The Blockbusters

The current Blockbuster Age of Hollywood is an era where marketing and spectacle have dominated in contrast to the creative freedom and excesses that marked the New Hollywood era of the 1970s. It has also created a new "studio-system", built upon the ashes of the old. This time however, there are only six major studios: Sony (releasing films under the Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures and Screen Gems imprints), 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (formerly known as Buena Vista Pictures)—MGM still exists, but as a shadow of its former self owned by its creditors, and a major studio only by virtue of its history. But fundamentally, this is a studio-system In-Name-Only. The studios have become part of larger conglomerates instead of being independent companies like in the Golden Age. In addition, actors still operate on a "free agent" basis instead of being contractually tied to a studio.

There is significant overlap between the end of New Hollywood and the start of the Blockbuster Age. While New Hollywood is generally held to have ended in the early '80s after a string of expensive, high-profile flops, the beginning of the Blockbuster Age is generally pinned much earlier, in the year of 1975, which marked the arrival of one Steven Spielberg into mainstream Hollywood, with his classic shark film Jaws. Jaws was a revolution in cinema, marking a shift towards advertising, High Concept and disciplined production as ways of producing high-quality, commercially viable films. This was followed up two years later by the success of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas' Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), which revitalized the science fiction genre. Star Wars also showed Hollywood how merchandising, spinoffs into other media, and sequels could be used by the studios to return to profitability. Together, Jaws, Close Encounters and Star Wars invented the Summer Blockbuster as Hollywood's new paradigm for film-making.

Notable is the fact that these science-fiction thrillers were in genres that in the Old Hollywood days would be B-Movie (and Star Wars was called such by Roger Corman during a visit to the set on hearing George Lucas' ideas) and would have been made on low-budget or No Budget with limited technical resources. The above films more or less structured on similar concepts with a much higher production standard and better visual effects. This trend continued with the wild success of Superman in 1978 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, which showed that adaptations from media previously scoffed at by Hollywood, such as the Comic Book Super Hero and genre TV series, had potential to become big-time film genres and that the supposedly niche teenager, geek and nerd concepts could in fact appeal to a big part of the mainstream. The huge success of these films — and another '79 entry, The Muppet Movie — with children was also noted. For all its rebelliousness, New Hollywood fundamentally was built on the old genres of the Golden Age Hollywood (The Musical, the Screwball Comedy, The Western, Film Noir, the women's film, the Epic Movie) and either made Deconstruction of those genres, or updated or reconfigured it. What Lucas and Spielberg achieved was a Perspective Flip whereby the disreputable serials, science-fiction and adventure stories suddenly went from micro-budget B-Movie to more or less epic spectacular made on a scale and budget comparable to a Cecil B. DeMille production. This realignment of the audience kicked off the Blockbuster Age.

More importantly, both films were among the first to have "wide" releases (The Godfather was the first) instead of being released first in major cities. This eventually blurred the line between the different kinds of movie theaters existing until then.

The name "Blockbuster Age" also has another origin: Blockbuster Video. It is very difficult to overstate how great an impact the invention of the videocassette had on the film industry. It started a golden age for independent cinema, the full impact of which is described below. (It also started a golden age for the porn industry, but that's for a completely different article.) It also effectively killed second-run theaters, grindhouses, and porn theaters, as people could now watch movies in the comfort of their living rooms instead of having to go to sleazy, run-down theaters in that part of town — and in the case of porn theaters, not worry about getting caught at an establishment that was only one step above a brothel or a bathhouse. In addition, home video and cable television offered the studios additional revenue streams for their films after they'd left theaters, allowing them to continue making money off of older films — some of which could see a second chance at success when they came out on video or on a movie channel. Last but certainly not least, the videocassette seriously spooked Hollywood's traditional arch-enemy, the over-the-air television industry, which feared people recording shows just to fast-forward through all those lucrative commercials.

