You’ll never go in the water again!  That was the tagline of the monumental blockbuster film Jaws (1975) when it first premiered, and was there ever a tagline that hit it’s mark exactly as it did.  Hollywood was no stranger to creature features.  The whole B-Movie Sci-Fi craze of the 1950’s and 60’s was littered with movies about mankind battling the forces of nature as they run amuck.  But, Jaws was very different from those classics of the past.  It was grounded and devoid of campy cheapness.  It was a film that managed to transcend the the creature feature genre and grab a hold of it’s audience in a way that the industry likely did not expect.  It was a movie that made it’s premise feel real, and for a time, it did in fact make people afraid to go into the water.  Jaws was adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Benchley, who had a part in adapting his own book into the screenplay alongside screenwriter Carl Gottlieb.  While the story had some of the same tropes as many other creature feature stories, Benchley’s novel rooted it’s premise in a far more grounded story about the people charged with saving their town from a rabid great white shark.  It’s a simple story, but enriched with not just the man vs. nature aspect but also with the friction that occurs between the people involved as they embark on their quest.  It’s just as much a character study as it is a story about hunting a shark.  While the movie had a lot of potential to be a fun action adventure, it would achieve a much greater status in the annals of movie history by falling into the right hands at the right time.  Jaws status as a classic is inexorably tied to the personal growth of the filmmaker who made it; Steven Spielberg.  Jaws was the movie that propelled him to the next level as a filmmaker and he wouldn’t be the icon that he is today 50 years later had it not been for the trials the he was put through in the making of this movie.

Steven Spielberg was an ambitious go-getter right from the start of his career in Hollywood.  Legend has it he snuck off of the famous Universal Studios tour when he was a teenager and wandered around on his own.  He was spared from disciplinary action after a film librarian at the studio was impressed by his ambition and he was granted a three day pass to revisit.  That three day pass expanded into a full time gig as Spielberg became a regular assistant on the studio lot.  He used his odd jobs to help finance a short film called Amblin‘ (1968), which got him noticed by a Universal executive named Sid Sheinberg, who signed the then 20 year old filmmaker to a 7 year contract.  Spielberg would direct several episodes of TV series made on the Universal lot, and he won high marks for his professionalism and ability to run productions on time and on budget.  Spielberg eventually got his chance to direct feature films for Universal, which included the critically acclaimed films Duel (1971) and The Sugarland Express (1974).  But while these movies were well regarded, Spielberg hadn’t had that big break out hit that would turn him into a household name and give him the creative freedom to do what he wanted as a filmmaker.  Thankfully, he still had the favor of Sheinberg, who by 1971 had elevated to the position of President at Universal Studios.  And it was not long after that the novel Jaws was optioned by the studio.  Based on Spielberg’s success with the movie Duel, which featured a story about a man being hunted by giant freight truck, Sheinberg believed that Steven had what it took to make this story about a killer shark work on the big screen.  Spielberg was more than happy to take up the challenge, but given what happened over the next couple years, Spielberg may have had some second thoughts about the assignment.

The making of Jaws was to put it lightly a bit of a “shit show.”  As skilled as Spielberg was up to this point, he had yet to make a movie as complicated as this one.  For one thing, half of the film was going to be set out in open water.  While you could do some of that on a studio controlled flood tank, of which Universal actually has one of the largest in the world, Spielberg believed that you needed the authenticity of being stranded out in the middle of open sea to really convey the terror of the shark’s presence.  So, the production set up shop in Martha’s Vineyard, with the small island community playing the part of the fictional Amity Island from the novel.  The sleepy, tightly knit community provided a good setting for the production of this movie, but it also was a crucial lifeline for the film once it moved into it’s oceanic phase.  In order to make it look like they were out in open water, they had to film several miles out in order to make the island disappear over the horizon.  But Martha’s Vineyard also had the benefit of having shallow waters all around it in a twelve mile radius, with the bottom being only 30 feet below the surface, making salvaging much easier if something went wrong.  And that it did.  Not only were they confined to filming on boats for most of the film shoot, but they were also dealing with three mechanical sharks that would be playing the monster.  Two of the sharks were open on opposite sides in order to create greater mechanical movement depending on the shot and the angle they were capturing it from, while the third was fully skinned and meant to bob up and down in the water, mainly for the shots showing it swimming.  But these sharks would prove to be a nightmare to maintain.  Filming out in the open sea meant that the salt water would constantly wreck havoc on the mechanical instruments puppeteering the sharks, and the sharks would constantly experience multiple issues that delayed shooting for extensive lengths of time.  Salvaging the sharks from the sea floor was also a common occurrence.  The shark problems being a constant nuisance throughout the film shoot caused Spielberg to jokingly name the sharks Bruce, which was the name of his lawyer.

Given all the production woes, Spielberg was constantly worried that he might have the project taken away from him.  He had gone from delivering on time and on budget to massively going over schedule by weeks.  But, it was through these trials that Spielberg really found himself as a filmmaker, developing skills that would carry him through the rest of his career.  While the sharks were giving him trouble, Spielberg used this opportunity to become a problem solver.  He would fill the down time between shooting with the sharks by working on shots that would build the atmosphere of the movie.  His team devised a scene that was not in the original script where Richard Dreyfuss’ character Hopper conducts an underwater investigation of a boat that was potentially attacked by the shark.  The scene is famous for a jump scare as a severed head pops out of one of the holes in the haul of the boat.  So while the scene doesn’t show the shark itself, you still get a sense of the terrifying power it holds after seeing what ends up to it’s victims.  And through all of this, Spielberg learned that it actually worked to the movie’s benefit to show as little of the shark as possible, which helped to make the shots later in the film when he does appear have a lot more impact.  They would only be able to get a handful of shots of the sharks actually working, but they would not be wasted, and thanks to the expertly handled building of dread throughout the film, Spielberg achieved his goal in making the shark absolutely terrifying.  It’s all a trick of signaling the presence of the shark without actually seeing him.  There are several underwater shots that signify the shark’s point of view as we see him swim up towards his victims who are bobbing around on the surface.  Then the movie cuts to the actors as they react to the shark capturing them in it’s razor sharp bite.   Couple this with John Williams’ iconic pulse-pounding musical score that signals the dreaded presence of the shark, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for making us forget that this is just some mechanical shark.  In the end he becomes almost as terrifying as the real thing, and we only ever get 4 total minutes of screen time with him.

But it’s not just the shark that makes Jaws an iconic movie.  Steven Spielberg also lucked out in getting the right actors for the part.  An interesting side note about the director’s history with the source novel is that when Spielberg first read it, he found himself rooting for the shark because he found the human characters so unlikable.  One of the great things about this movie adaptation is that Spielberg managed to make the human characters relatable and worth following to the end of the story.  And it mattered to have the right actors in the rolls too.  Roy Scheider was already a well respected up to this point in his career, having already garnered accolades for his work in the Oscar-winning The French Connection (1971).  He would provide the perfect everyman element to the character of Sheriff Brody.  Rising star Richard Dreyfuss would also bring a wonderful kinetic energy to the film as the cocky, self-made shark expert Hooper.  The working experience between Spielberg and Dreyfuss must’ve really been fruitful as Spielberg would cast him as the lead in his next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  But perhaps the most memorable character to come out of the film was the mysterious Captain Quint, played by an absolutely magnetic Robert Shaw.  Quint enters the film with one of the most memorable introductions in movie history, scrapping his nails across a chalk board in order to get the townsfolk’s attention at a community meeting, and with his salty Irish brogue he delivers a character that’s as tough and mean as the shark he hunts.  With echoes of Moby Dick’s Ahab, Quint becomes just as much of a wild card in the story as the shark, and his dynamic in contrast with the two more pragmatic heroes helps to give the movie personalities that are indeed capable of being interesting, independent of the shark.  One of the greatest additions to the film’s story is the scene where the three men have a bonding moment in between shark attacks and share their own stories to each other.  Here, Quint tells the other two about his time on the ill-fated U.S.S Indianapolis; a ship famous for sinking in shark infested waters after delivering the atomic bomb to the navy posted in the Pacific.  The monologue Quint delivers, which was written by an uncredited John Milius, is chillingly told by Robert Shaw, creating one of the movie’s most iconic moments.  Through that and many more moments like it, Spielberg managed to make this more than just a creature feature, but a truly human story about survival in the face of overwhelming terror.

In the end, the movie went overschedule by a staggering 100 days.  Spielberg was worried that this would be the movie to end him, just as he was finally starting to get a foothold as a filmmaker.  No studio would ever hire a director who ended up going three times over schedule like that.  While he still had the favor of Sid Sheinberg at Universal, that might’ve ended as well if the movie failed to recoup it’s costs, which also went massively over budget.  This was going to be the final film on his contract anyways, and there would be no need to renew if they couldn’t trust him anymore.  So, with a lot weighing on his shoulders, Spielberg would assemble his film together in the editing room, hoping that all that hard work translated into a coherent film.  The movie was orignally slated for a Holiday 1974 release, but because of the delays that the film shoot suffered, Universal had to push the release to Summer of 1975.  This was seen as a bad omen for the movie.  Back in those days, summer was seen as a dumping ground for the movie studios as films that were always considered valuable were released towards the end of the year, hoping to garner awards attention.  Summer movies were the throwaway genre flicks that the studios didn’t see much value in since they never grossed as much as the prestige films.  But, things would be different for Jaws.  The delay almost became a blessing in disguise because it not only gave Spielberg the right amount of time to assemble a stronger movie out of his edit, but by the time the film was released, it would be playing in a less crowded field at the box office with no relative competition.  The film opened on June 20, 1975 in one of the widest releases seen up to that point.  Initially wide releases were reserved for maximum saturation for films that studios had no faith behind, but for Jaws, a movie that received instant critical acclaim and wide audience interest, it would be a foundational shake-up for the industry as a whole.  Jaws became a monumental success at the box office, shattering every record in the books, including becoming the first film ever to cross the $200 million mark in it’s original release.  Jaws not only was a success story, it also fundamentally changed Hollywood forever.

If there was anything that has come to define Jaws in the annals of movie history, it’s that it started what would later become known as the era of the Blockbuster.  While Jaws wasn’t the movie that helped to coin the term blockbuster, as previous films like The Sound of Music (1965) and The Exorcist (1973) also were given the label, it was nevertheless seen as the movie that would usher in a new era where movies like it would be the driving force in the commerce of Hollywood.  After the fall of the old studio system and the rise of New Hollywood, the driving force in Hollywood through much of the 60’s and 70’s was auteur driven films from the newest crop of maverick filmmakers like William Friedkin, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese.  Spielberg came up through this generation, but he was also set apart from it given his studio connections.  With the success of Jaws, the studios began to fall out of favor with the auteur driven cinema of New Hollywood, which was already starting to see declining returns due to out of control productions like Sorcerer (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Heaven’s Gate (1980).  Now they wanted to have the next Jaws.  There were plenty of cheap copycat movies that tried to capitalize on Jaws success, like Orca (1977) and Piranha (1978), but it wasn’t another Jaws clone that would continue the Blockbuster era into the next decade.  Spielberg’s friend and colleague George Lucas would follow Jaws’ example by releasing his new space opera adventure film Star Wars (1977) in the summer season, and in the end, he too would see a phenomenal success during it’s release, even surpassing the record setting grosses of Jaws.  In the years that followed, the Summer season was no longer viewed as Hollywood’s dumping ground, but would instead be where Hollywood would premiere their biggest tentpoles, capitalizing on audiences off all ages that were out of school and looking to cool off from the summer heat.  And both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would continue to feed the studios’ appetite for new blockbusters, delivering more in the coming decades with big franchise like Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park.  But all of this change was the result of the turning point that Jaws marked with it’s massive success in the face of all the factors that worked against it.

Steven Spielberg may have been the man who sparked the beginning of a new era in Hollywood, where the Blockbuster would come to dominate, but Jaws was also the movie that forged him into the kind of filmmaker that would continue to survive and grow in the changing Hollywood landscape as well.  The challenging and mostly frustrating production of the movie would be his trial by fire as a filmmaker, and out of it he developed problem solving skills that have made him the most consistent and reliable filmmaker in the business.  Spielberg became the great instinctual storyteller that he is today thanks to the creativity he had to rely upon in order to make Jaws come together.  And even after 50 years, Jaws still is the thrill ride that brings you to the edge of your seat and hasn’t lost any of it’s, shall we say, “bite” over the years.  It’s gone on to have this legendary aura around it, becoming one of the most oft-quoted movies in Hollywood history, especially with Roy Scheider’s now iconic ad-libbed line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  You can still see regular screenings of this film in cinemas all over the world, including a recent one at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April where it played with a pristine 35mm print at the Egyptian.  It also has managed to become a mainstay at the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, where the Studio Tour has a brief encounter with Bruce the Shark as a part of it’s showcase.  But that’s not the only lasting legacy of Jaws at Universal.  While Spielberg has gone on to make movies at every single studio in Hollywood, he still considers Universal his home base, and when he set up his own production company Amblin Entertainment, he chose to set it up on the Universal lot, next to the bungalows that he once worked out of as a page boy and assistant all those years ago.  You can still see Amblin’s offices just off the main route of the Studio Tour to this day.  Jaws made the Spielberg that we know today, and though it may have been a nightmare at the time, there’s no doubt that Spielberg is proud of what he accomplished with the film.  Those grueling 150 days of shooting set the stage for the next 50 years of Spielberg’s life and he’s still not done yet.  We may have been afraid to go back into the water that fateful summer, but we’ve always returned back to this movie again and again, and that will continue for the next 50 years as well.

It is really quite interesting looking at a movie like Brokeback Mountain (2005) in the context of the 20 years since it’s release in theaters.  For a lot of things, it was a pivotal film for many different things.  It solidified director Ang Lee as one of the industry’s greatest filmmakers, earning him his first Oscar for directing, a landmark as the first Asian filmmaker to win that prestigious honor.  It was also a crucial film in the budding acting careers of Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams.  It was also a major touchstone in the all too brief body of work for actor Heath Ledger who sadly would be lost to us in a short couple of years after his appearance in this film.  But, above all else, Brokeback Mountain stood as a monumental step forward for queer themed movies in Hollywood.  In the 20 years since this movie came out, there have been many social progressions in queer representation in cinema, with the presence of queer characters and storylines no longer being niche, but rather a natural part of the fabric of the culture.  But, 20 years ago, things were quite different, and Brokeback Mountain stood out much more as a provocative statement in it’s time.  Over the years, we’ve seen attitudes change, and it puts Brokeback into a different frame now in retrospect.  Does it still resonate with a culture that has seen so much change in 20 years, or is it becoming more of a relic of it’s time.  There are many ways to dissect Brokeback Mountain as a work of cinema, but it’s place in queer cinema is where it has stood out the most.  It certainly wasn’t the first movie centered on queer themes to be made, nor even the first mainstream film to center on queer characters.  But it perhaps was the most profound statement made in it’s time about how Hollywood as a whole wanted to deal with queer rights in society which was to be fully supportive of it.  And that was crucial as the fight for queer rights in America were reaching a breaking point.

