I’m sitting here and watching a video about the projected miserable performance of Disney’s Snow White remake at the box office. I won’t rehash that debacle, but apparently the House of Mouse is set to lose the GDP of Ghana on that particular film.

Movies over the past few years, for a variety of reasons, have consistently either barely eked out the cost of making them or have actually lost money. Hollywood has stopped being a growth industry. Heck, it’s probably not even a value investment anymore.

Every creative endeavor you want to sell for money is a roll of the dice, but usually those dice can be loaded by having a good story, decent acting and directing, and doing the whole endeavor in a way that makes folks want to shell out for the work, at least once.

In the long run, filmmakers will either get the hint and start making good entertainment that a mass audience wants to see, or they will decline to the point they only make inexpensive films that enough of a tiny audience will see so that they make a little money. Make enough of those, and you can limp along until somebody makes a unicorn of a movie that refills your coffers.

But at the retail end, the local theaters won’t survive long enough for that to happen. Bad movies put fewer butts in seats. Fewer butts in seats mean fewer $15 matinee tickets, $10 buckets of popcorn, and $12 sodas sold. For theaters that operate on a razor thin margin to begin with, that means financial Armageddon, albeit a slow one.

However, I think a lesson from the Covid-19 days could be applied.

During Covid, movie theaters were shut down. There were no matinees for the kids out of school, no date nights that included two hours of not talking to each other, no blockbusters on the huge screen.

However, our local drive-in theater stayed open. If folks are either sitting in the minivan or on lawn chairs in front of the pick-up, they’re far enough apart that the koof cooties couldn’t get them.

At the time, there weren’t any new movies coming out, so the drive-in was showing rereleases of old movies. All the best movies from decades past sold enough tickets to keep the gate open.

And to be honest, it was a good time. Irish Woman and I saw movies we remembered from our childhood, or relived good memories from when we were young and could still be stirred to go out on a Friday night. It was a great way to find entertainment during a bleak time.

I think something like that would be a good way for Hollywood to mine a rich vein of nostalgia while it gets its act together with new, better content.

Let’s take Star Wars, for example. Now, officially, there are nine Star Wars movies in the central saga. Being an Orthodox Jedi household, we don’t hold with Episodes 7, 8, and 9, so we won’t consider them for this thought experiment. Let’s throw in ‘Solo’ and ‘Rogue One’ as well, because they fit in the overall plot line nicely.

That gives us 8 movies to work with. If Disney releases one of them every six weeks, that gives them 48 weeks of theatrical time at little cost to them. Without spending a dime on writing, directing, acting, effects, or editing, Disney can put an iconic saga on the big screen and make profit.

Will it make hundreds of millions of dollars per movie? Probably not. But other than distribution costs and the cost of a few ads on social media, it’s almost all profit for the studio and theaters. A modest profit is better than barely breaking even, at best.

“Iron Man” came out in 2008, and “Endgame” came out in 2019. There is an entire generation of consumers who have never seen the entire MCU on the big screen. Teenagers who have only ever seen the movies on TV or tablet screens wouldn’t line up around the block to get in, but they would line up. There are 30 movies in the MCU. Even if you showed the dreck released after “Endgame”, that’s several years worth of content that looks good on the big screen and would cost a pittance to rerelease.

Heck, if film companies don’t want to stop with the political moralizing, they could run movies that make their point for them. Want to protest against a crackdown on illegal immigration? Rerelease “An American Tail” and let Fievel tell the story of legal immigration. Cinema used to be a subtle way to get your politics in the limelight. Release good movies that make your point, and you might just learn something about how to sway your audience without driving them away.

Hollywood has been putting out mediocre content, salted with gems that touch the human soul, for over 100 years. While they regroup and figure out how to make a product their customers want to buy, Hollywood should polish those gems and put them on display for us. It would at least stop the bleeding until they can figure out how to service their customers rather than insult them.