout most of the movie.
The other thing that gives faith-based films and horror films an advantage is that they resist the erosion of monoculture, as both genres lean heavily on religious narratives and religious communities that involve people meeting every week and listening to the same stories together. Haidt notes this in The Anxious Generation as well. Religious services bind people together under a shared system of values and experiences. This creates a common culture of tastes and values that movies can then appeal to. As secular culture continues to subdivide into smaller and smaller subcultures, religious communities will stand out as the biggest and least divided of the subcultures, making it easier for studios to identify and reach out to.
Moreover, religious Americans comprise the demographic having the most kids, so this audience is likely to only grow stronger over time. Hispanic/Latin audiences—who are also very religious and family oriented—are also a growing share of American movie markets, and they typically love horror films. With political liberals leaving religion far faster than conservatives, religion is becoming even more conservative-coded than it already was. And horror films have historically been a place very open to conservative narratives: from fear of stranger danger (Halloween), extramarital sex (It Follows), the exotic or foreign (Dracula), to celebrating things like family (A Quiet Place) and faith (The Exorcist) to overcome evil. Men are more likely to enjoy horror films than are women, and with Gen Z, men are now going to church more than women are. This is one reason I think Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ follow-up, The Resurrection of the Christ—essentially a faith-based/horror/superhero composite—is probably going to blow away expectations.
Hollywood has long been a place to enjoy shared stories and commonly held cultural values. For the last 30 years, those stories have been fantasies about flying men with capes who would save us. But, perhaps because they haven’t, we’ve finally gone off in search of other saviors. The groups that haven’t moved on are the ones whose primary culture was based on a real-life Savior. And this may be the very thing that causes Hollywood to move in their direction at last.
