Ranking every movie I've seen in theaters in 2023

Answering questions on Seahawks, Xs and Os, and the current state of Hollywood: Seaside Joe 1592

Seahawks report to 2023 training camp in: 14 days!

On Monday’s episode of Seaside Joe, I mentioned that I sent out a Super Joes-exclusive newsletter asking for questions and topic suggestions. I’ll answer three of those questions today, but I have plenty of others left to get to and two more weeks until the team reports to the VMAC for training camp. I also must post sequels to the Quandre Diggs origin story and “How to spend $1 million”, so be subscribed to Seaside Joe to not miss anything and tell your Seahawks fan friends about us.

If you want to add your questions in the next Super Joes post, upgrade for a full year and you’ll be paid up for all the bonus content as well between now and 2024 training camp! Or join Regular Joes for only $5 per month or $55 per year to help us reach our next big milestone and because I’ll literally write over 1.2 million words about the Seattle Seahawks this year:

Joshular: If you could attend one Seahawks road game this year which one would it be and why? Which one’s at the bottom of your list and why?

This gives me a chance to review my options from the “How to spend $1 million on the Seahawks” article that started with spending over $100,000 on attending the games. A figure that may have actually been a significant low-ball to what I could have done as a projection with private flights and club suites.

I could actually try to go to the Rams game this year because I live nearby. But I like being available to write and interact with fans online during and directly after the game and not through a phone. We’ll have our game threads active again in the Substack app this year, so be sure to join us there if you’re new to the newsletter.

I have had this strange sense for a long time that I want to go to Cincinnati, plus you’re getting a good show from the other team with Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase. Seaside Jay has been a big fan of “Cincinnati Chili” since I introduced her to it, so at least we could try the real thing.

But we also had the urge recently to go to Nashville, so I’ll pick the Titans game on Christmas Eve. It seems like the city has a handful of experiences in the food and music departments that I would be interested in, and though I’m hardly picking it as a “win”, maybe this is a road game that the Seahawks could have a bit more success in compared to some others. Could Tennessee be starting Will Levis at this point? Will Derrick Henry hold up through the season? The Titans seem to be held together by marshmello whip and melted chocolate.

Plus, how hard is it to put chili and cheddar cheese on top of spaghetti?

Grant: I'm interested in how the study of football Xs and Os is coming along. Every time I watch one of the links you provide I come away feeling a better appreciation for just how complex this game is at the NFL level. I'm so impressed at how these players can diagnose what's going on around them in a matter of seconds vs the several minutes of slow motion replay and explanation we get from these videos.

If anyone reading this ends up doing daily non-negotiable habits, I recommend keeping a checklist that you read at the end of the day. Last night, I felt I had finished everything I set out to do everyday and was about to get cocky and not check my list, but then I did and realized that I hadn’t watched 10 minutes of Xs and Os yet. Usually, this is a task I get done early in the day—because it is so enjoyable and easy to do—but I was pushing stuff back in the morning and almost forgot to do it.

What I put on last night was J.T. O’Sullivan’s explanation of the Sail concept:

The literal Xs and Os explanations like these aren’t necessarily as “fun” as watching game footage, but I hope that when the season gets here that eventutally this all starts to reveal itself to me like a magic eye poster.

When I was a kid (read: when I was 30), I saw my colleague Danny Kelly put a lot of effort into learning Xs and Os when he was at Field Gulls. He didn’t have a football background either but then he read all the books, the websites, and watched whatever version there was of football YouTube at the time. That worked out well for Danny and I can understand why so many people gravitated towards his insights. That just wasn’t what I was trying to specialize in and everybody who does what I do has to choose a specialty. Many of them don’t, but they should.

It’s still not what I’m going to specialize in (sidenote: basic Xs and Os analysis has a loyal audience, but not a large one) but it should definitely be in the arsenal, especially because unlike Danny in 2012, we all have an UNBELIEVABLE opportunity now to learn from a VAST market of resources on YouTube. Reading books is still advisable, no question, but at worst what excuses do I have for not watching more videos about football on YouTube?

