Over the summer months, the narrative that “cinema is dead” once again began to be bandied about, with Ty Burr among those floating the idea in a thinkpiece. It’s understandable: as we’ve written about before, the summer was one of the worst in recent memory in terms of major releases (and not all that great in terms of minor ones either). It wasn’t just cinephiles getting up in arms either: Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate and basis for the character Oogie Boogie in “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” told a rally at the start of this month “they don’t make movies like they used to,” causing even members of the political commentariat who otherwise vehemently disagree with him to concur.
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With almost every major blockbuster financially underperforming and getting poor reviews, this certainly seemed to be Trump serving up his trademark populism. In light of the rise of quality TV in recent years (“Stranger Things” was discussed more than most movies this summer), many have been claiming that television has now completely superseded film in the cultural vanguard. Bret Easton Ellis backs this notion, describing in a recent episode of his unbearable podcast about “how film culture has basically died,” and that “Movies vs. TV: that’s over now too. TV, in a sense, won, [and] movies lost.” Maybe 2016 really was the year that killed the movies.
Or maybe it was the year that saved them.
There’s no denying that the film world, particularly with regard to the mainstream, has some crippling problems. A reliance on blockbuster tentpoles is nothing new —it’s been heading that way since “Star Wars”— but the explosion of the international box office and the ever-increasing cost of marketing a movie has led to a reliance on brands, and identikit orange-and-teal summer movies full of explosions and stakes-free CGI combat. Even pretty good, semi-thoughtful examples of giant tentpoles like “Captain America: Civil War” and “Star Trek Beyond” end up feeling like so much noise amidst the marketing blitz.
“TV is as cinematic as anything on the big screen, but that means more cinema, not the death of movies.”
Critics have been tired of this for a long while, but what’s changed is that audiences palpably feel tired of it as well. The nihilistic thunder of a “Suicide Squad” or “X-Men: Apocalypse” has worn audiences down, especially when there are so many good alternatives you can watch without leaving the house. And yet for all this bleakness, it’s debatable that film culture is all that much worse than it used to be. Ten years ago, the top grossers included “Night At The Museum,” “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “The Da Vinci Code” and “Ice Age: The Meltdown.” Twenty years back, it was “Twister,” “101 Dalmatians” and “The Nutty Professor.” Thirty years back you had “Karate Kid Part II,” “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” “Back To School” and “The Golden Child.” People have always flocked to see crap. The crap is just different now.
And people still see good movies in large numbers as well. Recent years have seen films like “The Martian,” “The Revenant,” “Straight Outta Compton,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Creed,” “American Sniper,” “Interstellar,” “Gone Girl,” “Noah,” “Gravity,” “American Hustle,” “The Wolf Of Wall Street,” “Lincoln,” “Argo,” “Life Of Pi,” “Black Swan,” “True Grit” and “The Social Network” bring in blockbuster numbers. You might not like all of these films, but they’re all possessed of a marked difference from the tentpoles that dominate media coverage, the kind of movies that Trump, Matthew Yglesias and co. claim don’t exist anymore.
It would be a leap, at least so far, to say that this summer’s run of bad films has led to a burst of audiences looking at a wider selection of movies. But it’s notable that August and September saw a solid run of performers that are less brand-name reliant. Sequels like “Blair Witch” and “Bridget Jones’ Baby” continued to underperform, while “Sully” has earned well over $100 million now, and “The Magnificent Seven,” “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” and “The Girl On The Train” all opened healthily and look to continue to play strongly.
We would not argue that these movies are great, or in several cases any good (if they were really good, they perhaps would have done even better). And their grosses are still a fraction of a hyped-up cinematic sinkhole like ‘Suicide Squad.” But they’re all quite distinct from the kind of fare that we were getting this past summer, and their consistent strong performance, despite being wildly different from each other, suggests that an audience hunger for something else could be causing them to look elsewhere. It’s also notable that in the indie scene, the offbeat likes of “The Witch,” “The Lobster,” “Hunt For The Wilderpeople” and “Swiss Army Man” have all done well, while “Hell Or High Water” has quietly outgrossed “Fargo,” the kind of movie that people hold up as the example of cinema that isn’t made anymore.
Again, “Hell Or High Water” certainly wouldn’t become a $200 million grosser if “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” or “Warcraft” ceased to exist. But the key here are the undecideds. These big branded blockbusters have built-in audiences that’ll turn up opening weekend because they’re fans of the characters, or of previous movies, or because they want to be able to talk about a film as an event. These kinds of filmgoers likely aren’t the market for a movie like “Hell or High Water.” But then there are the people in the middle, who might check out a blockbuster if they hear good things, but might spend their disposable income elsewhere if buzz is bad from word of mouth or reviews.
And one shouldn’t underestimate the importance of Rotten Tomatoes here. While the site has been bad for movie culture in many respects, particularly in reinforcing the binary idea that a movie is either “fresh” or “rotten,” it’s arguably given critics, or at least the critical consensus, more importance than ever before, with many members of the public using the score of a movie as a guide as to whether it’s worth their ticket money or not.