Now You See Me 3 shocked the world when it topped the box office this month – but it’s a handy reminder of some truths Hollywood likes to forget…
“If a movie could be punchable, this one would be.” “Absolute rubbish.” “About as magical as a baked potato.”
Critics have had this to say and more about director Ruben Fleischer’s magic heist threequel, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Unsurprisingly, it’s not mattered a jot. The film soared to the top spot at the UK/Ireland box office earlier this month and continues to bring in the crowds. Meanwhile, Edgar Wright’s update of The Running Man – burdened by its association with yet another 80s action classic – is struggling with blisters and a chafed nipple.
(This seems like a good time to mention Now You Three Me (not its name) actually made just £749 more than The Running Man in its UK opening weekend, nonetheless enough to turn Wright’s action spectacular into an unmitigated flop. Maybe it’s silly to judge a global blockbuster’s success on whether a single bus-load of cinemagoers gets a flat tyre, but that doesn’t seem to be the world we’re living in. Ho hum.)
Anyway, the headline is that Now You Don’t has performed better than Hollywood types expected, and The Running Man is doing worse. It’s the latest in a string of blows for peddlers of 80s IP, after the likes of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Tron: Ares both struggled to connect with audiences. Meanwhile, some of the year’s biggest films (Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy) look back on the 90s and 00s as the summit of human creativity. The nostalgia pendulum has swung away from shoulder pads and Reaganomics; Hollywood (late, as usual) is just about catching up.
But the success of the Now You See Me franchise isn’t just the result of convenient demographic change. When the first film came out in 2013, it was even then a rare example of an original 12A/PG-13 premise movie (a group of magicians pull off a bank heist? Throw me in a water tank and call me in the morning!), the kind of film whose elevator pitch you can actually remember. It may even have helped that the film itself was a bit naff, paving the way for a generation of cinemagoers to claim ownership of “the little magic movie that could.”
That idea of ownership is something studio big wigs could do with keeping in mind. Every generation needs its own original stories made for, and “belonging” to, them. It’s the same phenomena which has turned KPop Demon Hunters into arguably the biggest film of 2025 and made A Minecraft Movie into a meme-literate box office juggernaut. Films which older audiences look at with either bafflement or (often) scorn have a habit of turning into sleeper hits even if, as is the case with Now You See Me, it takes a few years to come to fruition.
Podcast | In conversation with Ruben Fleischer
But it does help that the people who saw the first outing of the Four Horsemen when they were teenagers are now those most likely to go to the cinema at all. The under-35 market has always been the group with the most time and financial independence to take regular trips to the multiplex and, despite their crumbling attention spans and addiction to their damn phones, that’s just as true in 2025 – you can’t take a Hinge date to a TikTok, after all. With older demographic attendance yet to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, the youngsters are more important than ever. Women, too, have driven Now You Don’t’s success Stateside, demonstrating once again the absurdity of a blockbuster slate catering to the average 13-year-old boy.
The Running Man has also proved the perfect foil to the surprise success of the year, and through no fault of its own (the ending doesn’t make a lick of sense, but I thought the film was reasonably fun). Its dystopian gameshow premise, still relatively fresh in 1987, has for an entire generation been obliterated by the success of mega-franchises like The Hunger Games and Squid Game. For English language films in particular, the shadow of Suzanne Collins’ murder-y goliath is hard to escape from and, without nostalgia for either the Schwarzenegger film or King’s book, Edgar Wright’s latest sadly looks a bit like a Panem knock-off (sorry, Edgar). It’s a perfect example of a film which looks like a solid mainstream Hollywood hit until you realise no one under 55 was able to see the 1987 film in a cinema, and which holds little brand recognition with anyone born post-VHS boom.
If Hollywood wants to keep profiting from nostalgia (what am I saying, if), then it needs to look a little closer to home – and remember that 45-year-old men (much love to all 45-year-old men) aren’t the ones buying cinema tickets.
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