Periodizing the Blockbuster Era

The above diagram schematizes some of the factors influencing the transition from the Hollywood Renaissance period (1967-1980) to the early decades of the Blockbuster Era (1975-present).

In the middle part of the chart (with the "synergy" arrow), I draw a boundary at about 1981, walling off the Hollywood Renaissance from the Blockbuster Era. Going solely by the content, tone, and look of the films, it's easy to impose that gap, with Raging Bull (1980) the last barbaric yawp of the European-influenced Hollywood Renaissance period and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) the herald of the big-budget Blockbuster Era.*

You can even see the difference between these cultural and industrial moments -- Renaissance and Blockbuster -- in the two (successful) Spielberg films that straddle the turn of the decade. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), for all its third-act spectacle, is a film of the Hollywood Renaissance, or as close as Spielberg ever gets to directing one barring The Sugarland Express (1974). Close Encounters is an auteurist passion project for Spielberg, based on one of the few screenplays (outside of Sugarland and Poltergeist) he ever wrote himself. It features French New Wave icon Francois Truffaut performing in the movie, his presence a direct nod to Renaissance-era auteurism. More surprisingly for Spielberg, Close Encounters ends ambivalently: an emotionally unbalanced man abandons his earthbound family to fly away with aliens.

And then there's Raiders of the Lost Ark, a tightly episodic, sequel-spawning, consciously "calculated" action blockbuster.

However, at the infrastructural level, and as the short line at the bottom of my chart indicates, the transition between Renaissance and Blockbuster starts well before 1980. Disney is already lucratively synergizing their various product lines (live-action films, animated films, TV shows, theme parks, toys, etc.) by the 1950s, and TransAmerica buys United Artists in 1967. Disney and UA are the corporate harbingers of the post-1970s era of multinational corporate takeovers, corporate mergers, and the dominance of the synergistic business model built around "tentpole" summer blockbusters.

Film historian and political economist Thomas Schatz claims that 1974-5 represents the "peak and, as it turned out, the waning" of the Hollywood Renaissance period, its last hurrah consisting of films like Nashville, Night Moves, Chinatown, and The Conversation.** Indeed, film historians Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell tell us that the multinational corporate takeover of the major studios was more or less complete by 1982, at which point "all the Majors except 20th Century Fox had become wings of diversified conglomerates" like Gulf + Western, MCA, and Coca-Cola.†

Popeye Doyle sez: "We better enjoy this Hollywood Renaissance thing while we can, Cloudy -- it ain't gonna last."

Yes, certain artsy, downbeat, auterist films continue to be made into the late 1970s and early 1980s: The Deer Hunter, Coming Home (both 1978), Apocalypse Now, Being There (both 1979), Raging Bull, Reds (1981), and even First Blood (1982).

But despite all these promising late entries, there's no denying the implications of 1975's Jaws, "a social, industrial, and cultural phenomenon of the first order, a cinematic idea and cultural commodity whose time had come" (Schatz p. 26). Jaws is extremely well-made entertainment by super-genius director Steven Spielberg -- it's a totally badass movie, even according to Mark Kermode. Furthermore, it establishes the broad template for all subsequent blockbusters via its postmodern genre-mixology:

Jaws was essentially an action film and a thriller, though it effectively melded various genres and story types. It tapped into the monster movie tradition with a revenge-of-nature subtext (like King Kong, The Birds, et. al.), and in the film's latter stages the shark begins to take on supernatural, even Satanic, qualities a la Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. And, given the fact that the initial victims are women and children, Jaws also had ties to the high-gore "slasher" film, which had been given considerable impetus a year earlier by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Schatz p. 25)