Of course, there's a catch to everything. Video camcorders also opened the doors to bootleggers, the pre-internet manifestation of digital pirates, who hawked their wares on the street and packed everything up in seconds the moment they saw a cop. In the early '80s, the film industry, having not yet learned what a potential gold mine it was, feared that the videocassette would destroy them; MPAA head Jack Valenti went so far as to compare the effect it would have on cinema to the effect of the Boston Strangler on a woman alone at home. (Any similarities to the hysterical reaction of the MPAA to file- sharing are completely coincidental.) Persuaded by calmer voices like Fred Rogers, the Supreme Court's decision in the "Betamax case" in 1983-84, which held that the makers of VCRs couldn't be held liable for copyright infringement committed by the devices' users, ultimately settled the matter, with the film industry getting in on the booming home video industry not long after.

When the LaserDisc appeared in the 80s and, more importantly, DVDs came around in The '90s, the studios were able to make even more money by putting out a Limited Special Collectors Ultimate Unrated Edition for each of their big films, packed with commentaries, deleted scenes and "director's cuts", "making of" featurettes, feelies, and other bonus features. The high-end Criterion Collection series emerged as taking the greatest care in preservation and supplementation of classic films.

Another factor in the return of Hollywood to profitability was the rise of the multiplex theater, something that began during the New Hollywood era

but truly took off in the Reagan years and after. The multiplex follows a fairly simple logic: if you have more screens, then you can run more showings of more movies, and can therefore make more money! Six-screen theaters were opening by the end of The '70s, and by The '90s, they had gone Up to 11 with 20-screen "megaplex" theaters and beyond. It is no coincidence that the rise of the multiplex occurred at the same time as the boom of malls and big-box stores; most multiplexes were part of such complexes, and like their retail cousins, were a driving force behind suburban sprawl through The '80s and the early years of The '90s, the decade when downtown theaters slowly got squeezed out of business, unable to compete with the massive profits made by this new breed of theater. Multiplexes caused the moviegoing experience to undergo a fundamental shift, and very few would argue that the shift was for the better — it went from large, well-appointed theaters with well-dressed, butler-like staff (something that is now seen only in the few remaining "legacy" movie palaces, like the Kodak and Chinese Theatres in Hollywood) to small, fairly spartan auditoriums with floors covered in dropped popcorn and spilled soda (both of which are ridiculously overpriced), staffed by young people making minimum wage and not particularly happy about it — movie theater jobs are often considered to be next to fast food and supermarket packing in terms of crappy, humiliating employment for teenagers.

None of this really mattered to the studios, who were mainly pleased with the fact that a movie could make back its budget, no matter how big it was, in a matter of days instead of weeks or even months. The goal of the studios had shifted from making movies with "legs" (i.e. movies that would keep marching on to large, stable box office numbers week in and week out) to movies that could rake in a colossal take on opening weekend. Who cares if bad word-of-mouth causes it to take a 50-60% drop for round 2? However, there was some push back from the opposing camp of viewers who tried to encourage more discerning tastes, such as when two movie critics from the Chicago newspapers, Roger Ebert of the Sun-Times and Gene Siskel of the Tribune, starting doing TV on the PBS show, Sneak Previews, on the side. As such, they later created the long running syndicated movie review TV show, Siskel & Ebert, that became a popular mainstay for decades spreading insightful film reviews from the wordy newspapers and magazines to a more easily digestible medium. While obviously it could not raise all the public's taste, the duo and their imitators at least could help make good artistic work pay off and any halfway ambitious movie studio still knows that credible praise is valuable stuff in marketing. After all, there's a reason that S & E's trademarked catch phrase, "Two Thumbs Up," was front and center for any advertisement for movies earning it.

