60 Business The Economist June 4th 2022
The movies“Top Gun” takes off
“Y
our kindis headed for extinction!”
barks a senior officer to Tom Cruise’s
hero in “Top Gun: Maverick”, a supersonic
action flick released by Paramount last
week. “Maybe so, sir,” replies Maverick.
“But not today.”
Cinema owners are feeling similarly
defiant. Worldwide box-office receipts fell
by 72% in 2020, when the pandemic forced
film buffs to say goodbye to the silver
screen and hello to their sofa. After ticket
sales recovered only partially in 2021,
many predicted curtains for theatres. Yet
“Top Gun”, a sequel to a classic of the genre
from 1986, raked in $248m on its opening
weekend, the biggest-ever debut for a film
starring Mr Cruise. Its domestic haul of
$156m over the long weekend broke the
Memorial Day record set by one of Disney’s
“Pirates of the Caribbean” films in 2007.
Theatre owners hope that “Top Gun”
heralds the beginning of a broader recov-
ery. It is only the fourth-biggest opener of
the pandemic era (see chart 1). However,
the other big hits—Sony’s “Spider-Man: No
Way Home” last December, Marvel’s “Dr
Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” in
May, and Warner Bros’ “The Batman” in
March—have all been superhero flicks,
with young fans. “Top Gun”, by contrast,
sold 55% of tickets to over-35s. This sug-
gests that viewers old enough to harbour
fond memories of Mr Cruise’s original turn
as Maverick 36 years ago are now ready tocome back to the movies, too.
The recovery is far from complete. This
year’s worldwide box office will be only
about three-quarters of 2019’s, forecasts
Gower Street Analytics, a research firm.
China, which these days rivals America as
the biggest cinema market, is still lockeddown and in any case increasingly hostile
to Hollywood (“Top Gun” has no Chinese
release date). Russia is also off-limits since
its invasion of Ukraine. Above all, studios
are focusing attention and resources on
their streaming platforms, releasing fewer
films in cinemas, for shorter runs.
The summer release slate is promising:
June will see “Jurassic World: Dominion”
from Universal and “Lightyear”, the latest
in Disney’s “Toy Story” series. “Thor: Love
and Thunder”, the next Marvel movie, is
out in July. Yet there will be strong reasons
to stay at home, too. On the day that “Top
Gun” was released, Netflix unveiled its lat-
est season of “Stranger Things” and Dis-
ney+ launched a “Star Wars” spin-off, “Obi-
Wan Kenobi”. In August Warner Bros Dis-
covery will start a new “Game of Thrones”
saga, before Amazon releases a “Lord of the
Rings” series in September. This latest ad-
aptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic is
the most expensive piece of television ever
made, with a budget around three times
that of “Top Gun”. A high-flying debut at the box office
sparks hopes of a theatrical recoveryThe hits everyone missed
US and Canada, box-office revenues
Top opening weekends, Mar 2020-May 2022, $mSource: Box Office Mojo *Not adjusted for inflation1F9: The Fast SagaEternalsSonic the Hedgehog 2Shang-Chi and the
Legend of the Ten RingsBlack WidowVenom: Let There
Be CarnageTop Gun: MaverickThe BatmanDoctor Strange in the
Multiverse of MadnessSpider-Man: No
Way HomeAll-time
ranking*^13512412311210184393411260.1 2187.4134.0126.790.080.475.472.171.370.0Boxed in no more
Box-office revenues*, $bnSource: Ampere Analysis *Including estimated sales taxes2 6 5 4 3 2 1 02019 20 21 22China United States
FORECASTDigital labourHire hurdles
“C
an i keepthe monitor and mouse?” a
fired tech worker recently asked on
Blind, an anonymous social-media plat-
form where techies go to compare notes on
employers. The questions used to be about
how much Meta was paying or what perks
Apple offered. As America’s technology
giants contend with supply-chain uncer-
tainties, a looming recession (see Finance
& economics section) and sliding share
prices, many users are instead asking if the
sizzling market for tech jobs is cooling.
The first sign of trouble came on April
28th. In a quarterly earnings call Brian
Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer,
said that the e-commerce titan’s ware-
houses were overstaffed, costing about
$2bn (9% of operating profit) in the past
year. A memo leaked a week later from
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the
firm was putting a freeze on new hires in
most teams. Other big tech names, includ-
ing Microsoft, Nvidia, Snap and Uber, have
made similar noises. So far this year listed
tech firms worth a combined $3.4trn have
announced hiring freezes or firings.
The commotion comes after a pro-
longed boom in tech jobs. During the 2010s
the number of positions in America’s tech
industry increased by 4.4% a year on aver-
age, triple the rate of the overall economy,according to a study by the Brookings Insti-
tution, a think-tank. The pandemic turbo-
charged the trend. Work, leisure and shop-
ping shifted online, boosting demand for
digital services. Last year listings for tech
jobs increased by over 80% compared with
2020, observes Amit Bhatia, co-founder of
datapeople.io, a research firm. Demand for
tech skills also surged outside the sector as
companies uploaded their operations to
the cloud and boosted cyber-security, mak-
ing the market even tighter. The number of
applications for each tech-industry open-
ing fell by a quarter in 2021.
Much of the jobs growth came from
startups and newly listed companies. But
the tech giants, too, were adding plenty of
employees. Between 2020 and 2021 Ama-
zon, Meta and Netflix all increased their
full-time staff by over a fifth. The ranks at
Microsoft and Alphabet swelled by 11% and
16%, respectively. That compares with a
median of 3% for firms in the s&p500 in-
dex of America’s largest companies.
So far redundancies, rather than just
hiring freezes, have been largely confined
to startups, such as Getir, a Turkish groc-
ery-delivery app, and newly public firms
such as Peloton, a maker of web-connected
exercise bikes. Sackings at established tech
companies have been modest. On May 17thSAN FRANCISCO
Big tech’s red-hot jobs market may be cooling