Babylon’s Global Hangover: How a $80-Million Orgy Became Cinema’s Funeral Streamed Worldwide

Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s 189-minute carnival of cocaine, elephant dung, and jazz trumpets, arrived in 2022 like a glitter-flecked hangover: loud, expensive, and somehow both shameless and ashamed of itself. The film’s $80-million fever dream about 1920s Hollywood excess was marketed as “international event cinema.” In truth, it is a perfect allegory for the global film industry’s own slow-motion implosion—less a love letter than a ransom note written in lipstick on a mirror nobody can afford to replace.

From Mumbai to Mar del Plata, critics greeted Babylon with the sort of polite bafflement reserved for a tipsy ambassador who has mistaken the national anthem for karaoke. In France, Le Monde praised its “énergie sauvage” while lamenting that the picture felt like “a binge-watch of American narcissism.” South Korea’s largest portal, Naver, saw audiences split: cinephiles awarded it 9.3, casual viewers 2.1, proving once again that democracy is messy and sometimes suicidal. Meanwhile China refused it a release entirely—officially because of “historical inaccuracies,” unofficially because the Communist Party dislikes parties it can’t police.

What makes Babylon globally resonant isn’t the debauchery—every culture has its own version of vomiting into a koi pond—but the way it chronicles an empire’s transition from spectacle to streaming. The film ends on a montage that fast-forwards cinema from silent slapstick to Avatar, essentially compressing a century of artistic mutation into three minutes and change. It’s like watching evolution on amphetamines, or reading a quarterly report from Netflix.

That montage lands differently abroad. In Nigeria, where Nollywood releases 50 films a week straight to phones, the idea of a $200-million soundstage looks as antiquated as a cathedral built for gods who’ve already started OnlyFans accounts. In France, the birthplace of the auteur, the sequence feels like a funeral march for a medium now reduced to “content”—a word the French refuse to translate, the same way they refuse to pronounce “hamburger.” Even in Hollywood itself, the scene plays like an elegy for a town that long ago learned it could make more money selling nostalgia back to itself than inventing the future.

The international box office drove the final nail. After a $15-million domestic opening, Babylon crawled to $63 million worldwide—roughly what Disney spends annually on corporate jets. Paramount consoled itself with the thought that art isn’t supposed to turn a profit, which is exactly what you tell the bartender when your credit card gets declined. Foreign exhibitors, still recovering from pandemic closures and popcorn inflation, quietly yanked the film after week three to make room for Avatar 2, a sequel that proved audiences will happily sit for three hours if you promise them blue cat-people instead of brown envelopes of cocaine.

Yet Babylon’s failure may be more instructive than its success would have been. It exposes the widening chasm between Hollywood’s self-image—“the dream factory”—and the global audience’s new reality, where dreams arrive in six-second TikTok bursts and subtitles are considered an act of aggression. The movie’s climactic shot—an audience weeping in the dark as Singin’ in the Rain flickers onscreen—is meant to be cathartic. In 2023, it scans as unintentional satire: people crying over a communal experience most of them now watch alone on their phones while doom-scrolling.

Still, there is something perversely admirable about a filmmaker who spends $80 million to announce that the party is over. Babylon is less an ode to cinema than an autopsy report written in confetti. Its worldwide shrug of reception may be the most honest global consensus we’ve managed in years: a collective acknowledgment that the old rituals—dark rooms, flickering light, shared silence—are being replaced by portable rectangles and algorithmic lullabies. The film’s final irony? It will probably find its true audience on a streaming platform, paused every eleven minutes for bathroom breaks and snack raids, the modern equivalent of dancing on your own grave while checking the stock price of the shovel.

In the end, Babylon is a monument that doubles as its own wrecking ball. It invites the planet to mourn a medium even as it live-streams the funeral. The rest of us, scattered across time zones and tax shelters, can only nod in recognition: we came, we saw, we added it to our watchlists.