Blockbuster flops and bedsheet chic: the Joker was on us in 2024

Every year brings its hits and misses, but the misfires loom especially large in 2024’s rearview mirror. From celebs stepping out in sheets and towels, filmmakers jumping the CGI shark, and musicians trading schoolboy-style sledges, the year’s lowest moments are best left behind. But before we move away from the wreckage, let us pause to wonder what went awry …

Movies

By Michael Idato

Before we pull open all the things we got wrong, it’s important to understand what we got right. Which was a lot. Inside Out 2, Twisters, Gladiator II, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dune: Part Two, Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine … this was a year for big, fun movies. The studios raked in the money. The cinema operators were happy. Everybody wins, right?

OK, so there wasn’t a single original bit of IP for them to rub together – by and large, everything you watched at the movies this year was a sequel or a franchise spin-off – but it was still a solid year for films that were based on other films that were based on books, comic books, earlier films or, in some cases, toys.

Whatever you say about Hollywood, there’s no shortage of good ideas. So if you manage to find one, please build a time machine, go back to 2022, place it in an envelope and mail it to the head of development at a film studio. We’ll thank you next year.

This was also a chapter-closing year in the history of cinema. Off the back of last year’s centenaries for Disney and Warner Bros, this year both Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer reached their 100th anniversary. Whatever you say about cinema, it’s not a business operated by fly-by-nighters. (Mostly.)

And yet, not everything went to plan. Last year’s multi-billion-dollar box-office double act Oppenheimer and Barbie could not be replicated, despite the sometimes desperate-seeming angles pushed by studio marketing departments in an attempt to shoehorn two films into a social media trend. Wolverjuice? Twadiator? Dead-Dune? It’s not surprising they didn’t catch on. By and large,they didn’t sound appealing. The wildest pairing – the release of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and The Exorcist: Believer. Exorswift, anyone? It’s fine. Nobody else liked it either.

Turning onto the final straight of the year, the film industry even managed to churn out Wicked, the first chapter of the longest musical in history. The film itself was, of course, fun. It’s just that the history books will likely take a long time to forget the accompanying press tour, the highlights of which included stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo “holding space”, holding fingernails, and holding your social media channels hostage. If that press tour isn’t its own 10-part semi-fictional drama on Netflix by 2026 then we know nothing.

So what stunk? Fly Me to the Moon was a dud, which makes no sense because it had Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson in it. The Fall Guy also fell flat, which makes no sense because it had post-Barbie Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in it. And despite screaming myself hoarse to anyone who would listen about how good it was, the inescapable reality is that Joker: Folie à Deux also landed with a thud.

Then there were the movies you didn’t even hear from: Poolman, which starred Chris Pine as … a poolman; Reagan, an un-illuminating biopic about the former US president starring Dennis Quaid; and The End, a truly baffling, two-and-a-half-hour post-apocalyptic, disaster-prepper art movie about a family who live in a mansion buried in a salt mine.

In Australia, things were not much better. George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga could have been a masterwork but somehow mangled itself into knots and could not command an audience.

Australia’s strength seems to lie in smaller, more nuanced films. Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail was brilliant, but too small to tip the scales. And the best film of the year here might end up being a streaming TV original: How to Make Gravy, directed by Nick Waterman, and based on the Paul Kelly song of the same name. It’s a beautiful pastiche of Christmas sentiment and Charlie Brown musical hand-me-downs from the exquisite Vince Guaraldi. But it did not come from a big US studio. It came from the Foxtel-owned streamer, Binge.

To be fair, it is somewhat glib to throw shade at the movie business and smirk at their shortcomings. After all, nobody is sitting in a corner office in a high-rise in Burbank, California, and working on their Films We Hope Will Tank This Year masterplan. (The hilarious, so-real-it-hurts plot of The Producers notwithstanding.)

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But it is equally true to say that Hollywood would make more good films if only they would get out of their own way. The development process. The marketing process. None of it is easy, and none of it seems to function in any sensible way that persuades audiences to part with their hard-earned money in exchange for sitting through genuinely brilliant films.

Wicked, Gladiator II and Deadpool & Wolverine are great, but Hollywood’s ability to churn out masterpieces like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Inception or The Godfather seems long lost. Much of the media conversation is devoted to the fact that streaming stole traditional TV’s mojo. But nobody seems to mention that it pinched the movie biz’s mojo at the same time.

