Feature - Another Blockbuster Summer Part 2 (The Curse of the Blockbuster)

I'll have a P please, Bob.

Jaws. E.T. Alien. Marvel's Avengers. Yes - I've been enjoying summer blockbuster films for most of my life. Hell, I even loved Independence Day. During the summer of '96 I was in a pretty dark place and that big stupid noisy movie lifted my spirits so much that I returned twice to the Iveagh Cinema, Banbridge, to see it again (even though the ending is balls). 

So let me say at the start - I have nothing against the blockbuster phenomenon per se. These films have their place and let's face it, they'll be with us as long as cinema exists. But I think movie-making as an art-form has paid a hefty price to accommodate big-budget crowd-pleasers. Let me try to explain.

Compare two movie-making decades - the '70s and '80s and the films that defined them. 

The '70s gave us One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All the President's Men, Taxi Driver and the first two Godfather installments. It was a time of cinema for grown-ups (you could argue grown-up men, but that's a whole other issue) and screens were taken up by films bristling with difficult political and psychological ideas. Mainstream cinema was edgy and confrontational, and even genre films had bite. The French Connection was as grimy and morally knotted a cop movie as has ever been made and The Exorcist is as much a complex character piece as a supernatural horror.

Fast-forward to the '80s (the decade in which fast-forwarding became a popular term). Messrs Spielberg and Lucas had already reset the course in the latter part of the '70s with the New Jersey shark attack and the Skywalker crew respectively, and that's how it continued. Back to the Future, Beverly Hills Cop, Die Hard - big glossy genre entertainments - were the order of the decade. They were entertaining for sure, but they marginalized the gritty cerebral films that had headlined ten years before. 

Cinema-going demographics altered hugely over that period. Movies, in America at least (and the US is the dominant cultural force in global cinema), were now being made with a family/teen audience primarily in mind. The advent of the John Hughes high school movie (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc) is evidence enough of that. Yes - grown-up, dramatically chewy films could still be found if you looked for them, but they were no longer the driving force in mainstream cinema. It's a phenomenon that's stayed true to this day. Despite a resurgence in the late '90s of thinky cinema, year-round blockbusters are claiming most of the box-office and taking up most of the screens in both the US and UK.

It's a matter of pure economics. The movie industry is just that, an industry, primarily based on commerce, however many genuine artists are working within it. A Star Wars or Harry Potter title can make insane amounts of money for a major studio, with the result that such films have become staples rather than say twice-yearly events. The knock-on effect is that fewer films with a mid-range budget and more mature content make it into production. In 2017 it's all about those big tent-pole movies, whose success can swell a studio's profits like little else. 

Another gloomy truth is that blockbusters have become steadily less innovative in their own right. Films costing upwards of $100 million to produce let alone market are clearly massive investments for studios, so as far as is possible risk-taking is avoided. Result - the predominance of ever-extending franchises, remakes and adaptations of popular fiction, in other words films that hopefully have a locked-in audience before they're even released. Some of these are quality no doubt, but they leave little room for screenplays that are original in every sense. And that only adds insult to the injury of clever, challenging movies being displaced on our screens, so that many cinema-goers have no opportunity to see them.

It's a sad, sad situation (as Elton John once said about something completely unrelated), and it's not likely to change much anytime soon. Great grown-up cinema is out there if you look hard enough, and I'll endeavour to keep covering it along with the fun, pulpy blockbusters.

For lovers of quality adult drama and no variety at their local multiplex, salvation lies elsewhere. Television. It's something that would have seemed hugely unlikely even 20 years ago, and it's deserving of a blog entry all its own.