Blockbusted
Some time ago in the distant past of the 1990s, movies out of Hollywood were relatively original and enjoyable. There was a time when a movie would come along and be declared the “Summer Blockbuster and added something to the national zeitgeist and culture. Now, not so much. I’ll spare the “woke tropes” and “DEI” complaints that are now par for these critiques and get to the heart of the matter. It’s simple. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy broke Hollywood. Just like Trump broke the politicoistas of the country. Since these movies based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien came out in the early 2000’s folks in the movie industry have been chasing that box office dragon. If you don’t agree, do me a favor. Name one standalone non-sequel or remake movie made between 2005 and 2015 that you think is of equal quality to something like Good Fellas or Forrest Gump or Pulp Fiction or Shawshank Redemption.
The new formula is clear. It must be a trilogy or a remake. Anything less will not be good enough. They need butts in seats not once, but two more times after that. It must be big. Bigger than the last biggest thing. And so long as it’s familiar to the audience, quality can be dismissed. In this paradigm, quantity trumps quality so long as the audience is familiar with the characters. That’s what’s lost on these producers seeking to recreate the Rings movies. Quality was coupled with familiarity of the public’s fascination with Tolkien’s storytelling. It’s the hallmark and the artistry of these films. But quality is hard to do, so they just equated budget with quality, and we get what we have now. I have not seen a superhero movie since the first Spider-Man 3 movie. It’s sad that I even have to say the first third Spider-Man movie. One of the first fruits of the Post-Rings Era, the movie could have been titled: Spider-Man 3: We’ve Gone Through the Motions, So Just Give Us Your Money. I won’t go into the issue with this film, but since the late 2000’s, we have been bombarded with remakes, trilogies and “universes” of movies that just have not captured the imagination of the public. They make money. They entertain people for a while. They are transactional.
This phenomenon did not happen in a vacuum, however. It was also a time that saw the advent of affordable digital media that made film making more approachable to the non-film maker. But more than that it liberalized the green-lighting of the film industry. It made the production cost of film inexpensive and therefore cheapened movie production by lowering the cost of admission for budding film makers. Some of whom were no good. But that didn’t stop producers and Hollywood executives from throwing money at anything and everything just to see if anything stuck. The ultimate result was a decrease in quality and viewership of traditional movies, both at the theater and at home via streaming services.
I saw a meme the other day that summed up the remake complex perfectly:
This past December I was at the mall and stopped to read the titles of the movies in the theater. I was surprised to see that some of them were re-releases of classic movies or reboots of past movies, others we uninspired. It’s like the spirit of Spider-Man 3 (the first one) has permeated the entire industry. Still there is hope. On the horizon are film companies like A24 that seem to be producing and distributing quality movies. While I’ve not seen most of these movies since I’ve really just given up on watching them. But their movies are outside the trilogy, remake, reboot paradigm, and appear to “reboot” quality and make the enjoyable movies that we once knew.