Genre-wise, then, the post-1975 blockbuster is nearly always an action-adventure film, even when hybridized with or superficially "skinned" to resemble another genre. Usually set "in the romantic past or in an inhospitable place in the present," the action-adventure typically features "a propensity for spectacular physical action, a narrative structure involving fights, chases and explosions, and in addition to the deployment of state-of-the-art special effects, an emphasis in performance on athletic feats and stunts." As Steve Neale, quoting Michael Nerlich, writes:

the ideology of adventure in its modern sense -- its association with the active seeking out of such events -- was developed in conjunction firstly with the medieval cult of the courtly knight, secondly with merchant adventuring (and state-sponsored piracy) in the early modern period, and thirdly with the spread of empire during the course of the nineteenth century. Hence its links with colonialism, imperialism and racism, as well as with traditional ideals of masculinity, run very deep.††

By defaulting to action-adventure pastiche, rather than artfully revising or reworking specific genres like many Renaissance films do, and by "recalibrating the profit potential of the Hollywood hit" to new, astronomical levels, Jaws and Star Wars toll the death knell of the auteurist Renaissance. Schatz writes that "the promise of Jaws was confirmed by Star Wars" -- its "emphasis on plot over character" solidifies the still-dominant action-blockbuster template (Schatz 24, 31, 29).

In 1981, Lucas and Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark confirms the successful formula and sets the tone for the biggest hits of the coming decade:

Top Grossing Movies of the 1980s (adjusted for inflation) according to Box Office Mojo

1. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
3. Return of the Jedi (1983)
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
5. Ghostbusters (1984)
6. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
7. Batman (1989)
8. Back to the Future (1985)
9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
10. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

My favorite sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981's highest grosser and the film that sets the template for the summer blockbuster. 

Quoting Richard Schickel, Schatz notes that blockbusters from this point forward all belong to one of two "metacategories," either the comedy (e.g., Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters) or the action film (e.g., all the other films on the above list). Schatz describes Star Wars in particular as the key proto-"high concept" summer blockbuster. For him, Star Wars exemplifies the tension between story and spectacle that characterizes the summer popcorn movie writ large:

One the one hand, the seemingly infinite capacity for multimedia reiteration of a movie hit redefines textual boundaries, creates a dynamic commercial intertext that is more process than product, and involves the audience(s) in the creative process -- not only as multimarket consumers but also as mediators in the play of narrative signification. On the other hand, the actual movie "itself," if indeed it can be isolated and understood as such (which is questionable at best), often has been reduced and stylized to a point where, for some observers, it scarcely even qualifies as a narrative. (39)

I agree with this account and have myself written about the recent blockbuster's trend toward spectacle over narrative.

What I want to do with the rest of this post is to try to break down the Blockbuster Era (so far) into smaller constituent periods, mainly derived from the chronological sketch given by Mark Harris in his must-read 2014 piece "The Birdcage":

The revolution of George Lucas’s game-changer — in purely financial terms — was that it confirmed what the James Bond series had suggested a decade earlier: There was no ceiling on how much money the right kind of series with the right kind of potentially escalating fan obsession could take in. Over the 25 years that followed Star Wars, franchises went from being a part of the business to a big part of the business. Big, but not defining: Even as late as 1999, for instance, only four of the year’s 35 top grossers were sequels. 

That’s not where we are anymore. In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business. Period. Twelve of the year’s 14 highest grossers are, or will spawn, sequels. A successful franchise is no longer used to finance the rest of a studio’s lineup; a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it.

To continue where Harris leaves off, I turn to Pamela McClintock's recent piece "Hollywood's Obsession with the 'Requel'" for its succinct definition of the latest transmogrification of the blockbuster: the requel. A requel is "a movie that's both a reboot and a sequel, blending old with new in an effort to extend the life of a franchise and, in the best cases, reinvent it for a 'universe' of follow-up movies."

The most successful requel so far.

Whereas the "hard" reboot usually retells an origin story, as with Star Trek (2009) or The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), the requel, according to McClintock, is different from either the reboot or the pure remake "in that it nods to and exploits goodwill toward the past while launching a new generation of actors and stories." It is, in essence, a thinly veiled remake in which the same basic stuff, with slight new variations, happens all over again to a new generation of characters. I like to describe it as "strangely similar things happening to slightly different people."