One of the  most provocative things about Brokeback Mountain was that it was telling an overtly queer story in a genre that typically was associated with hyper masculinity; the Western.  The movie was adapted from a short story written by American author Annie Proulx.  It covers the story of two cowboys named Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist who are hired to herd sheep in a grazing range near the titular Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.  Out in the middle of nowhere with only each other for company the two form an attachment which eventually turns into sexual desire.  After the weeks long assignment ends, the two men go their separate ways.  They both find new lives and jobs, get married and have children.  But, there’s always that nagging draw in the back of their minds about the time they spent alone at Brokeback Mountain.  They eventually reunite, and sneak away on camping trips which cover for their romantic flings.  Over time, this secretive arrangement they’ve made for themselves takes it’s toll on their relationship as well as on their marriages.  They know that if their secret gets out, it’s more than just public shame for them; in certain parts of the country it also means death.  For the sake of their sanity and what’s left of their relationships with their broken families, they part ways for good.  Years later, Ennis learns that Jack did in fact run afoul of the wrong kinds of people who looked down on their love, and it leaves an empty place in his heart now with no one else to share his secret love with.  Annie Proulx wrote her story as a reflection of what she observed in rural North America.  She would spot lonely men in country bars who often appear to be looking at the other men, but had to put on a rugged exterior in order to throw off suspicion.  She didn’t know for sure what these men were hiding, but it gave her the inspiration for writing about cowboys who had to hide their secret homosexual desires behind the aesthetic of a rugged outdoorsman, as she stated herself in an interview, “I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”

Her short story was acclaimed when it was first published and immediately garnered the attention of screenwriter Diana Ossana.  Ossana sought Annie Proulx’s approval to adapt the story into a feature script, which Proulx agreed to despite reservations about whether it could be done.  While Ossana was an accomplished writer in her own right, she also had a writing partner on this screenplay that would be crucial for the adaptation; acclaimed writer Larry McMurtry.  McMurtry was very much the godfather of modern Westerns with an impressive body of work that included dozens of novels and short stories.  He’s perhaps best know for his Lonesome Dove series, which was turned into an acclaimed TV mini-series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.  Movies that were based on his novels have also become classics, including neo-Westerns like Hud (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1971).  McMurtry and Ossana had collaborated on a few novels before and they had a great rapport together.  Larry loved the story that Ossana brought to him with Brokeback Mountain, and he had the Western bona fides to give it that genuine rugged American cowboy flavor.  They completed their screenplay almost a year after the original publication of the story in 1998, but the film would languish in development for a couple years.  Hollywood was still hesitant to invest in a provocative and unapologetic story about gay love, especially as the conservative Bush administration was coming into power.  New Queer Cinema icon Gus Van Sant expressed interest in the script for a while, with the intent of casting Matt Damon and Joaquin Phoenix in the roles of Ennis and Jack.  That eventually fell through as Gus became more intent on filming his Harvey Milk biopic project instead.  Eventually, producer James Schamus at Focus Features decided to take a chance on the film, and he handed it over to his long time collaborator Ang Lee.  Lee was an interesting choice to tackle this project, as he was very versatile filmmaker.  In between this and his Oscar nominated martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lee was just coming off his failed attempt at a Marvel super hero movie, Hulk (2002), proving that he was open to making any kind of movie regardless of genre.  It wasn’t Lee’s first attempt at a queer themed storyline, which was 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, but it would be his first attempt at a Western.  Still, Brokeback Mountain had extraordinary luck in not only having a team of prestige writers and filmmakers in their corner, but with Focus Features involved they were getting the backing of a major studio as well.

Brokeback Mountain was released at a very crucial time in American society.  We were entering a hotly contested debate over the matrimonial rights for gay and lesbian couples in the United States.  In 2004, Massachusetts became the first US state to recognize same-sex marriage as a legal right for it’s citizens.  This set off a firestorm from the religious right, saying that it was an affront to “traditional marriage,” and they began to push back on this groundbreaking advancement in gay rights.  Unfortunately for many in the queer community, the anti-gay right wing had the political muscle to get push back.  Republican president George W. Bush and his administration used this as a wedge issue in their re-election campaign and were pushing for more bans on same-sex marriage across the country.  Sadly, the majority of states did ratify these bans into law, including deep blue California with their controversial Proposition 8.  There was even a move to write a ban of same-sex marriage into the Constitution with a “traditional marriage amendment.”  This was the flashpoint that Brokeback Mountain was brought into; a moment where the debate over same-sex marriage was the primary focus of the American “culture wars.”  In a way, this was both a blessing and a curse for the movie.  One, it was a prestige film that was going to garner more attention because the subject it was tackling was very much a focal point of the cultural conversation at the time.  But, it was also going to become the poster child for this same era of conflict, and become the target of the same backlash that the queer community was facing during this time.  The movie would be the talk of the town, but also the focal point of a debate that it may not have been built for.  Regardless, the movie premiered to critical acclaim when it first released in the Fall of 2005, and it was for the longest time seen as the clear front runner in the Oscar race for that year.  It’s eventual loss to Crash (2005) of course would set off another firestorm of it’s own.

The Oscar controversy aside, Brokeback Mountain would have a more lasting effect on the industry that did lead to profound change not just in Hollywood, but in the culture as a whole.  With a solid box office and substantial collection of awards to it’s credit, Hollywood was finally seeing that queer themed films were actually quite valuable and worth investing in.  This was helpful for Gus Van Sant’s previously mentioned Milk (2008), which became an Awards season success just a few short years later.  But it wasn’t just with prestige films that we were seeing this change happen.  The stigma of queer representation in movies became less and less of an obstacle and more of a feature of the industry.  Gay characters were popping up more and more on the silver screen and on television, and not just as a stereotype there to be made fun of.  The same evolution was also happening across the country, with a backlash starting to grow against the backlash to queer rights.  The incoming Obama administration took a much different approach towards the LGBTQ population.  While initially playing things down the middle, then Vice President Joe Biden stirred the conversation again by rightly pointing out how absurd these same-sex marriage bans were.  Eventually the administration embraced the idea of decriminalizing same-sex marriage, and California’s Prop 8 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, thereby nullifying all bans on the books and making it legal in all 50 states.  How much Brokeback Mountain had a hand in this change is uncertain, but the movie certainly put focus on the conversation that was desperately needed, and perhaps helped to strengthen the resolve of Hollywood to no longer ignore this very vital community in the culture at large.

It is a much different world now than it was back when Brokeback Mountain was first released into theaters.  Attitudes towards same-sex relationships have certainly changed.  The stigma around same-sex marriage is almost completely gone, with now a vast majority of Americans having a positive opinion about it, with only the most rabid religious fundamentalists having any issue with it today.  Even still, there is still a lot of people out there trying to silence and erase queer voices in media.  The Trump administration in particular has courted many people intent on rolling back queer rights into his government, while also hypocritically proclaiming himself to be an ally for the queer community.  The times have changed, but a movie like Brokeback Mountain faces a challenge in trying to remain a relevant factor in this conversation.  Does it hold up in these changing times.  One thing that has negatively effected it’s place in queer cinema is surprisingly the way it deals with the relationship between it’s two characters.  One of the ways that Hollywood has dealt with garnering sympathy for the rights of queer people in society is to turn their stories into tragedies.  It does play into the underdog aspect of wringing sympathy from the viewer towards the plight of this persecuted community, but it does also send the wrong message to people who are still struggling with their identity.  This is what a lot of people today identify as the “kill you gays” trope, where a gay character is often doomed in the narrative as motivation for the plot.  Queer people don’t deny that the hardships of their struggle for rights need to be documented, but they also believe that these stories should also be balanced with stories of affirmation and triumph as well.  The fact that Brokeback Mountain ends on such a downer may be crucial for it’s own story, but what kind of message does it send to a young viewer still struggling to come out to see that queer relationships often end in heartbreak or tragedy.  It’s perhaps why much more queer themed movies today try to show more triumphant stories about love and adversity than the tragedies that often flavored their presence on the big screen before.  It also helps that many more of these movies are coming from a more insider perspective, made by queer filmmakers for the purpose of being inspirational.  Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurty and Ang Lee are all well-meaning in telling this story, but they are also coming at it from an outsider perspective, which comes across as being more about pity than anything else.  It’s a good thing that we are moving beyond movies like Brokeback Mountain and presenting queer characters and storylines that don’t have to be marked by tragedy in order to be successful.

It works much better to look at Brokeback Mountain on it’s own merits as a story about love blossoming in the unlikeliest of places.  Ang Lee’s involvement serves well here, because he is never once trying to thrust the message of the movie to the forefront.  He presents the film as an unexepected love story framed within the aesthetic of the American West, and how that contrast plays out.  There’s no cinematic flourish to the love-making scenes in the movie; they play out in a very realistic way, with both men not really knowing exactly what to do in the situation.  There’s a naturalistic flow to Ang Lee’s direction, with him playing the scenes out as honest to life as possible.  It’s not a titilating movie or a preachy one either.  He’s concerned first and foremost with the lives of these characters, and how the forces of society are weighing down on them.  It helps that his actors approached the material with the same kind seriousness.  The film’s most standout performance, however, belongs to Heath Ledger.  Ledger, who had been a rising star in Hollywood for some time, was finally given the oppurtnity to play a role with great emotional depth, allowing us all to see what he really was capable of as an actor.  And we saw the making of a superstar with this performance.  Ledger’s performance as Ennis del Mar is a total transformation, showing emotional depth and command over a character that is truly impressive.  You also don’t even feel like he’s acting, as he just embodies this character wholly.  It’s through his performance that we especially feel the schism between the way a man like him presents himself publicly, with a stoic cowboy exterior, and how he feels internally with his desire to embrace the man he loves.  Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is a bit showier and doesn’t quite stand up as well as Ledger’s, but the chemistry between the actors still works.  The real surprise though is Michelle Williams as Ennis’ lovelorn wife Alma.  The actress, who up to that time was most well known for the primetime soap Dawson’s Creek,  was finally given the chance to act in a film where she could really show her dramatic chops, and she has since become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated and awarded actresses.  Sadly, Heath Ledger was unable to see the legacy of his performance play out after his untimely death in 2008.  But there was one positive outcome of his work in this movie that still literally lives on to this day.  Both Ledger and Williams fell in love during the making of this movie, and they had a daughter together named Matilda who was born in 2005, right when the movie was hitting theaters.  Now 19 years old, Matilda is carrying on the torch of her late father and keeping his memory alive.

It’s undeniable that Brokeback Mountain is a pivotal film in the history of queer cinema, but it’s also a good thing that Hollywood has also moved past it.  As queer themes have become more mainstream in movies not just on the outskirts of Hollywood, but by the actual studio system itself, the more provocative films of the past now look like time capsules of a different time period, when things were not so great.  But, that also doesn’t mean that these films should be forgotten either.  We need to still see where we once were to know how far we have come.  Brokeback Mountain was made to make a statement at a crucial time when it almost looked like we were about to enshrine discriminations against same-sex relationships into the Constitution itself.  With gay marriage now not just the law of the land, but also embraced by the vast majority of Americans, the statement made by movies like Brokeback now seem quaint and irrelevant.  But, complacency often leads us to forgetting the importance of our hard fought for rights and it can lead to an erosion of those rights over time if we are not careful.  That’s why movies like Brokeback Mountain are still important, because it reminds us of the struggle and what it took to get where we are as a community.  When it first came out, Brokeback Mountain was undeniably provocative and stirred a conversation worth having.  As a young twentysomething closeted gay man when this movie first came out, I too struggled with how to respond to it.  I shamefully tried to dismiss it too, running away from my own feelings because the movie was very much showing me the struggle that came with being queer in America.  But over time, I saw why the struggle was necessary and I was able to accept who I am without fear, and in turn, I accept the movie much more now as a cinematic milestone.  I acknowledge that I am a better man today, and while I still have some reservations about the movie (particularly with it’s tragic gay tropes), I do now wish to celebrate it for what it did for queer representation in cinema.  Back then, some of us wished we could quit Brokeback Mountain, but now with the world once again challenging our rights in the queer community, we need this movie and the many more films of the Queer Cinema movement to inspire us to fight for a better future again.

Hollywood, like the rest of society, is prone to major moments of upheaval whenever major breakthroughs are made in technology.  Just look at the history of cinema and how it responded to new things like synchronized sound, television, and the internet over the last century.  Some corners of the film industry manage to find their footing by embracing new technology, but there are others who are not so lucky.  The advent of sound put a lot of actors out of work because they didn’t have the right voice for cinema and their style of performance that was geared towards acting through silence was seen as old fashioned.  Computer Animation in the digital age also shook up the world of visual effects, where craftsmen and women who developed elaborate practical effects that were shot live on set were suddenly replaced with blue screens that would later be filled in with CGI by technicians working at a computer stand months later.  Not to say that these new technologies were all a bad thing.  New tools allowed cinema to grow and evolve, which was in the long run a positive for the industry.  But, disruptions aren’t accomplished without a cost to the old ways of doing things, which in of themselves were also instrumental to helping to build the artform.  Sound helped the movies talk, but we also lost the bold experimental storytelling of the silent era movies.  Computer animation brought some amazing visuals to the big screen that couldn’t have been done with just practical effects, but it also has led to a lot more movies feeling artificial compared to the tactile physical effects that were hand crafted.  And the biggest cost of all, big disruptions also put a lot of people out of work; many of whom who were specialized in some fields that sadly phased out.  It’s unfortunate, but that’s the cycle that Hollywood has gone through in it’s entire history.  And there are more disruptions to come in the future.