And 2025? Before you even crack the surface, you have A Complete Unknown, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Wolf Man, Wuthering Heights, Snow White and Paddington in Peru to look forward to. Proof, if you ever needed it, that every 2024 cloud has a 2025 silver lining.

Fashion

By Janice Breen Burns

Actually, fashion is never wrong. Not technically. Fashion just is what it is, a multi-faceted mirror of you, me, us, here, now. My “gorgeous” is your “boring”. Your “slay” is my “ick”. And so on across a vast, expanding galaxy of fashionable algorithms and demographics.

However. Yes, we did crank out another circus-load of indisputably dopey stuff in 2024, a happy chance for the classic fashion snobs among us to take umbrage and, by the power of wrongness-according-to-me, scorn-scroll and troll any little thing that pinged our “ick” and “stupid” meters this year.

Like pre-stained underpants, for starters. Really? Yep. New York designer Willy Chavarria launched his Dirty Willy briefs, jockstraps and singlets online with wear-holes and hand-painted wee (or urine-yellow something) stains already tastefully incorporated. Was he wrong? At $600-odd a pop, one might reasonably assume “ick” meters shot up and Chavarria’s sales dived down but, no. Of course not.

And, this is the thing about fashion now: “ick” and “slay” very comfortably co-exist. Chavarria needs only drop his icky knickers into a Zeitgeist air pocket of cashed-up fad-followers who in turn stir up an updraft of influencers as appalled as they are titillated by this shocking – this rebellious! This courageous! This unique! – new brand of cool and, whoosh … viral sensation. “Ick” and “stupid” swap back and forth in fashion consumers’ perceptions with “slay” and “cool” and before you can say “trash-bag totes and gem-encrusted Crocs were preposterous once”, Tik-Tok and Instagram are flecked with footage of everyday folk not only unboxing their Dirty Willys but revelling in fashion’s full spectrum of 2024’s oddest Zeitgeist markers.

Hailey Bieber’s nifty little trick at Coachella earlier this year, for instance, followed the mechanics of global fashion fad-dom to a Tik-Tok T. The uncommonly pretty wife of pop sensation Justin Bieber knotted a head kerchief over her baseball cap to windproof it at the music festival (a look she copied from Rihanna, circa 2017), snapped a selfie, posted the look and off it shot.

In its viral updraft, brands including Dior adapted the look to their monogrammed scarves and Bieber’s slavish fad-followers echoed with their own accessories. Whether it was a fortuitous fad, utterly adorable and a joy to us all, or just wrong on anyone unblessed with Beiber’s ridiculously good looks and Rhianna’s cool, was mercilessly judged across the look’s various outcomes on social media ranging from very nice, to confused Lolita, to Balkan nona.

Same story with the “naked dress”, a fad that reached peak naughtiness in 2024. While the inevitable chorus of “disgusting” and “wrong wrong wrong” pocked comments on celebrity versions so sheer they mocked the very word “clothes”, Vogue mused about popping Wolverine actor Emma Corrin, in a lace frocklet that rendered her topless with her g-string underpants frankly showing, on its list of best red-carpet looks from 2024. Slapped-forehead emojis proliferated.

Where next after (virtually) nude? When fashion’s shocks no longer shock and its extremes are rendered meh, where indeed. Take the fad for tiny two-tampon-and-a-house-key-sized handbags seeded around 2020. It appeared the micro-bag’s endgame was in sight – or so we thought – in 2023 when a sugar-crystal-sized copy of a Louis Vuitton monogrammed “On the Go” sold at auction for more than $100,000. Bye bye tiny bag trend, surely.

No. Idiotically small handbags – and superfluously gargantuan ones too, for that matter – are still giving good fad, still baiting lovers and haters in 2024.

The year’s influx of deliciously dagger-toed sling-back and solid-back flats is another example of fashion 2024’s provocative frontline. Chic as they are, they have not dampened some brands’ and demographics’ fondness for two and three-brick high platforms (frequently paired with socks). The louder the “stupid”, the higher they go.