It's appropriate that Jurassic World should lead the (successful) charge into the Requel period, since it is so transparently a remake of Jurassic Park (Lee Sabo calls it "fan-fiction story-telling"), which in 1993 was already hyper-aware of its status as a global commodity.

The most important shot in Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park's gift shop. 

To sum up: origin-story-retelling reboots include Batman Begins (2005), Star Trek (2009), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).

Recent "pure remakes" include King Kong (2005), Cinderella, and Pan (both 2015).

Our requels category is so far inhabited by Terminator Genisys, Jurassic World, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (all 2015), and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016).

I propose the following Periodization of the Blockbuster Era so far:

1975-85: Marking the inception of the Blockbuster Era proper with Jaws and Star Wars, these are the "Ten years that shook the industry" (J. Hoberman), the inception of the mega-blockbuster era. Schatz notes the increase in sequels and remakes from 1974 onward, writing that "From 1964 to 1968, sequels and reissues combined accounted for just under 5 percent of all Hollywood releases. From 1974 to 1978, they comprised 17.5 percent" ("New Hollywood" p. 27).

1986-99: The period of international conglomeration, worldwide release, and global synergy. The period during which Schatz's "calculated Blockbuster" -- calculated to be a major hit, produce sequels and spinoffs, and synergize with a larger product line and brand -- becomes the driving force behind the Hollywood film industry. As Thompson and Bordwell write,

The first wave of film studio acquisitions, from the 1960s through the early 1980s, had been initiated largely by conglomerates who wanted to diversify their holdings, to add a movie company to a menu of bowling alleys, parking lots, soft-drink bottling, or funeral parlors. The wave that began in the mid-1980s was more narrowly targeted, aimed at synergy -- the coordination of several compatible business lines to maximize income. (p. 664)

This period includes the Michael Eisner regime at Disney -- he's CEO 1984-2005. Eisner focuses on synergy and developing branded content, placing "special emphasis on activities and services that went beyond moviegoing or TV viewing" (T&B p. 696).

1989 is a key year, the starting point for the "dark" and "adult" interpretation of Batman on film. As Eileen Meehan documents, a dark interpretation of Batman was test-marketed beforehand by the release of Frank Miller's comic The Dark Knight Returns into mainstream bookstores.‡

Neale notes that in the 1990s Hollywood "conglomeration and synergy tended to accelerate on a national and international scale, as some of the mini-majors disappeared and as others were absorbed by the majors, and as the costs of making blockbusters and routine features alike continued to rise" (p. 230).

This period sees the wholesale onset of computer generated imagery (CGI) with pioneering effects-driven blockbuster films The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and of course Jurassic Park (1993).

Jurassic Park (1993) is perhaps the key film of this period -- a landmark in computer-generated effects, synergistic product lines, and global release strategies (Thompson and Bordwell p. 697).

Michael Keaton in 1989's Batman, another key film of the 1986-99 period.  

2000-14: I am tempted to call this the "Pointlessly Serious Superhero Movie" period. Fox's X-Men franchise launches eponymously in 2000, setting the general tone for the period. Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, which starts with Iron Man in 2008, goes a bit lighter in tone than X-Men, whereas Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy (2005-12) and Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009), Man of Steel (2013), and Batman v Superman all go darker and more pretentious.

Speaking of Nolan and Snyder, Kevin Tsujihara becomes Time Warner's chairman/CEO in 2013 and announces a slate of ten Warner Bros. movies based on DC Comics characters to be released between 2016 and 2020. Of Tsujihara, Harris writes:

He has never produced a movie; in fact, he is the first studio head to rise in the ranks purely through brand extension and ancillary divisions, and brand extension is what he’s all about. Besides the DC announcement, his big accomplishments have been to nail down those three additional [J.K.] Rowling movies to add to the studio’s portfolio of eight, and to turn one Lego movie into four.

