Damien Chazelle was responsible for Whiplash and La La Land, so, at some point, a Chazelle film had to come along that would nerf the filmmaker before he became too powerful, and Babylon wound up being that film, or so it would seem.
Speaking recently on Talking Pictures podcast, Chazelle spoke quite candidly about his Margot Robbie-led 2022 feature—which chronicled the lives, careers, ecstatic ups, and dire downs of several fictional characters during the age of Hollywood’s shift from silent pictures to “talkies”—revealing that he was under no illusion that he would be getting a Babylon-sized budget for his next film, assuming he gets the okay to make it at all:
“I’m in a sort of trepidatious state of mind, but I have no illusions. I won’t get a budget of Babylon size any time soon, or at least not on this next one. Certainly, in financial terms, Babylon didn’t work at all. You try to not have that effect what you’re doing creatively, but, at some level, it can’t help but affect it. But maybe that’s okay? I have very mixed mind about it. Who knows. Maybe I won’t be able to get this one made. I have no idea. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Released in and around Christmas of 2022, Babylon grossed $63.4 million against a roughly $80 million budget, and ultimately lost Paramount Pictures an estimated $87.4 million once other costs are considered, which is apparently enough millions to make studios think twice about banking on you. The big question, however, is whether the critically-polarizing Babylon really, truly deserved to tank at the box office as badly as it did.
Forget COVID concerns, and forget Winter Storm Elliott; is Babylon a movie that deserved to succeed? The answer is yes, it absolutely did deserve to succeed.
Yes, there’s a certain epicurean glee to be had in observing the cynical, cocaine-fueled, out-of-control pandemonium scattered throughout the film’s three-hour runtime, but that alone was never going to be enough to make Babylon—a title derived directly from a city known for its hedonistic wickedness—the evocatively worthwhile watch it wants to be, and upon realizing what actually makes the film tick, you as an audience member will feel truly disgusting. And that’s the genius of Babylon.
No matter what shape Hollywood takes throughout Babylon, be it the poisonously glitzy producer parties where underage women regularly OD’d or the reign of the more posh producers who are hellbent on ruthlessly sanitizing everything in sight, no secret is ever made of the fact that it’s a vile, vile machine that all these characters are trying (and, on some level, always failing) to navigate—a machine that’s nevertheless responsible for all the movies that have captivated us all our lives.
Indeed, as exhausting as movies about Hollywood can be, there’s no denying the power of the stomach-churning challenge that Babylon issues to us movie-lovers; seeing all those bright-eyed audience members littering the cinema in the film’s final scene heavily clashes with our newfound knowledge of Hollywood’s exemplified inhumanity. And after everything, in no way, shape, form, or fashion should that one final scene manage to be something that we ourselves end up identifying with, but we do, and while the resulting inner feeling you get might be a nasty one, the fact that Chazelle evoked it the way he did deserves a tip of the hat regardless of how you felt about the rest of the movie.
Perhaps it’s poetry incarnate, then, that this movie wound up losing Hollywood as much money as it did.
(featured image: Paramount Pictures)