“Scandal is good” says designer Demna Gvasalia, and by that he means that baiting trolls with outrageous fashion is a social-media marketing strategy guaranteed to rocket-fuel any profile, any brand. And so here we are. Fashion and its driving influencers, 2024, troll-baiting for algorithms.

It was Gvasalia and his brother Guram who co-founded the volcanically disruptive fashion label Vetements a few years ago with their huge, ludicrously expensive hoodies and “re-imagined” streetwear. They won awards for that level of chutzpah and ingenuity and – let’s judge, it’s fun – the sheer numbers of gormlessly slavish fad-followers they hooked into their look.

The shocks linger on now that Demna is creative head of the scandal-plagued wrong-right ick-slay Balenciaga, including this year’s versions of those Vetements pants, now fatter and longer than ever, and sweats and puffas so bloated they need a little shove sometimes just to get through doors. His padded boots more suited to moon landings or Arctic expeditions than city streets are still tracking too, as are those replica chip-packet handbags introduced in 2023 and still selling for about $3500. To name a few.

And there’s always more. Not all troll-worthy fashion this year was seeded by the Gvasalias, by any means, but they did give notables such as reliably shocking designer Rick Owens’ inflatable rubber boots a run for their scoffers and “that’s so wrong”-ers.

Guram’s girlfriend, singer/influencer Doja Cat, hit 2024’s proverbial fashion zenith when she was snapped shopping in a Cartier jewellery store (surreptitiously, by a passer-by, I don’t think so) earlier this year in a bum-floss G-string and king-sized white bed-sheet clutched awkwardly to her breasts.

Not long after, she appeared for her limousine transfer to Planet Fashion’s pinnacle event, the Met Gala, this time clutching a white Vetements bath towel “dress”, ostensibly mid-dash from a quick shower. In fact, she had been carefully styled by creative director Brett Alan Nelson and her cheeks streaked with running silver tears by legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath. All precisely planned and orchestrated to elicit the twin tsunamis of love and hate she got. Is still getting. Ick. Slay. Stupid. Inspiring.

For act three, her ascension up the gala stairs and entree into fashion zeitgeist 2024, Nelson swapped Doja Cat’s towel for a drenched, oversized white T-shirt.

The fashion strategy was complete. “The aesthetic,” he twinkled, “is ‘f— you’.”

What a blip on fashion 2024’s honour roll. What next?

Music

By Michael Dwyer

So AI didn’t kill music in 2024 and neither did Taylor Swift. Some months ago, I confess those two riders on the imminent apocalypse were thundering neck-and-neck through my imagination. I even suspected they were in cahoots; that some tech genius had crunched enough pop data to unleash a smartBarbie avatar universally fabulous enough to hoover up the entire monopoly game.

I’m not abandoning that theory just yet. One thing we always get wrong when we talk about music is the long view. In the heat of the moment, for instance, we imagine that Beyonce covering a Dolly Parton tune has radically upended the social order. It’s only when the chatter dies down we realise Cowboy Carter was just another cross-promotional sortie and the walls of the Grand Ole Opry aren’t for breaching yet.

For a while there too, Drake’s beef with Kendrick Lamar was tipped to remodel the world of hip-hop like Godzilla and Mothra in Destroy All Monsters. The two titans’ garden-variety flex tracks escalated to accusations of domestic violence, parental neglect, sex-trafficking and paedophilia week by week until … uh, boys? Just stop. Turns out J. Cole won that one by apologising and bailing early. Watch and learn, rap gods.

The pattern here is hype and bust. All of the above left good music in their wake but there was so much prattle, static and bumf surrounding every drop that it’s getting soooo much harder to hear it properly.

In a recent interview with Millennial zine Blunt, the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan bemoaned how the escalating cacophony of self-promotional “content” online is in danger of totally obfuscating what artists are ostensibly doing it for (um, music). He reckons social media has become a “a big yelling din” contributing in turn to “the hyper-sexualisation of a lot of female artists in order to gain attention”.

The old-timer’s unfashionable view reminded me of Sting talking to popular YouTuber Rick Beato about the sad demise of the middle-eight (sometimes called the bridge) in modern songwriting. The jazz-pop maestro suggested the lack of structural invention amounts to the artist shirking their responsibility to move beyond the banger “trap” to new ways of thinking that might help solve human crises.