Tsujihara's counterpart at Universal is Jeff Shell, who becomes CEO in 2013 and about whom Variety's Peter Bart and Claudia Eller write that "Shell’s background and management style is strictly corporate and solidly Comcast." Significantly, Shell rises through the corporate ranks on the television side. Writing in 2014, Mark Harris suggests that by making seven- and ten-year plans for interlocking franchises a la Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, contemporary movie franchises replicate formulas that have been honed to perfection on and by television:

TV looms large over this new movie lineup. How could it not? TV is everything. TV is how people see movies; TV is where people want to watch movies, on demand and on their own terms; TV is what Twitter wants to talk about. Most of all, TV knows how to keep people coming back, which is its job, every day and every week, and is a quality that, above all others, the people who finance movies would dearly love to poach.

2015: The Requel period begins. In addition to the McClintock piece referenced above, see also Adam Sternbergh's recent essay on the studio as auteur and the "Marvel movie" as prototypical blockbuster. Analyzing directorial duo Joe and Anthony Russo's successful run of MCU films, Sternbergh writes:

As TV becomes more cinematic in its execution (multiple locations, expensive FX), and films become more TV-like in their storytelling (single chapters in an ongoing story), the decision to employ TV directors on Marvel films starts to make sense. Which is why directors like the Russos — talented, proficient, flexible, and instinctually collaborative — are perfectly suited to flourish.

If the release of Jaws marks the beginning of the Blockbuster Era, then it's been forty-one years since then. We are over forty headlong years into this Era, it is barreling along, we are just beginning the Requel period, and there's no end in sight. We don't even really know what we're in for yet. As Harris concludes,

What we are witnessing is not stability but transition — the evolutionary moment of overlap in Hollywood when the old way and the new way transiently coexist. Ten years from now, the old way will be gone. The new way will simply be the way.

The way of the endless requel and its mutant spawn.

Hi, I'm Mark Harris. I'm so goddamned smart about movies and a fine writer, too. Carter is quite impressed with me.

--

* You'll notice that I call the Hollywood Renaissance a period and the Blockbuster Era an era. That's because the former is a short transitional period bridging the stretch between the decline of the Studio Era (and it is surely in decline by the 1950s) and the rise of the Blockbuster Era. The Hollywood Renaissance years constitute the tail end of a longer period that begins circa 1948 when the Paramount Decree critically alters the makeup of the Golden Age Studio System. Thomas Schatz describes the 1947-60 period in the later chapters of his The Genius of the System (Pantheon Books, 1988).
** Schatz, "The New Hollywood," in Movie Blockbusters, Ed. Julian Stringer (Routledge 2003),  p. 27.
† Thompson and Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (Third Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2009) p. 664.
†† Neale, Genre and Hollywood (Routledge, 2005) pp. 49, 46, 51.
‡ Meehan, "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!" in The Many Lives of the Batman (Ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, Routledge 1991) p. 53.

Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

One of my favorite bits from The Force Awakens.

I have written before about Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams' "requel"-style sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy. I claim the new movie

is better (by far) than any Star Wars prequel and better (by less far) than Jurassic World. The dialogue is decent, the characterization (especially of the new characters, Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and BB-8) is good, and the action sequences and overall narrative flow work really well. I agree with A.A. Dowd when he says that the film does not slow down and develop its characters and worlds quite enough and that it fails to land a couple moments (like the revelation of Kylo Ren's parentage) that could have been far more emotionally impactful than they are.

I stand by that statement, yet having recently re-watched The Force Awakens, I aver its dialogue is better than "decent." As these kinds of basically superficial movies go, the latest Star Wars entry is actually quite well scripted.

Take. for example, the two lines exchanged between Han and Leia as they sum up why they have drifted apart from one another over the years:

HAN: I went back to the only thing I was ever any good at.

