From plugging my ears to avoid spoilers, to not seeing the movie

When I’m within a week of my ranking deadline, I’ve narrowed down the list of titles I plan to squeeze in before the end, and thereby also know which ones I won’t.

One of those is a bit of a surprise this year.

Back before Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw hit theaters, it was advertised pretty heavily through trailers. I should have already seen every good bit in the movie, but I stopped watching after the initial teaser trailer, in which the title characters (played by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham) have a sort of competition to see who can beat up their own room of bad guys better. I thought this teaser was hilarious, and it left me primed for the movie.

So primed, in fact, that when full-length trailers for the movie started to come on, I closed my eyes and plugged up my ears. This is a strategy I sometimes use to remain unspoiled on a big new movie, such as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Never thought I’d use it on a Fast & Furious movie, but there we were.

I heard that the movie was not so good, but the bigger problem with getting to Hobbes & Shaw was that it came out in the middle of MIFF, and I had other priorities for the few available time slots when I wasn’t either watching a MIFF movie or at home with my kids while my wife was. Those slots went to Midsommar and, strangely now in retrospect, Ophelia, which was not good. The ability to review Ophelia was likely a factor in that choice, as was the comparative lengths of the two films.

Once MIFF ended, I was off to America, where my viewing priority immediately shifted to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. When I finally got back to Australia, Hobbes & Shaw had been left in the dust.

Still, there has been plenty of time over the rest of the year for Hobbes & Shaw to become available on video and for me to watch it. I have not done it so far, and unless something really weird happens, I won’t before next Monday.

It’s not been an oversight, but rather, a conscious choice whose logic I have only just come to understand.

Each year I see movies from every conceivable demographic, a “demographic” in this case consisting of genre, budget size, and age/gender/race of the intended audience. As a sort of zen balancing act, therefore, I also like to miss movies from every conceivable demographic.

I consider summer action blockbusters to be a demographic unto themselves. Due to sheer availability and the desire to be part of the cultural conversation about them, it’s a demographic whose percentage of movies seen is usually pretty high for me. Unless, that is, I specifically choose not to see some of them.

In 2019, I had a number of good candidates for blockbusters to shun. But when I ended up seeing the likes of X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Hellboy on various plane flights, the list narrowed to only a few.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters was one. I haven’t seen it, and I won’t, for now anyway.

Hobbes & Shaw was/is the other.

It was easy for me to continue shunning Godzilla, as you might surmise if you read this post. But now that I’ve committed, I’m having second thoughts about the Hobbes & Shaw snub. As I write a piece like this, I think back to the me of mid-July, who was so worried about the best things this film had to offer (its ridiculous action set pieces) being ruined that I took extraordinary measures to avoid ruining them. That me was also triggered when I listened to the recent Filmspotting top ten of the year podcast, in which two of the hosts mentioned their shared love of one particularly awesome scene in the movie.

I’ll see Hobbes & Shaw eventually, of course, but not getting it into my ranking year does feel like something of a loss. And yet, though I have time to change that and watch it before Monday, I’m not going to. I can’t let Godzilla be the only big summer blockbuster I don’t see.

They may be strange rules, but they’re mine.