I’m not calling either of those theories wrong, but they seemed to get very little traction where it matters: on TikTok. I mean, who listens to a song past the chorus anyway, grandpa? Especially if it’s not sexy.

This is a common thing we get wrong when we talk about music today: we measure it against old music. Not just in form and sound and all the other things that meet the ear, but in intention and audience expectation and modes of interactivity. Comparing the three different versions of Charli XCX’s all-conquering Brat album of 2024 to anything by the Beatles is like comparing the internet to Gutenberg’s printing press: mind-blowing, but equally meaningless to consumers at either end of history.

This year marked a neat quarter-century since an application called Napster completely changed the accessibility, economics and even the physical substance of recorded music as we had previously known it. Combined with the more creative tools of the digital revolution, peer-to-peer file-sharing technology presaged a new music landscape so wild and diffuse and uncontainable that every 20th century preconception we bring to it seems wrong.

Mapping such a thing with sales charts, for instance, is increasingly absurd, not least because hardly anyone buys recorded music at all. Here in Australia, just a few thousand units – calculated god knows how from paid downloads and merch bundles and streams, divided by the singer’s shoe size, minus the number of singles – might earn our favourite artist a world of glory in any given week but, alas, nothing to eat.

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On that score, can there be anything more wrong than the system by which we have universally agreed to compensate the artists whose recordings we’re curious enough to click on? Do we really imagine that our token streaming service fee, significantly less than the cost of one cup of coffee per week, will ever trickle down to, let alone adequately reimburse, every musician whose work we’ve enjoyed?

To add insult to financial injury, we’re sadly wrong, too, if we fancy that it sounds just as good as the CD player that car manufacturers stopped installing years ago because we preferred streaming songs for nothing rather than buying CDs (further hastening the latter’s demise). If you imagine your favourite song sounds anything other than horrifying screeching through your mosquito-sized smartphone speaker on the tram, maybe ask fellow passengers how right you are.

But hey, see above about the fundamental error of comparing the sublime elegance of the musical experience in a former century to the big yelling din of 2024. Some of us continue to exercise the right to sit in reverent silence between stereo speakers, senses respectfully immersed in the scented gatefold splendour and crackle of a carefully selected slice of vinyl.

Others bark “Alexa, play chill-out surf vibes” at the ceiling while scrolling through sped-up hack videos on YouTube and pumping emojis through our socials at the same time. Who can say which of us has got it wrong?

Conversely, is it wrong for your favourite artist to demand a month’s wages to see them play in a stadium because you and the rest of the world have decided their albums aren’t worth paying for? And how right is that equation compared to the $25 we’d rather not pay to see a local act down the pub?

Next time you do that, by the way, look around and do some maths. If you want to ever see them again, would it be wrong to buy a T-shirt on the way out? Lucky for us this is 2024, so we can just jump on their socials and ask them. They might be off making music for a second but don’t worry, they’ll be back online soon, working endlessly in lieu of rent money for the precious dopamine hits of our little cartoon thumbs and love hearts. All that content isn’t going to post itself.

TV

By Louise Rugendyke

It starts with a shrug, that little shoulder raise you give when someone asks you what you’re watching, “Meh, not much,” you say, before listing 10 shows you started and never finished, or hate-watched to the bitter end. If that sums up your 2024 TV year, you are not alone. We are officially post-peak TV – that decade-long run of excellence which, according to Variety, ended at the end of 2023 – and into “Meh TV”.

Blame the Oscar winners. From Natalie Portman to Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell, to Jeff Bridges, Billy Bob Thornton and Kevin Kline, they all seemed to decide this was the year that a two-hour sharply written, edited and directed movie wasn’t enough, and instead they were coming for our small screens with sometimes bloated, often confusing and generally ridiculous shows that had more than a whiff of “who’s gonna tell them it ain’t good?” about them.

Don’t get me wrong – confusing and ridiculous were my two favourite TV categories this year (hello, Shogun and Rivals!). It’s just that these star vehicles were so disappointing because of the talent involved. They were meh. Portman’s Lady in the Lake? Meh. I didn’t get past episode three. Farrell’s Sugar? Its ridiculous ending made a normally very placid colleague very, very angry. Kidman’s The Perfect Couple? Meh. Bridges’ The Old Man? Meh. Thornton’s Landman? Meh. Winslet’s The Regime? Meh.

