Surprising no one, Damien Chazelle’s three-hour Hollywood epic Babylon has bombed spectacularly at the box office. With a whopping production budget of $78 million (per Variety), Deadline reports that Babylon has a break-even point of $250 million, and its opening weekend haul of $4.85 million suggests it won’t come close to turning a profit. The commercial disappointment of Babylon is no fluke; it follows a pattern of big-budget prestige movies failing because the studios refused to rein in the indulgent creative whims of a famous director.
It was a bold move for Paramount to open Babylon against Avatar: The Way of Water. After scoring hits all year with Scream, Jackass Forever, The Lost City, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Top Gun: Maverick, and Smile, the studio made a big mistake with its final major release of 2022. Babylon had no business competing with The Way of Water. Like Babylon, the Avatar sequel is the passion project of a revered director that runs over three hours long. But unlike Babylon, James Cameron’s aquatic sci-fi actioner provides some much-needed escapist entertainment. Moviegoers are increasingly disinterested in prestige pictures.
In a post-pandemic world ravaged by economic turmoil, if audiences are going to shell out some of their precious disposable income to watch a movie on the big screen, then they expect to be entertained. Babylon has some wild party scenes and a couple of laughs, but it doesn’t have Avatar’s relatable themes of family and conservation; it’s about the absurd excess of Hollywood millionaires. The Way of Water justifies its taxing runtime with an epic narrative that transports audiences to an entirely imagined world for a war between colonizing humans and vengeful aliens. Babylon, on the other hand, doesn’t justify its runtime; it manages to be both overstuffed and undercooked, with thinly drawn characters and hardly any plot to speak of.
The past year has seen a trend of auteur-helmed vanity projects tanking at the box office. According to /Film, Robert Eggers’ The Northman cost $90 million to produce and grossed just $69.6 million worldwide; David O. Russell’s Amsterdam (also starring Margot Robbie) cost $90 million and grossed $31.1 million; and George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing cost $60 million and grossed less than $20 million. Like Babylon, all of these movies were bolstered by star power and dazzling visuals, but let down by a director using their creative freedom to indulge themselves.
Chazelle broke out in 2014 with the critical and financial success of his drumming drama Whiplash. With his follow-up film, La La Land, an even bigger hit harking back to the Golden Age Hollywood musicals of yesteryear, he became the youngest filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Director at the age of 32. Since then, Chazelle has quickly earned a place as one of the most sought-after directors in Tinseltown with the lucrative ability to secure funding for whatever ambitious project he dreamt up. Out-of-touch studio executives gave him a blank check to make First Man, a big-budget biopic of astronaut Neil Armstrong that failed at the box office, and then they gave him a blank check to make Babylon, a big-budget retelling of Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies that has similarly failed at the box office. They didn’t learn the right lesson from the failure of First Man; maybe they’ll learn that lesson from the failure of Babylon.
Studios tend to have as much faith in big-name directors as they have in franchises and intellectual properties, and that’s a mistake. The Marvel brand and the Star Wars brand and the Fast & Furious brand are as close to guaranteed moneymakers as Hollywood can get its hands on. The same doesn’t apply to the Damien Chazelle brand or the David O. Russell brand or the George Miller brand. Most casual moviegoers have no idea what the job of director entails, so they don’t choose which films to watch based on who directed them. Some filmmakers can attract viewers based on their involvement alone, like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg, but even they’ve stumbled at the box office in recent years.
Babylon has been compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another lengthy, nostalgic love letter to a bygone era of the film industry starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. But there are a few key differences that made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a hit and Babylon a failure. Tarantino has a bigger fan base and a stronger track record than Chazelle. Once Upon a Time actually has real affection for the early days of Hollywood, whereas Babylon is more of an ode to decadence and debauchery than an ode to movie magic. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hit theaters at the height of the summer season when its closest competition was the live-action Lion King remake, an example of the creative bankruptcy of the I.P.-driven studio system at its worst, while Babylon was released in the dreary winter window against Avatar: The Way of Water, an example of the effects-heavy franchise machine at its best.
If Chazelle had paid as much attention to the audience’s experience when he made Babylon as Cameron did when he made Avatar, then the movie could’ve had a chance at hitting its break-even point. The auteurs who have succeeded at the box office this year, from The Batman’s Matt Reeves to Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski to Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Daniels, have put their audience’s enjoyment first and their artistic ambitions second.