The one that is especially worrying the industry right now is the beginnings of what is being called an AI Revolution.  Many start-up companies, and also ones with ties to already established tech giants like Google and Meta, are making significant advancements in the development of Artificial Intelligence.  This is far more than the Siri and Alexa assistants on our smart home devices.  The newer AI programs are starting to perform more complex functions including autogenerating text responses to any prompt you give it.  ChatGPT has become a widely used app that people now use for content creation, which can be anything from a text response to a full length speech.  These text prompts are now finding their way into many different written documentation, including term papers, website pages, and most worrying to professionals in the film industry, screenplays.  At the moment, the technology isn’t perfect and some of the robotic sounding phrasing of ChatGPT’s text prompts betrays it’s artificiality.  But, like most artificial intelligence, it learns as it develops, and the imperfections are getting harder to detect.  The presence of an AI that can produce long form amounts of text is one thing, but what is especially worrying is the advancements made in visual AI technology.  Now a text prompt can generate a visual image and more recently, we’ve also seen it create moving images.  There’s talk that this will be the technology that will ultimately destroy Hollywood and the film industry as we know it, and the sad reality is that there is a possibility that it could, depending on how it is used.  It should be noted that AI isn’t advanced enough yet to replace the actual art of physically making a movie, but it’s also a technology that’s still in it’s infancy and growing up very fast.

For those wondering why Hollywood was brought to a standstill 2 years ago with the dual strikes of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, this was a big reason why.  The guilds of Hollywood were seeing what Silicon Valley was doing with their big push into AI, and they wanted to establish some guardrails before it put a lot of current and future careers in jeopardy.  Thankfully, the studios and the guilds agreed to new standards when it came to due compensation if someone’s likeness or written work was used in any AI programming, but development into AI technology within the industry was still allowed to continue.  It’s not just the main guilds that are getting affected by this new tech, but every other below the line profession as well.  If you could just make a movie in a computer that looks about as real as anything that was shot on a set, well that risks the jobs of camera operators, lighting technicians, set builders, make-up and hair dressers, truck drivers and caterers, all whose livelihoods are dependent on there being a steady stream of new films and shows being made.  But, the big movie studios would also like to cut their costs, and making movies and shows with fewer people involved is something that sounds appealing to them.  The rise of streaming saw a giant ramp up in production across the industry, but it also blew massive holes into the budgets of the companies that own the platforms as they were all in an arms race to have the most “content” available for their customer base to watch.  The promise of AI being a cheap alternative is something that would appeal to lot of studio execs who have had to write a lot more paychecks over the last decade.

There’s one big issue with trying to use AI as a replacement for physical filmmaking, beyond the obvious one that AI made films still look fake.  Artificial Intelligence, in order to function, must assemble data from the internet in order to create the desired product of it’s prompt’s request.  It’s the one thing that AI still is incapable of accomplishing which is an original idea.  It can imitate, but it can’t create something whole cloth that is new.  So, when we see something that resembles a movie that was developed using AI, there’s a noticeable lack of visual ingenuity.  The image we see is a cobbled together amalgamation of many other things.  There was a demo released on the internet a couple months back of a cinematic car chase that was entirely made using AI.  Some AI enthusiasts said that this was the death of Hollywood, but closer inspection of the visuals in the clip showed how visually inconsistent the actual clip was.  The driver behind the wheel changed appearance multiple times and even the model of the car differed in various shots.  And the streets that it was driving through also had various weird things going on in the background.  The technology may advance to a point where these inconsistencies may be smoothed out, but it doesn’t address the big problem all together.  There’s a general lack of authenticity to the visuals that AI creates.  To make a story that connects with an audience, it takes a human touch to know things like the Mise en Scene of the shot they are constructing and how to edit the shots together for emotional impact.  AI only follows what it’s instructed to do, which doesn’t follow an emotional current.  That’s why it’s visual language is random.  Also, by combining data off of the internet, AI also runs the risk of cannibalizing data that was created by other AI programs, and that often leads to corrupted results that can sometimes appear nightmarish.

The big question is, will audiences care if they are fed more content that is AI generated.  We are seeing a test run of this phenomenon play out currently in our media landscape.  Social media has been flooded with a ton of AI generated images.  Many of them are absurdly artificial and can be easily identified, but the worrying ones are the ones that are trickier to spot.  The especially worrying aspect of AI is how it’s seeping into the world of politics.  Many bad faith actors are using AI for propaganda purposes, creating false images that can feed into misinformation campaigns.  A lot of altered images are easy to swat down now, but as technology improves, it will be more difficult and we will find ourselves living more in a post-truth world.  It becomes even scarier when moving images come into play.  Are people more discernable when it comes to noticing things that aren’t real in visual media?  There’s this thing in computer animation known as the “uncanny valley” where the animation that’s created in a computer attempts to feel as lifelike as possible but reaches a state where the likeness becomes off-putting and repulsed by the viewer.  This was a big reason why motion-capture animation never was able to take off; at least as a replacement for standard computer animation.  The brief period where Hollywood tried to make motion capture a thing, which was spear-headed by filmmaker Robert Zemekis with films like The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007) is not looked back upon with favorability and thankfully died off pretty quick.  But, motion capture does survive in a way as a tool to mix realistic digital characters with live action ones; such as those in the Avatar movies.  AI’s future could run a similar course where audiences reject it as a full replacement for the art of cinema and instead sees it used as a tool in the arsenal of digital artists in the future of visual effects.  The future either way is still uncertain, but for everyone’s sake, it’s better if AI on it’s own is not a catch all fix for all of Hollywood’s problems.

The thing with AI technology is that it’s only bad when used in a bad way.  There are ways that Hollywood could implement AI technology in a beneficial way.  Streamlining the visual effects process is one example where it’s benefits can be useful.  One of the big problems facing the film industry today is the overworked and underpaid labor in visual effects.  So many digital artists are forced into this “crunch” culture of digital rendering, meaning that many of them are working round the clock in order to deliver their rendered shots on time under sometimes unrealistic deadlines.  Many digital artists find it difficult to work under these conditions and it’s only gotten worse in the rise of streaming.  Over time, it’s led not just to a downgrade in quality visual effects for many projects, but a workforce that often has succumbed to bad health due to the long hours as well as a more toxic work environment.  Some AI programs that can carry some of the workload in limited areas could indeed help many of these digital artists meet their deadlines without there being a dip in quality as well as giving them a better work experience as a whole.  There are a lot of applications where it does seem like a little AI assistance could be beneficial, but because people in the industry are wary of what the introduction of these tools may end up replacing, it’s difficult to be nuanced about the good aspects of AI.  We saw one controversy erupt last year when it was revealed that AI was used by the film The Brutalist (2024) in it’s production.  The Brutalist, which was a mostly hand-crafted low budget film, used AI for one specific reason, which makes sense when you learn more about it.  The film’s editor, David Jancso, wanted to have the lead actors sound more authentically Hungarian like their characters should.  Jancso, who is Hungarian himself, used an AI program named Respeecher, which allows someone to mask their own voice with another one entirely.  This is a program that has been used before by Lucasfilm to replicate James Earl Jones’ voice for new lines for Darth Vader, and in The Brutalist’s case, Jancso used his own correct annunciation of Hungarian vowels to fix the line readings of Adrain Brody and Felicity Jones in the movie.  Their performances are still authentically their own, but Respeecher allowed their Hungarian to sound closer to what it should be.  Still, this stirred a bit of controversy and it’s a small possibility that it might have cost the film the Best Picture award at the Oscars.

It is healthy for the Hollywood community to be skeptical.  This is something that if put into the wrong hands could end up ruining cinema as we know it.  The big concern is that the studios are going to do whatever they can to make more money, and the belief is that investing more into AI would be worth it in the long run if it meant that they would have a tighter control over how much money they’ll be spending.  But there are a massive amounts of unseen costs that could lead to more trouble down the road.  To replace the amount of production that is involved in making a full length movie, it would take a massive amount of data processing, which means using a significant amount of server space in data centers across the world.  Using data centers is not cheap, and it also uses up a lot of energy to run them, which could also lead to significant environmental impacts as well.  And all this for something that is not going to be new and original, but rather a faint reproduction of many other things that we’ve already seen.  It all depends then on if the audience is eager to buy the product they are serving up.  It’s hard to say what that result may be.  We are already in a moment of cultural stagnation where the majority of new movies out there are either sequels or remakes.  Hell, we just witnessed A Minecraft Movie gross nearly a billion dollars at the global box office, which kind of tells you that we may be already primed to accept AI slop at our local movie theaters.  But, there are signs that people have more discerning tastes than that.  Take a look at the rise and fall of other tech advancements in the last couple years.  The NFT market thankfully died a quick death after people realized that owning digital art was fairly pointless and also a scam, and people are also opening up their eyes to the fraudulent nature of crytocurrency as well.  We’ll have to see if people call the bluff of those pushing AI generated media on us as well.  What may ultimately decide things one way or another is how many creative people may end up using the technology.

Strangely enough, we have been programmed to distrust AI over the years by Hollywood itself.  From HAL 9000, to Skynet, to Ultron, Hollywood has made AI feel like a very sinister force that often intends to eliminate humanity altogether.  And it’s understandable to be fearful of the technology.  The biggest threat that it currently possess is the possibility that it may replace us in the workplace, and in many professions it already has.  The sad thing is, we are largely responsible for all of the threats that AI poses for our future because we are addicted to convenience.  We like using self-checkouts at the grocery store and using Google to help us with our research instead of going out to the library.  Streaming has also caused us to move away from attending the movie theater, and pretty soon it will try to replace the very act of movie-making itself.  But, it’s something that we can still have the power to push back on if we still value movies as they are.  There are thankfully many filmmakers out there who are still making movies that are as practically constructed as they can be and are still able to find their audience.  The recent success of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), a fully original film made by real artists and utilizing actual, physical film stock in it’s making and presentation is a good sign that audiences are still hungry for true cinematic experiences.  Even with a million detailed prompts AI could never make something as new and original as Sinners because it took a lifetime of human experience to craft that kind of story and make it connect with audiences.  There’s hope that this will convince the studios that they need to still invest in original films made by actual people.  The AI encroachment will always be there as the technology continues to be refined.  But like how music lovers rediscovered the beauty of vinyl in recent years and the steadily increasing loyal fan base of physical media shoppers out there, there will always be an appetite for something that’s real and that’s what will ultimately be what drives the future of cinema.  AI at best is a tool that can help the business improve beyond it’s shortcomings, but it can’t motivate change in the same way that a new voice and original idea can.

The Disney Renaissance ushered in a Golden Age for the art of animation.  After many decades of being a niche market for little kids, animated movies were suddenly becoming big blockbusters once again; films that all ages were enjoying equally.  But it wasn’t just on the big screen that Disney Animation was succeeding.  Their TV animation department was also blossoming alongside the Renaissance films of the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Disney had developed a number of hugely successful Saturday morning cartoon shows that also became highly influential.  They often featured already established Disney characters, such as Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Tail Spin, which starred Baloo from The Jungle Book (1967).  They were also developing hit shows with original characters too, like Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles.  One show in particular, the Scrooge McDuck centered Duck Tales became such a huge hit that it even spawned it’s own theatrical film.  Duck Tales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) was certainly more ambitious than the average episode of the show, but it was also limited by a slightly larger than TV sized budget that the studio allocated for it.  Needless to say, the Duck Tales movie didn’t light up the box office the same way that the TV series had on the airwaves.  But, the attempt to make it work did garner the attention of the new regime that was in charge at Disney during the 1980’s.  In particular, Animation head executive Jeffrey Katzenberg believed that the popularity of the shows made for strong contenders of a new plan he had for his animation feature department.  As the studio was buzzing with the development of their A-list projects like Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992), Katzenberg was looking for a way to put more films in development that were smaller in scale but still retained that high quality Disney style to them, essentially creating a B-move department.  There were plenty of good shows to choose from to jumpstart this new project pipeline at Disney, but which one would be the movie to get the first green light.

The block of Disney cartoon series became so popular that even the programming block it spawned was given it’s own name: The Disney Afternoon.  The Disney Afternoon block of shows would switch once a new program was launched each year, keeping the line-up fresh over many years.  The first new show to jump into the line-up was very unlike the others.  After giving the spotlight to many secondary characters from the Disney stable, or entirely new ones as well, it was decided to give one of the Fab Five Disney characters their own show.  And who better to headline a new series than Goofy himself.  The character, who first launched in 1932 with the name Dippy Dawg, had been a popular mainstay in Disney’s many theatrical shorts over the years.  And Goofy was also a character who could be re-molded for any time period as well, which has helped him to stay relevant all these years while still maintaining his core characteristics.  His new show would be called Goof Troop, which followed the everyday adventures of Goofy and his son Max, as well as their neighbors, the Pete family.  Goof Troop was very different from all the other Disney Afternoon shows, which were often more action adventure based.  Goof Troop by contrast was much more grounded, choosing instead to be a domestic, situational comedy.  It was a show about the quirks of suburban life, with Goofy often getting himself and others into some very silly situations.  And it was a huge hit for the Disney Afternoon.  While people enjoyed all of Goofy’s trademark goofiness, it was also the relatable day to day issues that the characters dealt with that helped to make it a favorite with audiences.  And what’s more, it was a premise that could easily translate into a theatrical story as well.  And that’s what the newly formed B-team at Disney thought as well.  It all depended on if Jeffrey Katzenberg thought the same way they did, so a story team was assembled to pitch the idea of a Goof Troop movie.

Some of the earliest people involved on the project included producer Brian Pimental and story writer Jymn Magon.  Magon had worked as a writer for Disney Television for some time, including on Goof Troop, so he was an ideal choice to put together the first draft of what would be the script for the movie.  Eventually, the team had the script storyboarded out and was ready to present to Katzenberg.  However, it didn’t take very long for Katzenberg to see the problems with the story right away.  The initial story was too close the original show, and Katzenberg thought it lacked heart.  It was just a 80 minute collection of shenanigans with Goofy, and Jeffrey wanted something deeper that he believed would connect more with an audience.  So, despite feeling dejected, the Goofy movie team went back and streamlined their script even more.  Eventually, most of the side characters from the animated series would be excised from the story, including Pete’s wife Peg and his daughter Pistol.  In the end, much of the Goof Troop elements would be left out and this new movie would become more of it’s own entity, with only the characters of Goofy, Max, Pete and his son P.J. being the connecting threads.  And even they would be different to their TV counterparts.  The character who went through the most significant change was Max.  Max has more or less been around since the 1950’s in Disney cartoons, where he was known as Junior in his earliest appearances.  He was renamed Max for the series Goof Troop, was was given a very contemporary, 90’s style personality.  But for the movie, he would be changed even further.  The movie aged Max up to his teenage year, made him less self confident and more at odds with his father.  And it was in exploring this aspect of Max beginning to mature and growing in more contrast with his father that the filmmakers found the heart of the film they were looking for.