Channels that I have watched recently include QB Confidential (Kurt Warner’s analysis), Devy to Dynasty Football (I don’t care at all about fantasy football, but this guy actually explains through scouting why skill players may or may not be successful), Thinking Football, The DB Room (there’s only a handful of Xs and Os videos and it stopped a few years ago, but former NFL safety Glover Quin does the breakdowns), Philly Film Room (new channel, not much content yet), Coaching Football Insights, The QB School (J.T. O’Sullivan), Brett Kollmann, The Football Scout, Coach Mac (a high school football coach), Pure Football (stopped posted five years ago, but just a a dozen videos that explain fundamentals in an easy way), Ryder McConville (Dolphins coverage, but still worth watching), and anything with Urban Meyer is usually succinct and easily understood.

I know there’s a couple of young guys who do a podcast about the Seahawks Xs and Os, but that type of show is not for me and I think it’s important to note that these explainers and breakdowns do not have to be Seattle specific because every team is pretty much running some version of the same things on offense and defense. And if you do get something about the Seahawks like the video I just posted above, well, it could be from…a HALL OF FAME QUARTERBACK. For free. That’s not bad.

Roger Woitte: What movies are you watching? Is A24 still putting out good stuff?

I am going to see the new Mission: Impossible today and it gives me some hope that Hollywood isn’t 1000% dead, but I still haven’t even watched it. I’m just that concerned about the state of the movie industry. I was reading the list of the top box office hauls of 2023 last night and you can no longer write someone off as a “cranky, old cynic” for complaining that Hollywood only makes sequels, remakes, and pointless franchise films for cash anymore.

I read the list to Seaside Jay and said, “Just tell me if you’ll ever see this movie” and the results were concerning given that these are supposedly the 10 “most-watched” films of the year. Jay merely feels obligated to see Super Mario Bros, Fast X, The Little Mermaid, and John Wick 4. She also said Transformers even though she didn’t know that they had made a single Transformers movie since “the one with Shia and Megan Fox”.

Is this Hollywood’s only goal now? To make obligation pictures? The one movie out of 10 that we actually wanted to see, the Spider-Man cartoon (I say “wanted” but what I really felt was “this movie won’t be torture), we saw it. And yeah, good for them for making a creative movie. But like the other nine movies on the list, it’s for kids. Yes, John Wick too. I’m not telling anyone that they can’t like these movies either, there are plenty of great films in history that were made for kids. We just have to also acknowledge that these movies are made for kids and families: Movies that sell three or four tickets at a time instead of one or two.

Unfortunately, unlike Pixar movies of two decades ago, orWizard of Oz, or Singin’ in the Rain, or The Princess Bride, and so forth, most of this year’s kids movies were also widely panned by critics—at least the critics who I believe are real. (Rotten Tomatoes scores are NOT real.)

Here’s the score the studios want you to see:

Now consider that the “top critics” score is 60%. And NOW consider that 14 of the 16 most recent top critics scores are “positive” reviews and they all came out AFTER the movie was released. I’ve been following the score since Dial of Destiny was first released to critics and it’s just been slowly climbing up from the 20% range to this…The saddest part might be that the best score that the studios could even pay for was 69%.

Because I watched the original Mission: Impossible last night, here’s the box office from 1996:

Some kids movies. Some adult movies. A couple of remakes, a TV show adaptation, a book or two, and as far as I can tell, no sequels. (This isn’t even about sequelitis either, as I noted in the beginning, I’m excited for the new Mission: Impossible movie because they’re usually good and I kind of trust Tom Cruise. It says a lot when the most trusted person in Hollywood is now Tom Cruise.)

But the most telling thing of all about that top-10 list, and most top-10 lists in history, is that I’ve seen all of those movies. I’ve seen at least eight of those movies more than once and I would watch all eight of those movies right now. (I could live without 101 Dalmations and The Nutty Professor, but actually yes, I would rather watch The Nutty Professor in theaters today than most 2023 movies.)

It sucks that you can’t be critical without sounding whiny and cynical and old…but I also don’t feel like I’m wrong. Did you know that the ninth-biggest movie in the world last year was a Chinese movie (a sequel actually) called Water Gate Bridge? #11 was a movie called Moon Man. Six of the top-30 movies in the world were not American films, which in theory is fine (RRR was great) but it’s also a clear indication of a shift in the direction of Hollywood and an ability to dominate the industry because of waning quality.