LEIA: We both did.

Simple stuff but it implies so much. Perceiving themselves to be failures as lovers and parents, Han and Leia have fallen back on their respective jobs as smuggler and military commander to sustain them through their trauma. This makes sense. It's human. People in the real world throw themselves into work and old habits to avoid pain and discomfort all the time. Succinctly put, not revolutionary, but believable and resonant.

The film's high entertainment value also stems from Abrams' considerable ability as a "show don't tell" filmmaker. In this, thank God he is more a disciple of Spielberg than of Lucas. He moves the camera dynamically, he focuses on action and gesture over expository dialogue, and he -- unlike his contemporaries Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder -- seems to comprehend human emotions.

This moment, like many similar moments between Furiosa and Max in Fury Road, subtly illustrates how heroic men depend upon smarter, more capable women.

However, one can easily tell that Abrams' hands were tightly tied while making this franchise-rebooting component of the highly synergized Star Wars product line.* As the L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik writes,

Whether out of his own instincts or via directives from the suits at Disney, J.J. Abrams, the co-writer and director of The Force Awakens, plainly labored under a mandate to not get the thing wrong. It's a mark of Disney's own caretaker mentality that not only is a Jar Jar Binks-level blunder absent from The Force Awakens, but so is surprise or even much suspense.

That's hard to argue with. The film is fun but generally unsurprising, in large part because it is a barely-disguised remake of Star Wars (1977). (Though I am pleasantly surprised by Kylo Ren's sudden tantrums -- show don't tell!)

Hiltzik allows that "Abrams' big advance is said to be supplanting the whiter-than-white protagonists of the original Star Wars with a young woman and a black male." Agreed.

Finn (John Boyega) rocks. He also signals imminent major SPOILERS in this review.

What's more, The Force Awakens makes good on two key unfulfilled promises: to give Han Solo a meaningful death, and to give us a frikkin' female Jedi protagonist.

As Harrison Ford has been saying for decades, Han Solo should have croaked at the end of The Return of the Jedi. It makes sense in terms of the character's arc (greedy bastard in Star Wars, learns his lesson in Empire, sacrifices himself for his friends in Jedi) and would have given the conclusion of the original trilogy some much-needed gravitas. Tony Zhou writes that

J.J. Abrams must spend half of The Force Awakens re-building the same emotional ground under Han Solo [as existed in the original trilogy]. That’s why Han is back to his factory default setting of “smuggler,” why he’s escaping again from people to whom he owes money, why he and Leia are separated then reunited, and why he quickly agrees to storm a planet and disable the shield so that fighters can attack the Death Star. 

Han Solo is literally, moment by moment, reliving Return of the Jedi. Because in story terms, he should’ve died then.**

Don't get me wrong, Jedi is an aesthetic triumph. Its action sequences, particularly the Endor speeder bike chase and the destruction of the second Death Star, are among the best you will ever see. Luke's final confrontation with Vader and the Emperor in Jedi is one of the best dramatic scenes in any Star Wars movie and is probably the most emotionally resonant scene George Lucas has ever had any hand in creating.

But on a basic story-structure level, and as far as including the Ewoks goes, Return of the Jedi is a lazy, stupid, watered-down piece of shit. It stupidly keeps Han Solo alive, denying the character a meaningful death and reducing him to comic relief. Worse, Jedi gives Solo screen time that rightfully belongs to Leia at this point. Why the fuck isn't Leia, a longtime military leader, commanding the attack on the Endor shield generator? For that matter, why the fuck is this blaster-wielding leader of the rebellion being chained up in a slave bikini in the opening act of this puppet-fest?

Whatever happened to this Leia?

Did she follow this Marion Ravenwood down into the pit of 1980s sexism?