What was important in getting this story to work was having a vision that could make the more dramatic themes feel natural, which was not easy for a film that starred a character like Goofy.  A rising star in Disney’s animation department, Kevin Lima, was tapped to direct the film.  This wouldn’t just be his first time directing a feature; it would be his first time directing anything ever.  To make it even more daunting, he would have to supervise production across three different studios in three different continents.  The Burbank studio would be the main base of operations, but most of the animation would be done off-site at Disney’s international animation studios in France and Australia.  While this would’ve normally been a recipe for disaster for a first time director, Kevin Lima proved that he could indeed pull a project like this together.  One thing that helped to make him an ideal choice in guiding this project was the fact that he had a personal connection to the story.  As revealed in the recent Disney+ documentary about the making of the film, Lima had an estranged relationship with his own father, who abandoned him and his family when he was still young.  Taking on this story about a father and son reconnecting through a road trip experience was therapeutic in a way for him, and it motivated him towards getting that sense of bonding across in the story.  He also had the benefit of a team of animators who wanted to show that they were more than just the B-team at Disney.  While it didn’t have the same budget as say Aladdin, the Goofy Movie would still have some of the best rising talents at the studio eager to show off what they could do.  The French studio in fact had a team of twin artists named Paul and Gaetan Brizzi who would later go on to create some of the studio’s most artistically daring sequences in the years ahead.  With a story that had emotional resonance in place and the full blessing of Jeffrey Katzenberg, A Goofy Movie was finally set into motion.  But it’s success wasn’t always a guarantee.

Unlike all of the other animated features made by Disney at the time, A Goofy Movie was not a fantasy or a grand adventure.  It was a road trip movie.  The story involves Goofy wanting to take his son Max on a fishing trip in the hopes that it will mend their strained relationship.  Meanwhile, Max has become increasingly resentful of the traits he’s gotten from his father, fearing that he’s going to grow up to be just like him, so he’s been trying to reinvent himself in the pursuit of impressing a girl that he a crush on at school; Roxanne.  The majority of the movie has the two of them at odds over how they should deal with their relationship; Max wants to break free and Goofy wants to stay connected.  Eventually things come to a head when Max deceives his father, having them steer away from Goofy’s plan to go fishing and instead pointing them in the direction of a concert for Max’s favorite singer that he lied to Roxanne about knowing personally in a desperate ploy to impress her.  But, through the friction, Goofy and Max come to a realization that they can’t stop either from being who they are. Goofy realizes that Max has his own path in life to follow, and Max realizes that his father is always there for him and that being his son is not a curse like he believed it was.  Kevin Lima pointed out one scene in particular where we see this dynamic really coalesce in the story, and that in what he calls the “Hi Dad” soup sequence.  In that scene, where the two are forced to take refuge in their car after an encounter with Bigfoot, they start to break down their defenses and find common ground for the first time.  It’s a scene that you rarely see in any animated feature, let alone one from Disney.  It’s just a parent and their child reflecting on their relationship and getting to the root of why they’ve grown apart.  The fact that they managed to make a scene like this work with a character as inherently cartoonish and silly as Goofy is really a testament to how well the filmmakers handled tone and character in their film.  It’s not too serious, or too silly; it’s just like a conversation you would see in real life, and that was kind of revolutionary in animation.  There’s no wishing on a star to solve these characters problems; this was as true to life as any Disney Animated movie ever got in terms of their storytelling.

One of the major contributors to making A Goofy Movie work as well as it does was the voice cast assembled.  Strangely enough, this is also where things could’ve gone disastrously wrong as well.  Jeffrey Katzenberg had seen what putting Robin Williams in the role of the Genie in Aladdin did for that film’s record-breaking box office, and he believed that the best way to sell a animated film was to put a celebrity name behind it; something that he would pursue more when he left to start Dreamworks Animation years later.  Kevin Lima revealed in recent years that there was a possibility for a while that Goofy was going to be given a celebrity voice.  In particular, he had Steve Martin in mind.  This distressed Goofy’s official voice at the time; veteran vocal artist Bill Farmer.  Farmer had been voicing Goofy since 1987, including in every episode of Goof Troop.  He was hoping to also carry that over into A Goofy Movie, but this plan to change Goofy’s voice left him shocked, making him wonder why someone didn’t want Goofy to sound like Goofy.  A test sample was made, with Bill voicing Goofy in his normal voice to show Katzenberg how it would actually sound in practice, and thankfully Jeffrey saw the error in his plan and allowed Bill Farmer to continue playing the character the right way.  And Farmer’s performance is really extraordinary  in the movie, with him finding nuance in Goofy’s voice that no one had even heard before, allowing him to excel in the film’s more dramatic moments.  His performance also works perfectly against the vocal performance of Jason Marsden as Max.  Marsden was a budding teen actor at the time and Max would be his second major voice role after Binx the Cat in Disney’s Hocus Pocus (1993).  What’s great about his performance is that it feels so natural against the shiny personality of Goofy.  He doesn’t take the teenage angst too far, nor does he try too hard to sound like a cartoon character’s son.  He plays the part naturally, and it makes Max a fully rounded and relatable person.  You really get the sense that you would’ve known someone like Max in school or were him yourself.  In addition to the leads, voice acting veterans Jim Cummings and Rob Paulsen carried over their roles as Pete and P.J. from Goof Troop without missing a beat, and were joined by an impressive collection of character actors like Wallace Shawn, Kellie Martin, Jenna von Oy, and an uncredited Pauley Shore in the cast.

However, there was a speedbump in the film’s road to the big screen.  Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had been the film’s biggest ally at the studio, abruptly left Disney after a succession dispute with CEO Michael Eisner.  Apart from Katzenberg, there was no one else at the Disney Studios that was enthusiastic about having a B-picture production line, so little effort was put into marketing the movie.  The film was too far along to cancel, so Disney ended up treating it as an obligation rather than a movie to be treasured as a well as any of their others.  The film was quietly dumped into theaters in April of 2025 to little fanfare, and this resulted in low box office results.  Critics were also split, because they weren’t sure what to make of it because A Goofy Movie didn’t fit the typical Disney Animation mold.  At least their Spring 1995 release helped them to escape the long shadow of the previous year’s hit, The Lion King (1994), which would have buried the film even more.  But, even with it’s lackluster launch, this was not the end of the movie’s story, but rather it’s beginning.  The movie slowly developed a following during it’s home video release.  People gravitated to the more grounded, realistic story at it’s center, especially in the way it tackled the issues of family and fatherhood.  The fanbase for this movie grew steadily over the years, and in some surprising demographics as well.  One of the biggest areas of support for this film was found in the African-American community.  You’ve got to remember that this was long before The Princess and the Frog (2019) and Disney still had not featured any significant character of color in their movies up until the 90’s.  Despite all of the characters having a Goofy like appearance, black audiences still saw themselves identified in this film, particularly with the pop singer character in the movie named Powerline, who was primarily based off of singer Bobby Brown, with a little Michael Jackson and Prince thrown in.  This was also the first Disney film to ever feature hip hop in it’s soundtrack, which probably also contributed to it’s popularity in the black community.  The soundtrack overall is another factor in the movie’s success over the years.  It’s a musical, but not in the standard Disney fairy tale style.  Each song is unique, mixing rock, country, hip hop, and pop all into one.  The finale song, I 2 I, sung by Powerline (who was voiced by recording artist Tevin Campbell) in particular has become one of Disney’s biggest hits over the years, receiving it’s own fair share of remixes and covers in the YouTube era.  What is especially great about the re-discovery of this film is that it has shown Disney that not every animated classic needs to be based on a legendary story.  Sometimes, a simple father and son road trip is enough to yield a great universal experience for everyone.

Over 30 years the movie has grown in esteem in Disney history; greatly over-coming it’s B-movie status.  It’s especially funny seeing how much Disney’s own social media machine is spotlighting this film’s anniversary this year, and not even mentioning once the anniversary of their “A-list” movie from the same year; Pocahontas (1995).  It shows that even the B-team could create something that could lay claim to being a masterpiece.  And indeed, over time the B-team got to be rewarded for their efforts.  Kevin Lima got to move on to directing an “A-List” feature as co-director of Tarzan (1999), and afterwards he even found success as a live action filmmaker, getting the chance to direct the film Enchanted (2007), starring Amy Adams.  Though their Paris based studio was closed shortly after the making of A Goofy Movie, the Brizzi Brothers would get to direct some of the most beautiful moments in future Disney features, including the “Hellfire” sequence in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and the “Firebird Suite” segment of Fantasia 2000 (2000).  Bill Farmer continues to voice Goofy exclusively to this day and has been honored as a Disney Legend for his efforts over his 37 years in the gig.  Jason Marsden also continues to voice Max occasionally, and has been an in demand voice actor all of these years as well.  One of the pleasing things about this anniversary in particular is that it’s showing just how big this movie has gotten.  Disney was especially taken by surprise 10 years ago when they held a 20th anniversary panel at the D23 Expo in 2015.  Demand was so high that they had to turn away hundreds of people at the door after the room had reached capacity, and the audience that did make it was electric.  After attending last year’s D23, I can tell you that the fanbase has grown even stronger since then.  Powerline was an especially popular cos-play at D23, even rivaling people in Jedi or Mickey Mouse dress-ups.  It makes sense because all the children who grew up over these 30 years with the movie are now having children of their own, and they are probably re-watching the film with them in a new perspective.  Those who originally identified with Max are now finding more in common with Goofy.  And one of the greatest legacies that this movie has had is that it’s helped people from multiple generations, fathers and sons, learn to communicate with one another.  It’s more than just a goof, it’s a movie that brings people together and that’s why it holds such a special place in Disney history.  And that is definitely something worthy to “hyuck” about.

When we entered the year 2020, global box office was at it’s peak.  Carried by major franchises like Marvel and Star Wars as well as a flurry of rising markets in places like China, global box office receipts hit a total of $42 billion in 2019.  And the movie theater business was thriving as a result.  The only thing at the time that theaters had to worry about was the rise of streaming, which was about to explode into the new year.  Netflix had dominated the market through the decade, but both Disney+ and Apple TV+ made their big launch in the Fall 2019 season, and HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ were gearing up for theirs in the months ahead.  Indeed, were things to remain the same in 2020 it was very likely that Hollywood was going to see yet another big year of generated revenue off of multiple modes of entertainment.  Unfortunately, history had other plans, not just for the movie business, but for everyone and everything.  There were news stories of a novel coronavirus starting to rapidly spread across China in the latter months of 2019, and while medical professionals were raising alarms about what they were seeing, it remained business as usual through the start of 2020 here in America.  The new year rang in without incident.  We had a Super Bowl and an Oscars ceremony that were exciting but normal.  And at the box office, the most noteworthy thing to happen was the surprising turnaround success of the Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).  But, the news of the virus spreading began to go from the back page to the front page, and suddenly the fear of the virus coming to our shores no longer seemed remote, but certain.  Eventually, all quarantines failed and the Covid-19 virus strain had reached North America and soon after it would be a global pandemic, the likes that our world hadn’t seen in over 100 years.  People suddenly growing ill and even dying was horrible enough, but the necessary step we had to take after in order to stop a bad situation from getting even worse would themselves have a harsh effect on everyone.  No one was spared from the fallout of this new pandemic reality, including the movies.

On March 16, 2020, it was announced that the three biggest movie theater chains in North America would be closing all of their location, and independent theaters followed suit, bringing all of cinema to a complete standstill, something that it had never experienced before.  The last time a global pandemic happened that reached all corners of the Earth, it was in 1918 with the influenza pandemic, also commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu.  Movie at that time were still in their infancy; a novelty that had yet to reach every town in America.  The incubation rooms of movie theaters just didn’t exist in those days, so Hollywood and the theatrical industry just never had to think about such a event happening that would affect their business in such a profound way.  It’s kind of astounding to think of the passage of time it was in between these two monumental pandemic events, that the whole of cinema history from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation (1915) to the aforementioned Sonic the Hedgehog happened in between them.  All the movies of Charlie Chaplain, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Quentin Tarantino, were seen in between these pandemics.  And also how much the movie experience changed within those 100 years, going from small screening rooms to giant movie palaces to the the multiplexes we see today.  The movie business had seen it all, except a global threat that brought all life to a standstill.  But, the movie theaters had no choice.  In order to prevent our medical system from being overwhelmed by this rapidly spreading virus, all businesses had to conform to the recommended guidelines set by the CDC, which said the best way to mitigate the spread was social distancing and wearing of masks.  This left virtually all non-essential businesses unable to function as is, especially movie theaters and other entertainment venues that compact a lot of people into a confined space.  In the months ahead, there would be flexibility with these guidelines in less populated areas, but considering that the hot spots for the virus were in densely populated centers like Los Angeles and New York, the very markets that the movie business was reliant upon, it became very clear that this pandemic was not going to go away so quickly.

To give you a sense of the impact that living through a pandemic had on a movie lover’s experience, I’m going to share my own personal journey through this uncertain time.  I live in one of those big city markets (Los Angeles to be exact) and March 2020 was a pretty surreal time.  It wasn’t just the movie theaters that shut down, but all production in general.  Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the world, with many residents here reliant on there being an active industry continuing to make more movies.  But, those studio lots also were emptied of non-essential workers, and the industry quickly had to adapt to a new “work at home” normal.  For me, as an avid movie goer, I had to adapt to one of my favorite past times now being unavailable for an unknown amount of time.  It would be five whole months before I would see the inside of a movie theater again, and it wasn’t even my local theater either.  Just to show how much I value being in a movie theater, I drove 120 south to San Diego just so I could watch Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in the brief window that movie theaters were allowed to re-open in parts of California, with San Diego being the closest one.  Eventually, closer theaters would re-open in Ventura and Orange County, but anything in a short driving distance remained closed for an entire year; finally re-opening in March 2021.  But, even with those restrictions in place, I still went out of my way to get as close to having the theatrical experience as I could.  One of the things that saw a surprising revival in the midst of the pandemic was the Drive-In experience.  Two such drive-in theaters still existed in my area, the Vineland Drive-In in the City of Industry and the now demolished Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair.  They may have been further out than my local theaters, but they were always open every night, and I managed to make my way to these places at least once a month through the pandemic period.  For the sake of my sanity during that time, these places were life savers because they filled that need to see movie on the big screen.