(Box Office Mojo actually didn’t list these movies, but according to Wikipedia’s list, there are actually THREE Chinese movies in the top-nine of worldwide box office in 2023. How distant is the future where Hollywood represents less than half of the top-20?)

You know how I know modern movies are bad? Because I don’t see most of them. I LOVE seeing movies. It’s my FAVORITE THING TO DO. So, I don’t want to hear that I don’t “understand” the appeal of Star Wars, Marvel, or DC movies, et al. One of the top-three movies I saw in theaters this year was…Return of the Jedi! (Which made more money in 2023 than some current films including a Ben Affleck/Robert Rodriguez movie called Hypnotic.)

Nobody actually cares if a movie is a sequel, a remake, a franchise picture, a kids movie, a comic book movie, based on a book, based on real life, based on a dream you had when you fell asleep at a movie based on a book…the ONLY thing moviegoers care about: Is it good? ANYTHING can be good.

The Silence of the Lambs is based on a book. The Thing, Scarface, Heat, The Birdcage were remakes. The Godfather Part 2 was a sequel and based on a book. The Magnificent Seven was a Western version of The Seven Samurai. It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie the whole family can see and Toy Story 2 is a Pixar movie for little kids. That first Iron Man movie was great.

Audiences don’t give a shit where a good movie originates from, we just want good movies, and trust me, if Hollywood was making good movies right now then I would be there on opening night. As evidenced by seeing M:I7 on a Tuesday afternoon, I put my money where my mouth is. I’ll be there for Oppenheimer on opening night and by the hand of Seaside Jay, I’ll also be there for Barbie.

Perhaps the most concerning part of this whole segment though is that despite the blow that streaming has been to Hollywood’s bottom line and quality of films over the last few years, the Netflixes of the world haven’t been able to replicate the productions that we used to see and there’s not much great content to show for it. It also appears that streaming gave it a shot but may not be able to survive for much longer without ads-included plans.

I apologize for making this such a long blah-blah-blah especially because I know that I’m not a Hollywood insider or an industry guru and I’m way out of my element, but I think about this stuff a lot and it’s good to let it out somewhere. Actually, “The Entertainment Strategy Guy” Substack is a great resource for dropping that kind of knowledge. He’s a former data analyst at some of the biggest streamers and studios in Hollywood and the only writer I know of who releases and analyzes ratings for streamers.

I actually had an urge this week to rank every movie I’d seen in theaters this year and so since you asked (kind of), I’ll do that now:

1. Beau is Afraid (saw it twice and it’s kind of difficult to get through actually, but very unique…this movie made $10.9 million, ranked 72nd in the world)

2. Return of the Jedi (re-released in theaters, this movie made $7.2 million)

3. Past Lives (We saw this on Sunday and it was nice…you asked about A24 and actually without intending to do it this means that my top two movies of 2023 so far are by that studio.)

4. Spider-Man: He’s At It Again, Folks… (I’d feel a lot better about this if I was a dad, but there’s something so disconcerting about enjoying a kid’s comic book movie as a childless 40-year-old…)

5. M3GAN (I remember it being fun in theaters but trying to re-watch it on streaming felt far less satisfying)

6. Evil Dead Rise (I saw this in theaters twice but only because the first time I went I was sitting next to a woman who kept clearing her throat every five seconds and talking during the movie. It’s fine compared to what we usually get from horror now, but far less enjoyable than the Evil Dead remake from a decade ago. Bad acting is a trademark of horror movies, but bad acting by children is the worst kind of bad acting.)

7. Scream IV (30 minutes in, I was ready to say that “Scream is back” but it’s like Scream has become so obsessed with the ending that the endings get progressively worse)

8. Plane (A Gerard Butler movie that you probably didn’t see and that I would have forgotten if not for researching this article)

9. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (You could probably just watch the opening sequence in order to have a conversation about de-aging technology (it’s not good enough to be used in movies yet) and then walk out)

10. Cocaine Bear (Nobody who worked on this movie should work on movies again)

11. Knock at the Cabin (How have we all not come together as a society to agree that M. Night Shyamalan must have killed somebody in the ‘90s and stole their script for The Sixth Sense?)

Some 2023 movies I streamed: 80 for Brady, Luther: The Fallen Sun, Renfield, Extraction 2. The Extraction movies are okay. What are you watching?