Where Have All the Indie Hits Gone?

We’re now in the thick of the fall movie season, but you wouldn’t know it from how skimpy the box office is, or how muted the chatter. Simply put: Where have all the indie hits gone?

Not so long ago, the slate of buzzy, critically acclaimed prestige movies that opened during the fall added up to something like the indie version of blockbuster season. There’s a reason the movie calendar was arranged that way. Critically acclaimed films tended to open in the last part of the year because that’s when they did well. And the trend crystallized in the ’90s, when Harvey Weinstein transformed the old awards season into the awards-industrial complex (welcome to your life, actors and directors who now have to spend five months on the road-to-the-Oscars campaign trail).

But the days when a buzzy fall movie could be a box-office bonanza are starting to look like a weirdly distant memory. The flameout has been creeping up for a while, ever since the pandemic produced its unhappy paradigm shift in moviegoing (i.e., more and more folks don’t like going). You could see it in the disconnect between praise and popularity that greeted such films as “Tár,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” and, last year, “Anora” — which crawled its way to $20 million, though that was a sobering reminder that in the indie-film world, $20 million is the new $50 million.

This fall, however, it has seriously begun to look like the bottom is falling out. One high-profile, high-prestige film after another has opened to a deafening thud at the box office, and the failures are so varied that each movie tends to come with its own elaborately tailored excuse.

“After the Hunt“? People didn’t want to see an anti-“woke” academic thriller starring Julia Roberts as a pill of a professor. “The Smashing Machine“? People didn’t want to see Dwayne Johnson in a serious role, looking like the Hulk’s damaged cousin, in a movie that felt like a staged…