But if there was anything to also fill that void, it was streaming.  I already had a Netflix account long before the pandemic, but I was fairly new to Disney+, HBO Max and Apple TV+ as I became an early subscriber to those services.  Little did I know that they were going to be the sole outlet for Hollywood movies for quite a while before theaters re-opened.  While I still went out of my way to see a movie first on the big screen, there were other movies that I had no other choice but to watch them at home.  A lot of studios had to offload their 2020 releases onto streaming platforms, while the bigger films were pushed further back on the calendar.  Streamers were the beneficiaries, but such a drastic measure would have downstream repercussions, especially when it came to compensation for actors and filmmakers who had theatrical percentages written into their contracts.  But, with box office so depressed by the pandemic, movies either had to wait a bit longer for their release, or go straight to streaming, and a lot of movies ended up in the latter column.  Apple TV+ for instance landed the Tom Hanks war flick Greyhound (2020), while Disney made the controversial choice of releasing their Pixar film Soul (2020) on Disney+.  There was also the Premium VOD model where movies were made available to rent at a premium price on platforms like Amazon, Apple, and Vudu, which is how Dreamworks chose to release their sequel Trolls World Tour (2020).  Studios were desperate for any revenue they could get and the streamers could leverage that by getting them to agree to shorter theatrical windows.  Nevertheless, the number of movies that could get released, either through streaming, theatrical, or a combination of the two was limited.  Hollywood was just uncertain about what the future was going to be for their industry.  The pandemic would pass in time, but what would be left of the theater industry?  Was streaming indeed the future of exhibition and movie theaters obsolete?  Just like all the rest of us waiting on the vaccine to help speed up a recovery, the movie theater industry was just taking things one day at a time.  Movie production finally started again, but under a new normal of constant testing and safety protocols, which led to lengthy productions and bloated budgets.  But, as time passed, things would clarify itself as the pandemic finally passed.

The outbreak of Covid-19 was a shock to the system for every aspect of life; one that we hopefully won’t have to repeat in our lifetimes.  Going into 2021, after a year of masking and social distancing, we were finally able to start the recovery once the vaccine became widely available.  Movie theaters took a while to recover, however.  Even with movie theaters in the major markets of Los Angeles and New York allowed to operate again, there were still social distancing measures put in place.  People had to sit with empty seats on either side for the first couple months.  And even in that situation, the choices of movies was still fairly light.  All the blockbuster films were still being held back until later in the year, so what we were getting in early 2021 were low risk movies that the industry was comfortable with playing in half full theaters.  But, there were some movies that managed to shine through.  Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) managed to be the first post-pandemic movie to cross the $100 million mark, even with a hybrid streaming/theatrical release.  A Quiet Place: Part II also became the first movie since March 2020 to have an opening weekend above $30 million.  But, even as blockbusters started to return to the market, it was still evident that the pandemic took it’s toll on the theatrical industry.  Between 2020 and now, it is estimated that nearly 3,000 screens have been lost due to the after effects of the pandemic across the country.  Small, independent cinemas were hit the most by the lockdowns, and the big chains barely scraped by.  AMC, the largest chain, may have fallen into bankruptcy by now had meme stocks not come to their rescue.  But even five years out, some theater doors remain shuttered and a few of them lost forever.  One of the crown jewels in Los Angeles’ collection of movie theaters, the Arclight Hollywood (home of the Cinerama Dome) still sits empty to this day, with it’s door boarded up like an abandoned home.  In terms of returning back to the heyday of the theatrical market of the 2010’s, it would be impossible given the fact that there were just fewer venues in general to host these movies now.

But, the last five years have also shown us that the theatrical market is not on it’s way out either.  If anything, the theatrical model has proven to be surprisingly resilient in the face of cataclysmic change.  One of the surprising signs emerged during the Holidays of 2021.  Right before Christmas, Marvel and Sony put out their film Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), their highly anticipated sequel that not only performed as well as the other films in the series, but also broke records, even in the midst of some lingering Covid protocols.  Movie theaters by this time had been loosening their social distancing standards so that they could finally fill all the seats in an auditorium, but masking was still enforced.  None of this stopped people from seeing No Way Home, and the film went on to have a #2 all-time opening weekend of $260 million and an eventual worldwide total of $1.9 billion.  It defied all protocols and showed that a movie could indeed perform like it used to before Covid.  But, it wouldn’t be the case with every movie.  Apart from Spider-Man, there weren’t a whole lot of movies that played to sold out crowds.  But, the right kinds of movies would come in the years that followed, including Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Barbie (2023), Oppenheimer (2023), Inside Out 2 (2024), and Wicked (2024).  What these movies showed more than anything is that there are just some films that can only play on a big screen to be fully appreciated, and it was motivating the studios to reconsider their decisions in what movies they wanted to focus on.  A lot of films that were once green lit as a big draw for streaming were now being looked at as a possible theatrical release instead.  The recent success of Moana 2 (2024) is an especially good example of the trends shifting back in theatrical’s favor.  Had Disney moved forward with their Disney+ Moana project, then they would’ve missed out on a billion dollar worldwide gross; a cash flow that they can now benefit from that they otherwise would not have seen from streaming.

And the streaming market has also changed dramatically in the last five years after Covid.  In the immediate months of the lockdown, streaming was the only game in town, and it saw a rapid growth as people were now stuck in their homes with no other outlet than to watch whatever was on TV.  It was a strange confluence of events with the global pandemic happening just as the streaming wars was about to ramp up.  And in that time, we saw some bold moves made by the studios to bring more eyes to their platforms.  Some of those moves, however, would prove to foolish in the long run.  Warner Brothers’ decision to release their entire 2021 schedule on HBO Max day and date alongside theatrical in a program called “Project Popcorn” proved to be a disaster, because it clearly diminished box office while bringing only a scant few subscribers to their platform.  That failed experiment is largely the reason it’s called Warner Brothers Discovery now.  Disney’s decision to release three Pixar movies in a row on Disney+ without a theatrical release also proved to be a foolish move because it diminished the once valuable Pixar brand and caused them to underperform once they finally put the beloved studio’s movies in theaters with Lightyear (2022) and Elemental (2023).  It wouldn’t be until Inside Out 2’s record performance that Pixar finally found their way back after their parent company neglected them.  But what the streaming wars also showed us is that a crowded market also has drawbacks of it’s own.  While there were good things to watch on all the platforms, the total cost of having to subscribe to all of them proved to be too much for a lot of people whose wallets were hurt by the pandemic and the inflation that followed it.  Churn has been the worst enemy of streaming platforms, as people are choosing to subscribe only when they see one particular show or movie they like, and then they cancel immediately afterwards.  The viewership numbers were just not justifying the enormous costs the studios were putting into creating exclusive content, and that led to a bunch of the Hollywood studios starting to reign things back in and playing it more safe.  Ironically, all of these potential Netflix killers failed to do just that, as Netflix still remains the top performer in the market, though even they felt a bit of the contraction in the market post-pandemic too.  One important thing that Hollywood also took away as a lesson is that box office returns are a better way to gauge the success of their movies, because it’s a definitive sum that tells you how much a single project is worth in the market, as opposed to the lump sum of a streaming subscription that’s spread across the entire catalog.

Now that it’s been five years since the initial beginning of the lockdown, I can tell you that I still have terrible memories of that experience, but I also memories of the bright moments that helped me get through it all.  Had my desire to see movies on the big screen not been so key to my happiness in that time period, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to go out to the Drive-In theaters in my area.  Sadly, their revival during the pandemic was short lived.  The Mission Tiki in Montclair has since been leveled and turned into a housing development for the city, while the Vineland Drive-In is only open for special events and the occasional summer program while mostly operating as a swap meet during the day.  During the pandemic, I may have watched 20 or more movies between the two of these venues, so I am eternally grateful for what they gave me in that lost year and I’ll miss that part of the experience for sure.  Even though the lockdowns lasted the longest in my area compared with every other part of the country, we were lucky to not see many closures in the wake of the pandemic.  All of my local theaters managed to re-open, with some of them being salvaged by new ownership.  Sadly, the Arclight Hollywood is still in limbo, and despite some promises made by the property owners to eventually get it up and running again, the theater still sits empty with their screens still dark five years later.  In terms of the theatrical experience itself, it does feel like things are back to normal, except when it comes to the choices in movie itself.  Hollywood still is suffering from a post-pandemic identity crises as it tries to figure out what’s worthy of theatrical and what’s worthy of streaming.  This unfortunately is leaving the movie theaters themselves with a slim selection of movies to put in their theaters.  It’s either a choice between low risk indies or increasingly hollow blockbuster films based on established IP.  The mid-level movie is all but gone from the multiplex, and that’s making the range between the movies all the more greater.  Movies either need to break the bank, or be so small that they don’t risk losing money.  It was said that it would take a few years for the theatrical market to make a full turnaround, and I believe the last few turbulent years have proven that.  But, movie theaters still endure, which is astonishing given the near apocalypse that they faced during Covid.  The movies faced a test they were never prepared for with the pandemic, and though there were casualties along the way, somehow we found a way to get us close to normal again.  I feel closer to the theatrical experience even more now after having my local theaters closed for a full year.  Hopefully it will remain with us for quite a while longer, and that cinema itself will be able to find that happy medium between what belongs on the bog screen and what does not.

One of the most audacious movies to come out las year was the new film from Brady Corbet called The Brutalist (2024).  Starring Adrian Brody as an immigrant Holocaust survivor and architect, the movie tells the story of one man’s experience striving for the American dream by way of gaining favor with a wealthy benefactor who wants him to build a megastructure using the titular architectural style.  The movie is a complex character study about the faults lying within the pursuit of the American Dream and what toll it takes on the artist, but that’s not what makes the movie audacious.  The film is a staggering 3 and a half hours in length, which is not uncommon for a period set drama, but for this particular film, the director incorporated some long dormant Hollywood traditions that help to make the film feel even more monumental.  Baked into the film’s runtime itself is a 15 minute long Intermission, and the movie even opens with the announced Overture.  These elements are not used very often today in movies, but those who watch classic films from the 1950’s and 60’s will instantly know what they are.  They are throwbacks to a style of film exhibition known as the Roadshow format.  The use of the Roadshow format is certainly intentional on Brady Corbet’s part, since the whole movie is a throwback to a different time period, one in which this kind of movie experience existed.  In addition, to filming the movie in the classic and rarely used Vistavision format, the movie revitalizes the Roadshow style of presentation, even if it’s not quite the full Roadshow experience as it plays in local multiplexes.  But, why is the Roadshow such a novelty today compared to the Golden Era of cinema when it was used very frequently.  The answer reveals a lot about the way cinema itself has evolved over time, and it shows that even movies like The Brutalist will not bring it back to it’s full glory ever again.

The cinematic experience was much different 60 years ago than it is today.  From it’s early days and up through the post-War years, going to the movies literally meant “going to the movies” in the plural sense.  You paid a ticket at the box office, and then the cinema would be open to you for the remainder of the program that day.  That’s why people would just come and go throughout the day.  Unless there was a sell-out, audiences had free reign to choose what they would choose to watch that day.  In many cases, the availability of movies depended on how many theaters there were in town, and for some small communities that sometimes meant only one.  So, theaters practiced would run multiple films on the same bill, with one movie being the main attraction, while another smaller movie would be scheduled right after that.  This is where the terms “B-Movie” and “Double Feature” that still exist in movie lingo today come from.  In between the films, there were other short programming to fill the time, including news reels, animated cartoons, movie trailers, and various other shorts.  The heyday of the studio system stuck with this format for a long time, but as movies got more ambitious and lengthy, the industry was looking to a different kind of way to exhibit their films in a way that spotlighted the cinematic experience as something special.  What helped to inspire them was a form of entertainment that Hollywood had over the years been supplanting; which was live theater.  Shows performed on the Broadway stage, or in opera halls across the country used intermissions to break the performances into different acts, giving both the performers and the audiences a break.  Operas, musicals, and stage dramas by this time were considered prestigious forms of entertainment compared to the more provincial entertainment that cinema provided to the masses.  So, Hollywood looked to what the theater community was doing to create their own kind of prestige cinematic experience.

The Roadshow movie experience was meant to create a unique experience that emulated the feeling of attending the opera or any other high brow form of entertainment, but within the confines of a movie theater.  Roadshow films were often presented in a limited fashion, playing at only the most elite theaters in town, and at a premium ticket price.  To emulate the experience like you were going to the theater for a stage performance, the movie would open without trailers or any accompanying shorts attached.  Instead, the speakers would play a specifically orchestrated Overture before the film started; mostly with the screen blank, unless a specific preshow artwork was meant to draw the eye.  Then, depending on which theater you were at, the curtains would be drawn back as the studio logo was projected on the screen and the movie would play through.  If the film was longer that the average movie, there would be an intermission that would break the film into two acts, giving the audience time to either hit the bathrooms or to get more snacks at the concessions.  And at the film’s conclusion, once the words “The End” fades out the curtains close and another track of Exit Music would serenade the audience as they left their seats and walked out.  In whole, it made watching the movies that much more special.  The movie being projected on the big screen would be the same, but aura would be different.  To make the experience even more worthy of a premium ticket price, special souvenir programs would be handed out to you by an usher as you entered, just like you would receive at the theater.  It was a lucrative way to add an extra bit of revenue for the film, and also to help generate extra buzz and prestige around a movie before it was released to the wider market.  But, you couldn’t just do this with any kind of movie.  The films that would receive the Roadshow treatment had to be worthy of such a classy style of presentation.

