One of the more perplexing things about today’s annual blockbuster binge, in fact, is that it has become very hard to determine which films are genuinely popular and which are not – which is to say, films we would actively seek out, as opposed to merely sit through. Oftentimes, all we have to do is check that a movie is as bad as everyone says it is, in enough number, and – poof! – we’ve accidentally launched another blockbuster film franchise on an unsuspecting world.
- Tom Shone, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer
I came across this quotation last week while perusing the stacks of books down in the subterranean cinema library at USC. I’d been down there scouring the aisles for anything that could be useful in my research on contemporary cinematic culture but to be honest, I eventually had to tear myself away from The Wolf at the Door (a reference book which postulates that Stanley Kubrick hid innumerable references to the Holocaust throughout his body of work, but more interestingly that The Shining is actually secretly about the Holocaust) in order to learn about how artists like Kubrick were wiped off the landscape.
“Artists like Kubrick” is a dumb thing to say, though, (who the hell is like Stanley Kubrick?) and reduces the issue of the Blockbuster Era to an Us vs. Them rhetoric, when in truth, even the “Us” that identifies itself as opposed to “infantilizing” cinema help contribute to the box office gross. How can we stay cinema lovers and never go to the cinema? We can’t. We love it. So we pay for things we shouldn’t.
Shone’s point is a fairly common one in 2011: a massive weekend gross doesn’t equal popularity. The practice of over-saturating the advertising market with billboards, TV spots, internet ad banners, iPad apps, whatever, is incredibly commonplace today and as Shone discusses in his book, is a sign of a studio’s lack of faith in their product. If their advertising reaches and convinces enough individual people, then maybe they can make back their investment without being hurt by the bad word of mouth that will take a serious bite out of the Weekend #2 gross. Basically, excessive advertising is the sign of a bad product.
But that doesn’t account for everything that makes it into the yearly Box Office Top Ten. Some of the entries are genuine cultural phenomena. Below, I’ve included three lists: the top ten yearly box office domestic grosses from 2000, 2005, and 2010. Comparing the entries might tell me something about the developments in mainstream American cinema over the course of the last decade.
2000 Box Office Domestic Gross
1. How the Grinch Stole Christmas - $260,044,825
2. Cast Away - $233,632,142
3. Mission: Impossible III - $215,409,889
4. Gladiator - $187,705,427
5. What Women Want - $182,811,707
6. The Perfect Storm - $182,618,434
7. Meet the Parents - $166,244,045
8. X-Men - $157,299,717
9. Scary Movie - $157,019,771
10. What Lies Beneath - $155,464,351
2005 Box Office Domestic Gross
1. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith - $380,270,577
2. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - $291,710,957
3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - $290,013,036
4. War of the Worlds - $234,280,354
5. King Kong - $218,080,025
6. Wedding Crashers - $209,255,921
7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - $206,459,076
8. Batman Begins - $205,343,774
9. Madagascar - $193,595,521
10. Mr. & Mrs. Smith - $186,336,279
2010 Box Office Domestic Gross
1. Toy Story 3 - $415,004,880
2. Alice in Wonderland - $334,191,110
3. Iron Man 2 - $312,433,331
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - $300,531,751
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - $295,001,070
6. Inception - $292,576,195
7. Despicable Me - $251,513,985
8. Shrek Forever After - $238,736,787
9. How to Train Your Dragon - $217,581,231
10. Tangled - $200,821,936
So the first thing that jumps out at you, before the title even, are the numbers. Movies weren’t even hitting the $300 million mark back in 2000. My first thought: inflation. Which is interesting. Because immediately I had a difficult time imagining that people were more excited about going to the movie theater in 2010 than they were in 2000. So I checked the Inflation Calculator at West Egg to see how the top movie of 2000 would rank in 2010.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas made $260,044,825 in America in 2000, which according to the calculator would be $325,914,966.49. That gross would put it at #3 for 2010 and #2 for 2005, if we were to magically transplant the Grinch into different years. Does that mean that movies are slowly regaining an audience? If it couldn’t have made it to the top even when adjusted for inflation, doesn’t that mean movie theaters are doing better now than they were ten years ago?
Well, honestly, I’m not so sure. Looking over the entries again, the second thing that jumps out at you are the franchise titles, the remakes, and the sequels. Always a favorite topic for me here. But my point isn’t to harp (once again) about the lack of originality and absence of original content. I’m wondering whether the Grinch really could have been released in any of the years between 2000 and 2010 and still make money. I mean this: what makes this Grinch film specific to its place in time?
Look at these lists. Of the 30 films listed, 17 are based on older material: remakes, sequels, or adaptations. In fact, unsurprisingly, 2000 has far and away the most original material of any year I’ve referenced: Cast Away and Gladiator have each stood the test of time in their own way. The most surprising thing about 2000 is the dominance of live-action material. No animated feature made it into the top 10. In comparison, literally half of the top films of 2010 were computer-animated features marketed towards children.
I worry that we’ve arrived at a point in time where our entertainment is arbitrary. I get why Toy Story 3 was wildly popular and why it deserved to be. But let’s get real for a second: that movie could have been released anytime between 2005 and 2010 and people still would have gone nuts.
Here’s a question: why did a fake sequel of Alice in Wonderland get green-lit for release in 2010? Why did audiences flock to that story? I guess I could make some sort of psychological case for Alice’s appeal in an age of rabbit-hole economics, but that would be a stretch. It seems to me that, aside from Toy Story’s appeals to our nostalgic impulses, the primary appeal of entertainment in 2010 was technology.
I’m not making any conclusions about our culture in general yet, but this fascination with technology as it relates to entertainment has got to be one of the topics. After all, what else can you get out of the insane successes of animated sequels that use technology to make watching movies more visceral? The How to Train Your Dragon sequence below, to say nothing for the entirety of Avatar, is a great example of this “visceral” preoccupation:
Going to the movies in 2010 was at least as much about one’s physical experience as one’s emotional experience. As movies become more and more immersive, as their environments become more fictionalized and fantastical, I worry that we’ll sacrifice any chance at getting a basic emotional response other than awe. Here’s to hoping that in 2020, this Immersive Cinema will have developed a soul.
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