The only exception was Blanchett and Kline’s Disclaimer, which was written and directed by another Oscar winner, Alfonso Cuaron. I loved it, despite its terrible first episode and Sacha Baron Cohen’s wig, but also spent a lot of time defending it to people who hated it. Its greatest trick was making you think you were watching something meh – the usual ingredients were there: great coats, gorgeous interior design and a flaccid husband – before delivering an uneasy and compelling thriller that always left you unbalanced.

It’s not just me(h) – in April, The New York Times published an article titled “the comfortable problem of mid TV”, rightly moaning about the big-star, OK-quality shows proliferating on the streamers. “What we have today instead is something less awful but in a way more sad: The willingness to retreat, to settle, to trade the ambitious for the dependable,” wrote critic James Poniewozik.

Does it mean we just want movie stars to stay in their lane? I think it’s simpler than that: we want intimate stories on the small screen. We want to be surprised by performances and stories that don’t come with the baggage of expectation (think Somebody Somewhere) and instead spark curiosity (Ripley).

And while we’re talking curiosity, this was the year sport was turned into curiosity’s second cousin – the nonsense spectacle – courtesy of Netflix. In November, the streamer decided the best way to draw eyeballs was by putting 58-year-old former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson up against 27-year-old influencer/boxer Jake Paul. Sure, Tyson only landed 18 punches, but Netflix crowed it was “the most streamed sporting event in history”. Great! Don’t worry that Tyson now says he can’t remember most of it, this is what sport on TV should be – blood, spectacle and brain injury!

If you thought that was bad, let me take you back to The Roast of Tom Brady (Netflix, again) in May, in which the robotic former NFL star decided to submit himself to the grand tradition of being roasted live on TV for nearly three hours. I watched it, so you didn’t have to, and it’s still the stuff of waking nightmares. It’s hard to pinpoint what made it so terrible, so let’s start with host Kevin Hart and end with the numerous racist, sexist, misogynistic and homophobic jokes. The only thing that made it bearable was watching the light go out of Brady’s eyes as he realised very early on that this was a Very Bad Idea.

How’s this for an idea – if Netflix wants to get people to watch their livestreamed sporting events, it’s not just about getting Tyson punched in the head, seeing Brady taunted about his ex-wife or watching Beyonce perform at half-time. Why don’t they try just showing the sport? Fans don’t need spectacle, we just want to see the game we have paid to see. For me, a mad tennis fan, there is nothing more strangely thrilling than watching Wimbledon ad-free on Stan, and seeing the players eating a banana between sets as they mentally implode. You can’t script that!

(A quick side note here on the Olympics – and I promise I’ll move on from sport – but the phrases “The French, they really know how to do it”, “It’s raining here” and “Ahh, this really is the city of romance” should be banned. If you can’t properly commentate on an opening ceremony, just say nothing.)

Australia produced some outstanding shows this year – season three of Fisk and season two of Colin from Accounts, plus How to Make Gravy (yes, it’s a movie, but it was a made-for-TV-movie, so I’m claiming it) – but we did not make enough, especially for free-to-air TV.

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Our commercial channels have largely abandoned homegrown drama and comedy, instead reheating endless reality shows and game shows (two of which were hosted by Graham Norton and Stephen Fry and were filmed in the UK with expats for contestants) and then plugging the holes with US procedurals and five-year-old Graham Norton re-runs (I love you, Graham, but I think even you’d agree more than three nights a week is a bit much).

They’ll argue, of course, that they are supporting homegrown productions with shows such as Critical Incident and Bump, both on Stan, and Last King of the Cross on Paramount+, but they are all locked behind a paywall. Yes, streaming has given us endless hours of television, but it has come at the cost of a once vibrant and accessible culture of local free-to-air drama and comedy.

In the US, broadcast TV is in the middle of a resurgence, with the success of shows such as Matlock, Happy’s Place and Doctor Odyssey leading the way with huge audience numbers.

Let’s hope the local execs at home are doing the right thing and taking notes and not just checking which overpaid UK star can squeeze in another season of Jeopardy Australia.

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