What set the trend for the modern Hollywood Roadshow was the release of producer David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939).  While Gone With the Wind was not the first film to use the Roadshow format for it’s release, it was definitely the one that set the trend for all the movies that came after.  Selznick’s gargantuan Civil War epic really could not have been released in any other way.  At a staggering four hours in length, the longest studio film ever made up to that time and for several years after, Gone With the Wind had to be presented in a Roadshow format no matter where it played.  The Roadshow fit well into Selznick’s zeal for showmanship, and the demand was there for a premium movie experience with the film.  After premiering in Atlanta in 1939, the movie sold out in every large market it was presented, shattering every conceivable box office record, and this was even before receiving a wide release after it’s Roadshow run.  But, while the Roadshow proved to be a valuable source of revenue for some films, the success of Wind was still something that Hollywood found difficult to replicate.  That was until the 1950’s, when the advent of widescreen helped to make cinema feel like a prestigious experience again.  This revitalized the Roadshow format for a new generation, as big screen sword and sandal epics like The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) benefitted from the larger than life experience that the format offered.  The Roadshow experienced offered something that you couldn’t get from watching television alone in your living room.  It made going to a movie palace feel as enriching as going to an opera or concert hall.  And the experience wasn’t just made for biblical stories either.  Historical dramas like How the West Was Won (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965) also adopted the Roadshow format for their prestige releases.  But the Roadshow’s rise in success throughout the widescreen boom would face a different challenge as viewership patterns changed.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) fundamentally changed the way people went to the movies, as it’s shocking first act twist made people realize that they had to watch a movie from beginning to end, and not just casually dive in like movie goers would do in the past.  The way movies were released changed accordingly; movie trailers would still play prior to a movie’s start, but double features along with accompanying shorts and newsreels were a thing of the past.  One ticket meant one movie, and the appetite for lengthy 3 hour plus Roadshow features dried up.  Cinemas wanted more showtimes, which meant leaner movies without all the bells and whistles of the Roadshow, including Intermissions.  The ballooning budgets of the Hollywood epics, which used to be justified because of the Roadshow’s premium ticket prices, also became a problem.  The end seemed near for the Roadshow format as a means of theatrical release, especially after 20th Century Fox’s colossally expensive Cleopatra (1963) nearly drove the studio into bankruptcy.  But an unexpected reprieve came for the Roadshow format with the remarkable success of movie musicals in the 1960’s.  Fox was able to recover from their financial woes with the monumental box office of The Sound of Music (1965), becoming the biggest money maker in Hollywood since Gone With the Wind.  Disney and Warner Brothers likewise saw great fortune in their releases of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady around the same time in 1964.  But what the movie musical also did was use the Roadshow format to perfection.  It harkened back to what inspired the Roadshow in the first place, which was musical theater.  The musicals even had their Intermissions already baked into the show itself, making it easy for Hollywood to know where to put them in their film adaptations.  For a time, this worked out well, and the Roadshow format would survive a bit longer.  But, it unfortunately would be short lived.  The success of Sound of Music and My Fair Lady made Hollywood mistakenly believe that there was a widespread appetite for these prestige Roadshow musicals that actually wasn’t there, and the resulting glut of Roadshow movies in the back end of the 1960’s spelled disaster for the format as a whole.

While Hollywood was rapidly changing, with counter culture films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) becoming all the rage, the Roadshow format was representing all that was wrong with the industry at the time.  Big budget musicals that were trying to emulate the success of The Sound of Music were continuing to fail at the box office.  These included musicals like Doctor Doolittle (1967), Camelot (1967) and Hello, Dolly (1969), the latter of which almost wiped out all of the profits that 20th Century Fox had recovered with their Sound of Music success.  Going into the 1970’s, Hollywood was weary of using the Roadshow release format to generate buzz for their tentpole films.  A couple movies of the era did cautiously try to use it, like Patton (1970) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971), but when the big epic of the era, The Godfather (1972), released to great success without using any of the Roadshow features, it all but killed the format.  Hollywood still put out 3 hour plus epics in the decades that followed, but they would run like a regular movie would without an overture or intermission.  This includes some major prestige films that went on to awards season success, like Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997).  Neither film has any of the same features of Roadshow epics despite sharing their epic lengths.  The rise of the Hollywood blockbuster also changed the movie going experience as well.  With higher demand for blockbuster franchise films like Star Wars (1977), Back to the Future (1985) and many other crowd pleasers, the multiplex supplanted the movie palace as the primary destinations for movie goers.  Hard to replicate the same prestigious experience on the same level of attending a musical or opera when it’s in a small dark box of a room next to many others just like it.  After being the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige at it’s best, the Roadshow was reduced to being a relic of the past.

But the memory of the Roadshow format managed to survive through an unexpected avenue; home theater.  As Hollywood began going through their archives to find movies to release in the rising home entertainment market, they found these longer versions of films that were made in the Roadshow format that they could put out on video as a collector’s edition.  Spotlighted as the “Roadshow Edition,” these home video releases gave cinephiles the oppurtunity to see these movies in their original format, complete with the Overtures, Intermissions, and Exit Music included.  It was like rediscovering all of these movies again, seeing the way that they were originally meant to be seen instead of the truncated versions that were either re-released in multiplex theaters or aired on television.  It renewed an interest in the film enthusiast community towards the bygone era of the Roadshow.  Movies like Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments would subsequently be given restorations that re-incorporated the entire Roadshow format into their home video releases, and those same restorations would likewise be used in all future theatrical exhibitions as well.  The same went for all of the movie musicals released over this same period.  In some cases, the people who worked on the restorations would include graphic art for the Overtures and Exit Music, as modern audiences are not as familiar with these features and would probably be confused why they are included in the presentation.  While Hollywood hasn’t fully reembraced the Roadshow format completely as a part of their film releases, it’s at least worthwhile that the memory of it is being preserved with the restorations of these older films.  It’s probably a good thing that the Roadshow format is not used for every epic length movie; hard to imagine it being used on something like Avengers: Endgame (2019) or Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).  It’s a special kind of format to be used on certain kinds of movies; ones where the use of Intermissions to break the film into two acts is essential to the experience.

Which brings us back to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.  Corbet could’ve released his film without the trappings of a Roadshow style presentation, but he included them in his movie because of the way it evoke the era that the movie takes place.  It’s a film that has the feel of an old school epic, while still being fairly modern in it’s sensibilities.  The Overture and Intermission are integral features of the experience and not a necessity of the presentation because of it’s colossal length; though I’m sure audiences are pleased to finally have a long movie with a bathroom break.  It’s all the more astounding that Corbet was able to make a movie that felt like an old Hollywood epic on a miniscule $10 million budget.  My belief is that using the Roadshow format features helps to reinforce that evocation of grandeur, even with the movie being small and intimate in true scale.  And while Corbet is getting a lot of attention for his expert use of the format, he’s also not the only one that has attempted to revive the Roadshow style in recent years.  Quentin Tarantino famously put out his film The Hateful Eight (2015) in a Roadshow style version that played in select theaters nationwide.  It included the same Overture and Intermission features you would find in Roadshow movies, which Tarantino specifically paying  homage to, especially with regards to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone that released in the format.  In select screenings, you would even receive a souvenir program, just like they used to give out in the old Roadshow days.  And while both The Hateful Eight and The Brutalist both are loving recreations of the format, they are unlikely to make the format reach the heights that it once held within the industry.  The way people go to the movies these days has changed too much to support such a format now.  We’re even seeing epic productions like Dune and Wicked choosing to release as two separate films a year apart rather than a single two act Roadshow style film, and it’s working pretty well for Hollywood that way.  Could there still be Roadshow style releases in the future; probably, and with any luck more frequently thanks to The Brutalist’s success.  But it’s future will still likely be that of a novelty rather than the norm.  And that in a way is what’s best for the format.  The Roadshow was the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige and the rarer the treasure the better.  With the industry recognizing the special quality it brings to making the art of film feel as important as that of the high arts of theater and opera, it’s a good thing that it stands as the high water mark of cinema at it’s peak.

One thing that people like to see at the Oscars is an underdog story.  There are plenty of instances of a movie or a performer that unexpectedly defies the odds and pulls off an upset win.  Think Olivia Colman winning over the heavily favored Glenn Close in the 2019 awards ceremony, or Moonlight (2016) pulling off the upset of the century by beating La La Land (2016), with it’s record tying number of 14 nominations, in the Best Picture race.  The reason why people love these wins is because it’s sometimes offers a moment of spontaneous surprise in a show that can often be a tad too predictable, especially when you are following the momentums of the race closely.  But there are wins in past years that didn’t come as pleasant surprises, but instead left many people scratching their heads.  We tend to forget that the Oscars is more or less another race based on internal politics within the industry, and that sometimes the winner is not always the popular choice but rather the one who’s campaign strategy was the most well executed.  There are movies that are liked well enough for a nomination, but feel out of place if they actually win the award, especially if there are better movies in the same race.  And these movies tend to be cursed after winning the top award as they are looked at as being undeserving of the award they won due to the fact that the movies they beat have had longer staying power over the years; some even achieving all-time classic status.  Think How Green Was My Valley (1941) beating Citizen Kane (1941), or Ordinary People (1980) beating Raging Bull (1980).  But it’s also worth noting that the backlash against these movies may be bit too harsh, solely due to the fact that they fall short by comparison to their more famous competitors.  A movie may still be good even if it was undeserving of the Best Picture honor it snagged away from better movies.  It’s happened numerous times throughout Oscars’ long history, but perhaps the most severe backlash was leveled at the winner of the 2006 Academy Awards ceremony: 2005’s Crash.

Crash came out in the early summer of 2005 to mostly positive reviews.  It was the feature directorial debut of longtime TV writer Paul Haggis who only a year prior had been nominated for his screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004).  Crash was an ambitious exploration of race relations in the city of Los Angeles, told through interconnected vignettes of characters both black and white, rich and poor, criminal and law enforcement, etc.  It was also blessed with an all-star ensemble that included future Oscar-winners like Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser, as well as rising stars such as Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandiwe Newton, and Michael Pena.  The movie has thought provoking moments here and there, but as a collective whole it kind of misses the mark of the message it’s trying to impart on the audience.  Generally, people were pleased with the movie, but it came as a bit of a shocker that it managed to earn a Best Picture nomination.  That’s where people thought it’s meteoric rise would end.  The favored movie of that evening was destined to be the groundbreaking tragic queer romance movie Brokeback Mountain (2005), which had received the most nominations of the season and was racking up wins across the board before Oscar night came.  Crash did pick up a Screen Actors’ Guild win for it’s impressive ensemble, but Brokeback Mountain had won the Golden Globe, the PGA, DGA and WGA honors leading up to the ceremony; all major bell-weathers.  On the night of the Oscars, Brokeback was winning the bulk of the preamble awards that Best Picture winners usually take away, such as Original Score, Cinematography, and Adapted Screenplay.  Paul Haggis came away with an Original Screenplay win, which many saw as Crash’s consolation for the night.  With director Ang Lee’s expected Best Director win for Brokeback, the final award seemed all but certain.  And then Jack Nicholson who was presenting the Best Picture award that evening delivered a shockwave across the Dolby Theater and the entire Hollywood industry when he opened the envelope and announced Crash as the winner.  It was definitely a surprise win to everyone, and as we would see, it was also not a popular one either.

Brokeback Mountain’s nomination was seen as a profound statement of support for the LGBTQ+ community when it was up for Best Picture.  This deconstruction of the American Western that featured a romance between two closeted gay men came out in a time when the rights of queer people were under assault.  The Bush Administration that was in power at the time were pushing hard for a Constitutional Amendment that defined marriage as being between two people of opposite genders.  This would have enshrined into the founding document of this nation a discriminatory ban on same sex relationships.  Attitudes towards gay marriage would thankfully change in the following decade, but in the 2000’s, it was still a hotly contested issue, and the Queer community was facing intense opposition to their right to marry.  That’s why Brokeback Mountain was seen as such an important movie for it’s time, because it was a sympathetic portrayal of a queer relationship made and promoted by a major film studio (Universal, under their Focus Features banner) that openly condemned the persecution that the community had been facing (and sadly still does to this day).  Hollywood, despite some faults, has mostly been a place that champions marginalized groups and this was the time to shed a light on the LGBTQ community and give them the much needed mainstream exposure that they had been lacking for so long.  But sadly, despite winning quite a few awards, Brokeback Mountain came up short of the top award of the night.  How could this destined to be sure thing, a profound statement of support from Hollywood towards the Queer community, fall short to a movie like Crash which didn’t have a lot to say about prejudice that hadn’t already been said plenty of times before.

One reason why Crash came away with the upset is because of the social make-up of the Academy itself.  Hollywood is for the most part, and always has been, a progressively liberal majority industry.  It is also a very insulated community as well.  While social progressiveness is something that many in Hollywood value, they also absorb politics in a way that fits within their Cosmopolitan lifestyles as well.  That’s why members of the Academy responds to movies that appeal to their sense of personal experience, which in some ways may ignorant of causes and issues that fall outside of their inner circle.  In this case, it might have been what pushed Crash over the top at the Academy Awards.  Queer themes in mainstream movies were still a bit of a novelty in Hollywood, while at the same time, racial politics still hit close to home.  This was of course the city that saw the riots erupt after the beating of Rodney King, as well as the O.J. Simpson trial that also stirred up racial discussions across the country.  Paul Haggis’ contemplative feature about collisions of racial tensions within the City of Angels just rang more true to the Academy than Gay Cowboys.  It doesn’t mean that the bulk of the Academy didn’t support the rights of the LGBTQ community; though the true intentions behind most individual voting is unclear.  In many ways, Brokeback Mountain may have been the victim of it’s own historic status.  Queer cinema was still niche, and gay rights was only just starting to gain traction in America.  Academy voters may have felt that supporting such a movie for Best Picture was going to be too much of a statement against the establishment at the time, and they didn’t want that backlash to come down on them.

But by doing this, the Academy only created a different kind of backlash.  People rightly viewed Hollywood’s timidity towards supporting gay rights fully as an insult to the community, and over time as the right to marry thankfully became more of a mainstream position, this decision on the Academy’s part has appeared more and more out of touch.  But, is Crash deserving of all the scorn that it has received in the 19 years after it’s Best Picture win.  The complaint about the movie that feels most apt is that it is tone deaf about the subject it is covering.  It’s very clear that this is a story about racial tensions in America told from the perspective of a middle aged white guy.  Haggis has good intentions with his writing, but not a lot of nuance when it comes to tackling racism from multiple sides.  It probably would have helped if was writing scenes with a collaborator from one of the marginalized communities depicted in the film.  There are a lot of far fetched scenarios in the movie that undermine the message that it’s trying to deliver.  One involves Terrence Howard’s character taking the police on in a wild high speed chase with him ultimately trying to egg them on to use force against him, and yet he still walks away free and unharmed.  Another scene has two black men played by Ludacris and Larenz Tate discussing the hypocrisy of racial profiling right before they carjack someone.  Haggis’ screenplay are filled with these far fetched scenarios that get spiced up with platitudes about the sad state of racism in America, and in the end it just make the whole movie feel hollow and disingenuous.  Its like Haggis believes that he’s delivering something profound to the world, but the wild swings only make his attempts at it feel less impactful, and it just shows him to be an outsider looking in without any actual real world insight.