In any case, The Force Awakens' Rey (Daisy Ridley) appears to be Star Wars' attempt to reverse course on its usual sexism.† The attempt may never fully succeed -- that slave bikini is going to haunt the franchise forever. But our new series protagonist (for at least the next two numbered episodes I presume) and her black comrade-in-arms both provide a compelling and much-needed antidote to the series' usual white-male-centeredness. 

On the basis of its diverse cast and camera work alone I'm inclined to rate The Force Awakens up there pretty close to Return of the Jedi in terms of overall viewing pleasure. We'll see how it withstands the test of time. 

However, much as I complain about Disney taking over the goddamn universe, I sure look forward to seeing the next couple episodes of Rey's ongoing adventures. She is the single most compelling element of this latest Star Wars viewing product. 

Rey tells Kylo Ren to go fuck himself.

Bonus Afterthought: Make sure to check out this interesting piece about a possible unforeseen after-effect of The Force Awakens' enormous success: a critical reevaluation of George Lucas. Bryan Curtis explains that "in the era of reboots, Lucas' pastiches have a kind of integrity." A thought-provoking read.

UPDATE 7/1/2016: See also Film Crit Hulk's detailed explanation of why The Force Awakens doesn't quite work for him -- including accurate insights about why most of J.J. Abrams' films are big hits but lack staying power. According to Hulk, Abrams' films "DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW TO BE HUMAN SO THEY EFFECTIVELY IMITATE IT. [IN THE FORCE AWAKENS, ABRAMS AND COMPANY] LOOKED AT EVERY MOMENT AND WORKED BACKWARDS FROM THE INTENDED RESULT. J.J. KNOWS WHERE YOU WANT TO BE, BUT HE'S GOING TO RUSH YOU THERE AS SOON AS HE CAN, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT IT'S CATHARTIC."

UPDATE 9/10/2016: I recently came across this piece by Brian Merchant and feel it to be the best overall assessment of the place of The Force Awakens in the larger Star Wars film series. As Merchant writes, Episode VII "is more a product of the same market logic that gave rise to the Marvel Universe films—a logic that rewards emulation and nostalgia above all; reusing ideas, characters, and narrative arcs that have already proven lucrative—than it is of the imagination that launched the series nearly four decades ago." Though he has high hopes for 2017's Episode VIII, he concludes that "Science fiction is supposed to be all about exploring the unexplored, not rehashing the well-trod. As its key franchises become increasingly more important to the bottom line of huge studios that are fending off streaming and view-on-demand, expect them to become more formulaic, and less interesting."

--
* Eileen Meehan calls the web of cross-references created by the product lines surrounding a blockbuster film its "commercial intertext." She argues that each consumer interacts with the web of meanings created by a film text and its surrounding commercial intertext differently, each of us "positioning ourselves to construct different readings of the film and positioning the film and its intertext to suit our particular purposes" (pp. 47-9). If you are interested in the rise of the blockbuster and/or corporate synergy in Hollywood, you simply must read Meehan's "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!" in The Many Lives of the Batman (Ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, Routledge 1991) pp. 47-65.
** Zhou compellingly argues that The Force Awakens wastes too much time fixing the original trilogy's Han Solo problem: "the real film that Episode VII is fixing is Episode VI. Half of the runtime of this new movie is spent correcting one problem, the mere fact that Han Solo should have died then and didn’t." Along similar lines, Gary Kurtz, who produced Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, says in this interview that

one of the reasons I was really unhappy [about Jedi] was the fact that all of the carefully constructed story structure of characters and things that we did in Empire was going to carry over into Jedi. The resolution of that film was going to be quite bittersweet, with Han Solo being killed, and the princess having to take over as queen of what remained of her people, leaving everybody else. In effect, Luke was left on his own. None of that happened, of course.

Kurtz parted ways with George Lucas over these issues and instead of producing Return of the Jedi, he collaborated with Jim Henson and Frank Oz on the utterly badass The Dark Crystal (1982).
† The prequels are absolutely terrible on the gender front as well, so it's a good thing they don't exist.