When it comes to film, 2023 will likely be remembered as a year
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marred with strikes and big-budget bombs. Hollywood has begun to reckon with an existential crisis that has been brewing since Silicon Valley came to town with streaming hobbling theaters and proving to not be a financially viable alternative to good old-fashioned ticket sales. Add in a depressed box office that has struggled to return
to former heights following the pandemic, a rapidly grown cultural fatigue of superhero films — once one of the few guaranteed successes on the multiplex calendar — and you have the makings of a bleak outlook for the industry’s immediate future. That’s without mentioning the simultaneous strikes of both the actors’ and writers’ guilds that halted production for months on end. With that being said, there were many films released over the past year. Some of which were very good. We saw releases from several of our great auteurs from the likes of Martin
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Scorsese and Ridley Scott to David Fincher and Michael Mann. With several superhero movies, like “The Flash,” “Ant-
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Man and The Wasp: Quantumania” and the recently released “The Marvels,” all drastically underperforming — though James Gunn wonderfully
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closed out his “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy with what can be considered an ideal epilogue for the MCU. Video game adaptations became a hot commodity thanks to the sweeping successes of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s” (not to mention HBO’s “The Last of Us” bringing prestige to that particular trend). Movies about the origins behind some of our favorite products became all the rage, ranging from the forgettable “Tetris” and “Flamin’ Hot” (yes, it’s about Cheetos) to the better-thanthey-had-any-right-to-be “Blackberry” and “Air.” Animated films turned to a new page with strong box office returns and critical praise for the visually inventive “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” R-rated comedies made a minor comeback with releases such as “No Hard Feelings,” “Joy Ride,” “Cocaine Bear” and “Strays” all finding their way to theaters. Legacy sequels like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “The Exorcist: Believer” arrived to little fanfare and effectively left those classic series dead and buried. And then there was the movie event of the year, “Barbenheimer, a pair of blockbusting juggernauts (“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”) that amplified each other to become cultural phenomenons of a sort that films rarely experience in the current landscape. While the story of cinema in 2023 is still being processed, this wouldn’t be an end-of-year summary without doing a top 10 list, so let’s get into it.
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