Are there positives about the movie.  Sure there are.  The performances by the cast in particular really help to elevate the film.  Of special note is Don Cheadle, who gives the movie it’s most subtle and assured performance, as the character that’s closest to being the central figure.  This film would come out immediately after his breakout Oscar-nominated role in Hotel Rwanda (2004), and it helped to cement him as one of the most reliably solid actors in the business, helping to lead him to a great franchise role in the MCU as the hero War Machine (ironically taking over the role from his Crash co-star Terrence Howard).  Thandiwe Newton also delivers a strong performance as  woman who deals with two different levels of discriminations in the movie, both as a woman and as a woman of color.  But the standout performance in the movie surprisingly belongs to Matt Dillon in a role that in other less capable hands could have become an insultingly tone deaf character to include in a movie about race.  In the film, Dillon plays a racist cop who also commits a sexual assault on one of the minority “suspects” he chooses to pull over (played by Newton).  But, later in the film, he saves the same woman from a car wreck in a harrowing rescue scene, showing that he has the capacity within him to be a hero at the right moment.  This is one of the more far fetched elements of the movie, and people point to this character as one of the major problems with Haggis’ tackling of racial tensions in the movie by trying to go out of his way to depict the racist cop with an eye towards sympathy.  And yet, Dillon’s performance nearly makes it work, because he manages to ground the character in a nuanced way.  He doesn’t go over the top with the character, especially with the racism, and it makes the character far more complex than he probably reads on the page.  Naturally, this nuanced performance helped Matt Dillon to be the sole nominated actor for this film, and it’s still one of the actor’s best.  Given the level of strong performances from a pretty stacked all-star cast, it’s no surprise the film was awarded the Ensemble prize at the SAG awards.  And given that the largest voting block of the Academy is the Actors’ Branch, this likely was another key towards the film’s upset victory.

The years haven’t been kind to the movie since it won Best Picture.  Cries of homophobia plagued the Academy, but the movie Crash itself doesn’t represent any contradiction to LGBTQ rights.  It’s its own message movie that unfortunately gave the wrong message at the wrong time.  But as flawed as it is, it’s nowhere the worst Best Picture winner of all time.  There’s even a more egregiously tone deaf movie about race that took the Best Picture prize more recently with the film Green Book (2018).  Crash gets away a lot more with it’s shallow depiction of racial issues, because it’s ultimately harmless fiction.  Green Book on the other hand whitewashes the story of real people to make it look like the white character was more tolerant than he was in real life.  While Green Book’s depiction of racial issues may be more ethically dubious, it still is reflective of the same faults that Crash has, in that it’s coming from a one-sided, white male perspective that doesn’t have the nuanced insight of people who actually face real racism everyday.  The movies may mean well, but it also is observing the issue from the perspective of people who are least likely to face the actual repercussions of racial injustice.  The same critique could also be leveled at Brokeback Mountain too, because that film was written, directed and starring cisgender straight people who don’t have first hand knowledge about the gay experience.  However, there was a deeper sense of empathy felt in Brokeback Mountain that helped the movie feel genuinely truthful about the persecution that it’s queer characters faced.  Crash by comparison is heavy handed and unsubtle, and it undermines it’s message in the long run.  The backlash it faced may be a bit harsh, but it’s also understandable.

In the end, Crash’s sole noteworthy accomplishment is that it pulled off one of the biggest Oscar night upsets.  But, it came at a price, because now it is viewed as an unworthy recipient of that award.  While I wouldn’t disagree that Crash is not exactly the best choice for Hollywood’s top honor, I also wouldn’t say it deserved the severe backlash it received either.  It’s naïve, but ultimately harmless, and in some moments actually elevates to being better than just okay.  Divorced from the Oscars, I think the movie would’ve garnered a better reputation over the years.  Like so many movies before at the Oscars,  it is over-shadowed by the runner-up, which has eclipsed it many times in popularity and importance.  The Oscars are a snapshot in time, and Crash’s win is an interesting look back at a time when the crossroads of gay rights and racial politics intersected in our pop culture and spurred on a renewed conversation about the necessity of cinema to shed light on injustice in this world.  Brokeback Mountain may have benefitted from it’s runner-up status, as it shifted focus more onto the issues of the LGBTQ community as Hollywood was trying to make amends for passing them over at the Oscars.  Queer representation only grew stronger in the decade since, and in 2017, it was a queer themed film called Moonlight that pulled off the upset, and over a self-indulgent movie about Hollywood that the Oscar voters tend to prize more than others.  Crash on the other hand is remembered more as an infamous misstep by the Academy.  But it’s not a horrendous movie by any means, and it certainly is less insulting about racial issues than Green Book is.  You see these movies that rise up with momentum at just the right time, and then are forgotten to time quickly thereafter, with only the Best Picture win to give them any note of worth.  Crash is definitely that kind of movie, only the backlash it faced was stronger than most others.  20 years after it’s release, it’s still a movie that carries a lot of baggage with it.  But, let’s not forget that it won the Best Picture race in a fair fight.  It should be noted that it was widely praised in it’s day; critic Roger Ebert even named it his Top Movie of the 2005 that year.  Time has a funny way of changing perspective on things, and in the years since Crash beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars, I’m happier that attitudes have shifted more towards gay rights and less towards lip-service gestures towards race relations in America.

In the earliest days of 2025, the City of Los Angeles was struck by a long feared tragedy that has devastated the community.  Two massive fires broke out in the townships of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, both of which grew to enormous size and ferocity due to a wind storm event that was strong even by the standards of the yearly Santa Ana winds that the area normally experiences.  As a resident of the City of Angels myself, I can attest to the intensity of these winds on the night of January 7th.  But I was lucky to be in a part of the city that was spared the worst of the destruction; the only impact I felt was power being out in my neighborhood for a couple of days.  Pacific Palisades and Altadena were not so lucky.  Both communities saw near total destruction, with over a thousand structures burned to the ground; mostly homes and a few structures of historic importance to the city.  And the impact on the people who lived there is immeasurable.  It affected many ranges of residents, from the affluent who resided in beach side mansions in the Palisades to middle and working class citizens living in the foothills of Altadena.  It is estimated this will be one of the costliest disasters ever in the United States, with so many properties reduced to smoldering ruins; a fact that will also be consequential for the entirety of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the United States for many years beyond.  As the fires dissipate, the next important thing to do next is to decide how we rebuild.  Many things will need to be done, especially in deciding the infrastructure needed to help prevent something like this from happening again, especially with climate change making weather events more extreme, like the wind storm that fanned the flames in the first place.  But also, the question is also being put forward about how quickly we should be moving on in the wake of such a tragedy.

The thing about the fire happening in a community such as the Pacific Palisades is that many of the victims involved who lost their homes in the inferno are also professionals in the movie industry.  Movie stars, producers, writers, directors and agents were all among the people who called the Palisades home, and they of course were overwhelmingly affected by this disaster.  Of course, the scale of the loss varies.  For some, the fire in the Palisades may have taken away one of many residences that some of the most affluent owned.  But for others, they lost everything in the fire; an entire livelihood gone up in smoke.  And those residents will have to see their lives put into an upheaval, as they will be displaced for a while, which could affect their work in the business.  The hope is that many of them will be covered by insurance, but with home insurers pulling out of the state because of the increased threats of wildfires, it’s not a certainty that everyone will get reimbursed.  Because of all the disruption to the livelihoods of professionals in the business, there has been a significant slowdown of productions going on in the City of Los Angeles, which has already seen a downturn in film shoots post-pandemic.  Of course it would be a bad thing to pressure the people who lost their homes to quickly get back to work.  It’s going to take time for people to adjust, and the humane thing is to give them the time they need.  But, there’s also the fact that this is a city dependent on the film industry to help boost other businesses that make up the life blood of the community.  The unfortunate thing is that this tragedy has occurred at one of the worst possible times for the Hollywood community, which is Awards season.  At a time when the industry is gearing up to put on the show of the year.

This has led to the belief from some that Awards season should be either indefinitely postponed or outright cancelled in response to the tragic fires.  Some events have indeed been cancelled out of respect to the people who lost their homes, though these have been some of the less high profile ones.  It’s another question whether something as big as the Oscars should also be cancelled, but it’s something people within the industry have been floating out there.  One of the reasons people want to see the Oscars cancelled is because many of the voting body of the Academy were among those who lost their homes in the fires, and it is believed that putting the pressure on them to spend this time casting their votes for this year’s race would be in bad taste.  Now, not all voting members may feel that way, including ones directly involved in the tragedy, but it is something that certainly can’t be dismissed either.  For now, the Oscars are still scheduled for March 2nd of this year, but the voting deadline was extended an extra week to accommodate those affected by the fires.  The Oscar nominations came out this week as promised but later than planned, so it looks like things are full steam ahead, but there are considerations being made about the ceremony itself.  Some believe that it will also be in bad taste to have the usual glitz and glamour showcase that the Oscars usually are in the wake of the tragedy.  Plans are now calling for a toned down show that may also be turned into a fundraiser to help those in need.  One of the big changes already discussed is the elimination of extravagant stage performances for the Best Song nominees, which is a shame given that two of the best such performances have happened in the last two Oscars, with “Naatu Naatu” from RRR (2022) and “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie (2023).  We’ll have to see whether or not it’s a strategy that works, but it’s also a situation that the Oscars have been through before.

There’s something inspirationally resilient about the Oscars; the fact that it’s an institution that still stands even through significant moments of upheaval in our nation’s history.  From it’s inception in 1927, the show kept being put on every year without fail, all the way through the Depression and also through World War II.  Even the Olympics can say that.  Of course, during the War, the industry had to deal with many of their professionals putting their lives on hold to serve overseas, so to put on the Oscars each year, the ceremony evolved into something else, which became a way to promote the war effort and in a familiar plan to what we are seeing right now, used to fund raise by selling war bonds.  The Post-War years saw the Oscars return to it’s usual glitz and glamour for the next half century, but a national tragedy would cause another adjustment for the pageantry of the show.  The 9/11 attacks made Hollywood reconsider their plans for the ceremony in the show the following year.  The show opened with a solemn reminder of the tragedy, with Tom Cruise delivering an opening address stressing the importance of using art to deal with trauma, and the show included many tributes to the city of New York that suffered the horrific attack.  It was a ceremony about solidarity for a broken nation, though sadly it would be short lived as the War on Terror that followed would divide us once again.  The Oscars also saw a major disruption again with the Covid-19 pandemic.  Though the ceremony of 2021 was still put on, it was done so in a smaller venue (Los Angeles’ Union Station) with fewer guests spaced further apart in accordance with socially distancing.  It was also held a full two months later than originally planned, mid-way through the month of April.  And yet with all the barriers in place, the Oscars still managed to not skip a single year.

The one big difference this year is that the tragedy of the LA fires is that they hit much closer to home.  World War II and even the 9/11 attacks were certainly felt by the industry, but the city itself remained unharmed and people still went about their lives.  The fires on the other hand have left many within the industry directly affected, and that has put the city itself into a tough place.  A significant portion of the movie industry are not ready to just pivot into awards season mode.  It’s easy for many to dismiss the Palisades fire victims because many of them were disproportionately wealthy, but that’s not the case for the most part.  There were middle to lower class victims of the fires too.  One of the housing developments lost in the fire was a mobile home park just off of the Pacific Coast Highway that borders the Palisades community, and many of those residents were not among the rich and famous.  Also, the loss of so many homes in the area affects a lot of the downstream industries that serviced the Palisades, like landscaping workers, housekeepers, and assistants who served the residents of the community.  It’s those downstream services that are now feeling the effects of the fires that ravaged this community.  They have seen a significant clientele desolated, and it’s affecting their bottom line because there is nothing in place to compensate for that usually reliable income.  The same goes for Altadena, which is even more desolated by this tragedy.  Not only did Altadena lose a great many homes in their residential areas, but also the town center with it’s collection of mom and pop stores and businesses got lost in the fire.  It’s a scar on that community that may never be healed, as a whole chunk of their history is now gone.  The famous faces you see on the news are only a small part of the tragedy, and even those who didn’t lose their homes in the fire are going to be feeling the after effects for a while as so much business in this town was tied into these communities.

But there is the argument that putting things on hold out of sympathy would be making the situation even worse.  So much of the industry is tied into awards season, and cancelling the show would do more bad than good.  A lot of below the line workers look forward every year to staging the Oscars.  These include stagehands, lighting technicians, camera technicians, security details, caterers and photographers.  And that’s just for the show itself.  In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, you have tailor and dressmakers across the city prepping things to wear for all the people who will be attending the ceremony, as well as publicists and marketing teams working hard to push their clients’ films towards Awards season wins.  For all these below the line workers, the Awards season is essential to their yearly income.  They can count on the Oscars to be presented every year without a hitch, and they plan all of their activity that year around this certainty.  Suddenly cancelling the Oscars would either mean money would go to waste on products already spent with no chance of recouping, or budgets would have to be cut in the back half of the year to account for the shortfall that occurred because of no ceremony being held.  It would be especially disruptive for boutique businesses that are trying to advance in the competitive Hollywood industry.  Hollywood isn’t just a movie making business, but an industry that supports many other disciplines in the creative arts.  And awards season is one of the primary engines of what keeps the industry going.  It may not have a major downstream effect if something like a luncheon or a press event gets cancelled due to a tragedy, but cancelling something as vital as the Oscars would definitely be a disruption.

Going into this awards season, the considerations for the victims of the fires should certainly be met, but also the idea that the awards should be cancelled for the sake of good taste is also a bad idea.  I believe that the plan to scale things back a bit is not a terrible idea.  You definitely don’t want to put on the air of disrespect by pretending that nothing had happened.  I think you are definitely going to see a lot of praise for first responders who helped put out the fires, with some of them maybe being invited onstage at the ceremony itself for a round of applause.  The call for the show to be a fundraiser for charity is also a good thing, as it allows for anyone watching the show to contribute towards helping those in need.  What Hollywood definitely needs to do is to walk that fine line of honoring itself and also not making the tragedy something that is self-serving for themselves.  The people in that room wearing extravagant suits and dresses will be doing alright.  The show just needs to put a spotlight on those who were most affected by the fires.  And at the same time, also show that Hollywood is still as vibrant as it’s always been; that they are ready for making the future a lot better.  Like tragedies before, with 9/11 and Covid, the resilience of the movies and the Oscars has helped the world to heal before and it can happen again.  While we acknowledge the human cost of this tragedy, we should also celebrate the films that we love that help us move forward.  That’s what this awards season in particular should do.  Make us remember why a place like Hollywood is so important to our culture and why it’s important to recognize and support the ones who keep it moving, especially those whose work remains largely unseen by the general public.