There are many waves and stretches for the Blockbuster era. The first wave is 1982 which saw the release of a slew of summer blockbusters that are now regarded as classics, including: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Thing (1982), Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian (1982), Blade Runner, Poltergeist, TRON, and The Road Warrior with the caveat that Blade Runner, TRON and The Thing were flops. 1982 is often regarded as Hollywood's second "golden year" in terms of creativity and classic films, not unlike how 1939 is considered to be the highpoint of The Golden Age of Hollywood. Other memorable films released around this time include Ghostbusters (1984), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, and the first film to be released with the new PG-13 rating, Red Dawn (1984). However, unlike 1939, 1982 most certainly did not come at a high point for the studios financially. Hollywood spent much of The '80s reeling from the fallout of the New Hollywood era, and the combined share of the six surviving major studios from the Golden Age had fallen to just 64% by 1986 — the lowest it had been since the days of silent film. Two young studios — Orion and Tri-Star (the latter initially a joint venture of Columbia, CBS and HBO) — maintained about 6% market share each, Disney had about 10%, and smaller independents (the largest being New Line Cinema, "the house that Freddy built") would together make up 13% (more than any one studio besides Paramount).

It would be in The '90s — after a new round of corporate acquisitions (Columbia was purchased in 1982 by Coca-Cola, which sold it in 1987 to Cineplex Odeon which sold it to Sony in 1989; Fox became part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in 1985; Warners merged with Time Inc. and HBO to form Time Warner in 1990 [the Turner Broadcasting merger of 1996 brought New Line Cinema into the fold]; Also in 1990, Universal came under the control of Matsushita after it bought MCA, only to sell them in 1995 to Seagram, which was bought in 2000 by Vivendi, which sold it in 2004 to GE, merging it with NBC, it was finally absorbed into cable giant Comcast between 2011 and 2013; and Paramount was acquired by CBS-connected Viacom in 1995) — and the Turn of the Millennium that the rebirth would finally come. Orion would go bankrupt in 1992 (and eventually get eaten by MGM), Tri-Star would merge with Columbia (HBO and CBS having since sold out) in 1998, and New Line would merge with Warner Bros. in 2008 (after getting into a dick-swinging contest with Peter Jackson). By 2006, the six major movie conglomerates' share of the box office (counting Disney) had climbed back to 89.8% of the North American market. The two largest independent studios, Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company, would share 6.1%, MGM would have 1.8%, and the remaining indie studios shared the remaining 2.3%.

While Hollywood in the 80s is associated with family-friendly films like Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters (1984), Back to the Future and the like, adult audiences did not go away that quickly. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis became even more famous for appearing in ultra-violent action movies like Terminator, Rambo and Die Hard, whose colorful shoot-outs and thinly-veiled glorification of vigilantism greatly contrasted with the self-pitying demeanor of 1970s-era films.

The 1980s also brought two important things that would change Hollywood forever: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial made Product Placement ubiquitous in most films. By the end of the decade, Back to the Future Part II rolled out internationally over November- December 1989, an unprecedented move probably sparked by the popularity of home video (contrast this with the fact A New Hope had its European premiere in London in December 1977, seven months after it premiered stateside).

The faltering animation industry got a badly-needed kick in the pants at the end of the 1980s with the releases of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. The "Disney Renaissance" became one of the main factors of a new age for not only cartoons, but also for the film industry as a whole as studios began to take interest in animation. However, the success of 1995's Toy Story meant the end not only for the in-house animation divisions, replaced by up-starts like Dreamworks and Blue Sky, but also caused the decline of the live-action family film.

More importantly, it revived the fortunes of the Walt Disney Company which declined after its founder's demise and during The '80s saw a lot of defections and came close to becoming a theme park-based company with film-making as a side-business. By the mid-1990s, Disney became a major money-spinner with a huge slew of valuable properties; in the 2000s it acquired Pixar, Star Wars (via Lucasfilm) and Marvel Comics, becoming far and away the biggest studio in Hollywood.

The second half of the 2010s has seen a trend for greater consolidation with some controversial merger proposals: The first being Time Warner's acquisition of AT&T, which has been subject to congressional scrutiny. Meanwhile, Disney's takeover of Fox has given way to concerns about a potential near-monopoly of the industry, as the two largest media conglomerates would amalgamate, even if they will keep their separate operations.