The death of cinema

I love films, and that is the only reason it is worth saying this plainly. The biggest films in the world have stopped being any good. Look at what sits at the top of the box office now and it is sequels and superhero films nearly all the way down, enormous productions that cost a fortune and are about almost nothing.

Take Marvel. I tried to count them and could hardly believe the total. There are now more than thirty-five feature films in the one connected series, all released since 2008, and you are meant to watch them roughly in order, like set homework. Four of those are the giant team-up films with the entire cast crammed in together. On top of that, Iron Man got three films of his own, Captain America got four, and Thor got four. Then there are three more about a band of space outlaws, a couple about a sorcerer, a few about a man who can shrink, and the various Spider-Man films sitting on top of all of it. No other kind of story is allowed to run to thirty-five instalments and still turn up in cinemas every single year. We would find it ridiculous anywhere else.

If you want to date the moment the ground shifted, I would point at 2009 and a film about blue aliens on a distant moon. Avatar did not invent the blockbuster and it did not invent the sequel, but it was the film that proved a story could be almost pure spectacle and still become the highest-earning film ever made. James Cameron built a new camera system to shoot it, sold it on the effects and the 3D, and it worked so completely that it stayed the biggest film in history for a decade. Then he made a second one that came close to matching it, and a third arrived at the end of last year and passed a billion dollars in a matter of weeks. Three films across fifteen years, billions of dollars, and I genuinely could not name you a single character in any of them. That is the model everyone else set out to copy.

The real problem is what the machine rewards. Once a studio knows a comic-book crossover will open to a billion dollars regardless of what is actually in it, the script stops mattering. The budget goes on the effects and the fight scenes, the plot exists mainly to set up the next film, and the emotional moments are the same handful recycled every time. Meanwhile the mid-budget film for grown-ups, the sort that used to fill a wet Sunday afternoon, has been pushed out of cinemas almost completely, because there is no room for it beside something that costs three hundred million dollars and has to earn a billion back just to break even.

I will give the machine one thing. Some of these films are properly well made, and one or two are genuinely funny and have real feeling in them. But those are the exceptions, and they do not change what is happening at the top of the industry. For every good one there are several that exist only because the last one made money, and the sheer number of them leaves no space for anything smaller.

This is a guessing game, so I will point out the obvious. The machine I have spent this whole article complaining about has already supplied KINO with puzzles. The revived space franchise at #0015 broke box-office records the week it came out, and the Marvel films have turned up here more than once, at #0028 and #0030. I still use them, because plenty of people have seen them, and that is really the whole problem. Everyone has seen them. We have all watched the same small handful of enormous films over and over, while the smaller ones we might have loved never reached a screen near us. I do not think that is a fair trade, and I do not think the films at the top are anywhere near as good as the money underneath them makes them look.