Written by: Lee Fenton & Kevin Moyer

So.

The modern day blockbuster is dying. Again.

The public's freaking out; influencers are worried about their bread-and-butter and film executives have little to worry about, except the mortgage on their vacation home in the Riviera, and how much their yacht will fetch at open auction.

Also, a near industry-wide strike is happening.

Yikes, this has the potential to be a perfect storm of mitigating factors to hamper ticket sales for those tent-pole productions that usually fill seats. And when I say fill seats, I mean those mega-pictures did that job more adequately than Kevin Smith's ass (in his jersey-wearing-days). Blockbusters are no longer enjoying the bombastic opening-weekends that they once did, instead we are seeing a rise of smaller budget movies gaining popularity - in a way that would have been hard to predict a few years ago. The only reason studios loved to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into those massive films, was the insurance of two to three times return on said investment. Now without a guaranteed return exec’s are scrambling to cancel properties (Warner Bros. and the Bat-woman fiasco); change planned releases, and restructure the whole thing from the top down.

Well, how is this happening to Hollywood, and more importantly, why?

Because this is the natural order of things. Show business is cyclical – what’s happened before will most likely occur again. For instance take the 'Easy Rider' (1969) situation of the late 60s and early 70s, into account and you will see what I mean.

Easy Rider was an experimental film starring Jack Nicholson, in his first breakout role, directed by Dennis Hopper and made on a budget of $400,000. The movie had a meandering plot, rather thin and did not dwell on drama arising out of conflict but instead on setting and ambience. The way the scenes were shot and acted was very improvisational in comparison to other films of the time, and most of the dialogue was ad-libbed or brainstormed shortly before.

The movie was crafted with this method of guerrilla filmmaking, which only lent to its notoriety. Permits weren't acquired, numerous scenes were shot from the back of motorcycles while riding on the open highway with little to no pre-planning, and seldom any use of safety precautions. It was film-making unstructured, and avant-garde - in it's style and execution. Easy Rider is raw Americana at its finest – rebellious and chaotic like the open road is. And the film makes this statement with complete abandon not caring for the critics, or audience's opinion.

Before this - sweeping epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Ben-Hur (1959), the latter starring the iconic Charlton Heston - were the norm. After a warm reception to 'Easy Rider' the public moved onto similar smaller narrative driven films; featuring life in all its unpolished and gritty glory. Whether it was realism or surrealism that these films strove for, most of them were smaller movies with a scaled down cast and a scaled down production. What some might refer to as: indie-movies or art-house films. In the last few decades these more intimate, character driven films are seen at festivals (if seen at all) and it is only when they gain good reputation by word of mouth, maybe some industry buzz - that they ascend the ranks to be on the big screen at your local theatre – and the likely hood that they end up in a chain like Cineplex, is extremely low.

But with movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once becoming a global phenomenon and Oppenheimer ($720 m box office) doing much better than some of Christopher Nolan's higher budget flicks, who knows maybe it's the return of the (sorta) micro-budget movie.

And the death of the blockbuster.

PS: Why, sort of? Well, $100 million still isn't cheap for a movie but in comparison to Nolan's 2010 film Inception – it's quite a bit cheaper. Inception cost $160 million to make, a decent amount less in cost. Inception cleared $837 million at the box office being Nolan’s third highest grossing film, behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Oppenheimer is now his fourth highest gross at the box office.

PPS: I really love Kevin Smith’s movies with all my heart, it was just a playful jab.

Please don’t @ me.

Sources:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/easy-rider-was-filmed-guerrilla-style-at-1969-mardi-gras-1190587/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/10-wild-stories-behind-scenes-easy-rider-dennis-hopper-peter-fonda/ exerpt: Much of Easy Rider is improvised, with the cast and crew travelling around in a mobile home with two five-ton trucks carrying film equipment, often searching for any location that looked interesting to film in.