A lot of lessons are going to be learned from these devastating fires.  It definitely shows how much we are at the mercy of climate change, and that incidents like this sadly will become more common.  We definitely need to take climate seriously and build up infrastructure to deal with it’s changes.  Fire stations also need to be funded much better than they are and firefighters, who do so much thankless work every single day, should be paid much better as well.  There also needs to be accountability over how we rebuild from this disaster, as insurance fraud is rampant and many people are not getting compensated the way they should in the wake of devastating tragedies.  Also, the price gouging that landlords are putting on renters all across the city in the wake of this disaster needs to end.  Hollywood is just one industry within the City of Los Angeles that is feeling the residual effects of this disaster, and the long term repercussions will be around for decades.  Who knows what kind of effect the inhalation of smoke from these fires may have on the health of Angelinos in the years ahead.  It’s going to be a long recovery period, one that may be even worse because of the shenanigans going on in Washington, but that’s a rant that I’d rather not get into.  The one thing that I wish I can pass on to my readers is that you continue to show support for those who suffered in this tragedy by not just giving what you can to charity, but also to keep supporting the movies that the victims of the fires had a hand in making.  The continued success of movies and TV shows made in Hollywood will help ensure that many of those who lost their livelihoods in the fire will have a chance to rebuild with continued employment in a vibrant and thriving industry.   It’s not just the wealthy movie stars that need help, it’s all the below the line workers who are dependent on the industry not missing a beat that are very much need of support.  Like a phoenix from the ashes, Hollywood will thrive again, and that’s why it’s important for events like the Oscars to still move forward.

Like any other year, you’d expect at least one movie hitting the big screen that takes advantage of the holiday season and centers it’s story around theme of Christmastime.  This year is no exception.  We were greeted with a major one this year in the form of the action film, Red One (2024), which brings a bit of Michael Bay-esque mayhem to the Santa Claus mythos.  The movie also brings in two of the biggest action movie stars in Hollywood today, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, to give it even more cinematic gravitas.  Unfortunately, even with it’s well-timed holiday season release date, the film failed to deliver the presents at the box office, becoming a rare misfire for the the two stars on the marquee.  But that’s not the thing that got the notice of Hollywood insiders.  What really sparked a conversation around this movie was it’s astronomical price tag.  The movie, which is based around an original concept centered on the mythos of Santa and holiday traditions, cost over $250 million to make.  That is an astonishingly high production budget for what is essentially nothing more than a Christmas movie.  Now, the movie was financed by Amazon Studios, which is part of one of the world’s wealthiest corporations, so it’s soft box office results will not exactly sink the fortunes of the studio, but even still, many are questioning why a Christmas film needed a quarter of a billion dollar budget.  It’s been speculated that the budget ballooned because of cost overruns due to the lack of professionalism on the part of it’s main star (Dwayne Johnson) who caused multiple delays, but it still doesn’t account for why the project needed to keep going despite all of the production issues.  The answer lies in the fact that Holiday movies have grown into a much larger business over the last couple years.

In the last few decades, we’ve seen a rise in what can be considered Holiday blockbusters.  Christmas films certainly aren’t anything new, as they have existed in Hollywood as far back as the early days with classics like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).  But it was with the success of Home Alone (1990) that Hollywood took notice that a Christmas themed movie could not only perform well at the box office, but also be dominant too.  Further Christmas themed movies would continue to emerge afterwards that were not only successful but could also lead at the box office.  There was The Santa Clause (1994), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), all of which delivered surprisingly strong box office results.  In some of the cases, these movies succeeded not just because they capitalized on the holiday season, but because they connected with audiences in a way that transcended their holiday theming.  Home Alone especially stands out more for it’s comedic pratfalls than it does for it’s holiday aesthetics, because that’s what drove people to the theaters over and over again.  This is usually what separates the good holiday films from the bad, as not every holiday movie is a success at the box office.  Red One is proving that right now, as it does not have the legs to carry it through the holidays and will likely be out of theaters even before Christmas Day itself.  But, there is still a lot of signs that Hollywood is not weary of banking heavily in Christmas themed movies anytime soon even as movies like Red One continue to eat it at the box office.  What we are finding out is that Holiday movies are a far more resilient genre all on their own that have longer shelf lives than most other types of movies.

The reason why studios are willing to invest so much in new holiday themed films is because of something called the long tail effect.  This long tail effect is when a movie premieres in theaters or somewhere else and remains in the public view long after, You see it with movies that remain profitable many years later, helped by a healthy presence in subsequent television airings and re-releases.  Some movies get rediscovered this way too, such as It’s a Wonderful Life which had initially bombed at the box office and then later became a perennial classic.  While the long tail effect can happen to movies in any genre, it seems to more frequently happen with holiday films.  This has been an interesting phenomenon in recent years and it is beginning to be reflected in the way that more and more holiday films are being produced.  Hollywood certainly is more comfortable investing in something that they know is going to have long term value beyond it’s initial release.  One thing that has certainly changed in recent years is the frequency.  While it was common to see a new holiday classic emerge every couple of years, we now are seeing at least one new movie a year specifically be spotlighted with a Christmas theme at it’s center.  This year it’s Red One, a couple years ago it was the R-rated action comedy Violent Night (2022).  And I’m sure that the next couple of years will give us plenty more.  But what is interesting is that these movies are not just being made to solely rely on their theatrical box office.  Now, many more holiday movies are getting made with the intention of sticking around for many years.

What I think has contributed to this trend is the creation of programming blocks on cable television and on streaming.  These are special selections of movies centered on Christmas that are meant to cater to their audience’s desire to see holiday themed entertainment in the lead up to the special day.  The cable channel Freeform dedicates the entire month of December to playing nothing but Holiday themed movies and specials.  And on Christmas Day itself, the cable network TBS devotes it’s channel to a marathon run of one specific movie, 1983’s A Christmas Story, which has become an annual tradition all on it’s own.  On streaming services, there are specific specialty pages created just to help viewers find holiday themed movies and show episodes.  And what these specially selected programming blocks do is to keep the same holiday themed movies and specials in the public eye year after year.  These have definitely helped in making the long tail effect work especially well for holiday movies.  But, the programming blocks can’t just survive on the same small sampling of holiday classics we all know about.  They need new entries to help keep things fresh over time, though the best of them still remain an essential piece.  Sure, you’ll easily see evergreen titles like Home Alone or The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in the mix, but every year there are newer movies that get added, whether created as an original by the station or the streamer in question, or became an essential addition due to it’s box office performance.  It’s too early to know if Red One will see that kind of future, though the fact that it was made by Amazon tells you that it’s almost a certainty that Prime Video will be spotlighting it on their front page for many Christmases to come.

While these programming blocks definitely take advantage of the holiday season as a whole, it’s hard to know what kind of movies will become perennial favorites.  The problem is that Hollywood is producing a glut of holiday movies every year, and most of them don’t stick the way that they hoped they would.  Hallmark has created literally hundreds of holiday themed movies, but I don’t think many people can name one right off the top of their heads.  Still, Hallmark’s holiday block of films are among the most watched on television every single year, so their business model is still working well for them, even if their Christmas movies all blend together into an indistinguishable holiday blob of entertainment.  The same thing is also happening with broadcasters that cater to the same crowd as Hallmark, such as the Lifetime network or Netflix.  These easy to digest, non-offensive holiday themed movies are good at capturing that holiday spirit, but they don’t stand out like the perennial classics do, and those are the ones that continue to drive the highest viewership during the holiday season.  People just have the desire to re-watch the best Christmas movies there are to get into the holiday spirit, but it’s a hard canon to add onto.  When the same movies continue to generate viewership year after year, why try to replace any of them?  Just like any other genre, it’s hard to know exactly what movies are going to click with audiences and holiday movies ae no different.  For some of the “perennial” Christmas films, they were likely created without ever knowing that they would take on another life as an essential holiday film.  And yet, Hollywood tries a lot harder than they should trying to manufacture the next big holiday classic.

This is probably the reason why holiday films are becoming bigger budget undertakings in recent years.  The bar has been set high by the movies that we recognize as a perennial holiday classic.  A movie like Red One attempts to hit those holiday tropes in a big way, and sadly comes across as too much of a manufactured product rather than a movie made with a lot of heart.  The movie banks on us knowing all of the mythos surrounding Santa Claus and the Christmas season, mainly through the secularized sense, and tries to use all that as the unique element added into a standard action movie plot.  It’s a mix that doesn’t work as intended because we can see the intention behind the film, which is a cyncial ploy to re-sell a regurgitated, standard action movie plot with a new gimmick, and hope it hits that holiday sweet spot.  This is certainly the response it’s getting in theaters, but separated from it’s box office disappointment is it possible that the movie will have a long shelf life as a title spotlighted on Amazon’s own streaming platform?  It’s too early to know, but that long tail effect has kept even bad holiday movies like Jingle All the Way (1996) and Eight Crazy Nights (2002) in the public eye for much longer than they should have been.  The huge budget that Red One received certainly gives it a grander feel, and that’s likely what the filmmakers were intending with their movie.  Because the bar is high for standing out in the genre, you’ve got to present your movie as something pretty special.  Maybe Red One accomplishes this on a visual level, but it remains pretty hollow as a story.  Still, it’s an indicator that holiday movies are getting more ambitious as they try to crack open that door into becoming a perennial favorite for the season.

The only thing is, a lot of the holiday classics became just that out of more humble means.  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) was just a second sequel in a comedy franchise, taking the next logical step past the summer based vacation of the first movie, and managing to surpass it with it’s spot on holiday observations mined for comedy.  It certainly didn’t need a massive budget to do that.  A Christmas Story and Home Alone were also likewise modest projects that only grew in esteem over the years due to their perfectly executed storylines that tie into Christmas.  It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even about Christmas for most of it’s run time, and only incorporates the holiday into it’s inspirational final act.  In all, it’s difficult to actually manufacture a perennial holiday classic, and even with a bigger budget and big conceptual gimmick, your movie is still going to face an uphill battle to be accepted as an essential part of the holiday season.  But, this season also gives more movies a chance than any other genre towards achieving that classic status, because there is a audience that is primed every year to expect something new over the holidays.  Being a Christmas movie definitely brings it’s own built in public attention because there are people out there who seek out holiday themed entertainment.  While that journey to the podium of all time classics is a very narrow one, the platform to launch that journey from is quite broad.  That’s why we see such a large annual investment from Hollywood towards making so many holiday themed movies.  And in the case of movies like Red One, they are getting to be bigger and more ambitious in the hopes of standing out.  But as we’ve also seen, the holiday audience is discerning  and more prone towards accepting past favorites over flashy newcomers.

The holiday season is becoming a much bigger deal when it comes to the movies that take advantage of it.  The reason why Hollywood considers it essential to invest so much money into creating new holiday films is because they hope that one or more will give them that long term success that holiday films typically bring.  With the case of Red One, the question arises about what is too much to spend on a holiday movie?  Red One is certainly going to be a prime example of how not to spend money on a Christmas movie, and will almost certainly leave Amazon in the red.  But, is Amazon looking at the short term box office or the long term viewership on Prime Video as as their barometer for the success of the film.  It may play differently as a permanent fixture on their streaming platform that they can re-promote every holiday season.  But, it’s just one example out of many.  None of the classics are ever likely to diminish over time, because they continue to hit that sweet spot for the holidays that we all appreciate.  The question is, what else may land in that special category of perennial favorites?  For the amount of money that is increasingly becoming a part of Hollywood’s plans for the holiday season, something of quality is likely to emerge.  The long term prospects for success the a perennial holiday film provides is what helps to drive new investment into the genre each year, and eventually something will land and become a new classic.  It may not be this year, but Hollywood will keep trying.  In any case, there is an excitingly open market during the holiday season that we all participate in as we search for new favorites while also indulging in what makes Christmas so fun.  And the classics will remain there as well to help give us that entertainment fix during the holidays.  I for one always have to catch Christmas Vacation once every year(in addition to Charlie Brown’s Christmas).  I’m sure that all of you have your go to essentials as well.  With the frequency that Hollywood is attempting to give us something new each year, let’s hope that another holiday classic is waiting to be opened under that Christmas tree very soon.

The early 2000’s were an interesting transitional time for comic book movies.  After the crushing failure of 1997’s Batman and Robin, the genre as a whole went into a bit of a recession as it tried to re-establish what it needed to be.  The Batman franchise had evolved from moody and grim to campy and colorful, and it was not what audiences were looking for.  Heading into the new millennium, a different approach was looked at.  Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) got the ball rolling by grounding the super hero mythos in something that was more familiar to the world that we live in.  A couple years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) took the genre in a direction that made it’s adventure fun but not overly camp.  In many ways, the genre was heading in a direction that honestly was much closer to the comic books that these movies were based on.  Fidelity to the comic books was the guiding force now rather than the traditional standards of genre that had been present before.  And each comic book movie was able to have it’s own identity rather than follow formula, though there were still common tropes that still stuck around.  By the end of the 2000’s, the comic book genre had gone from being on life support to being the dominant force in Hollywood, and it would only continue to grow into the following decade and beyond.  But while the mighty forces of Marvel and DC were battling for supremacy in Hollywood, it could be argued that both have an entirely different source to thank for setting the tone right for the genre.  The movie that had the most profound influence on the super hero genre over the last 20 years (with impacts on everything from character development to the sense of humor present) didn’t come from Marvel nor DC, but rather from an animation studio called Pixar, which itself saw it’s own meteoric rise during this same period.

Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) came at a pivotal time for both animation and super heroes.  For Pixar, it was a big leap forward for them in terms of animation.  Up to that point, they had steered away from depicting human characters, often leaving them to the background as they were far more difficult to model in a believable way.  You look at the early character models of characters like Andy and Sid in Toy Story (1995) and you can see why Pixar chose to center their early movies on stylized toy characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear.  Animals or non-humanoid creatures also gave the studio more creative freedom with the primitive tools they had to work with, which was evidenced in the movies A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).  However, they faced increased competition from Dreamworks Animation, which struck a huge hit with Shrek (2001), which featured more human characters in prominent roles.  For studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, the dilemma was to find the perfect medium in animating humans that would avoid the uncanny valley pitfall that can often occur.  The solution that Pixar ultimately landed on was to treat their human characters less like perfect recreations, and instead look for ways to make them stylized in a way that would make them easier to animate.  And what better example to look for exaggerated forms of human physique than in comic books.  There are plenty of examples of comic book artists doing away with traditional character models and bringing their own unique stylistic twists to the looks of popular characters; in many cases creating body shapes that could only make sense as part of comic book art.  This is likely what inspired the artists at Pixar and drew them into the idea of making a super hero movie that felt very heavily inspired by the freeing graphic inventiveness of comic books.  Instead of characters with perfectly rendered anatomy, Pixar’s Incredibles would have humans with extreme features that not only made them stand out, but would also be perfectly accentuated to their personalities as well.

The interesting thing about how The Incredibles came to be at Pixar is that it marked the first time that the studio went outside of their own inner circle to green-light a new project.  Now, writer and director Brad Bird was no stranger to the Pixar team before he came to work for them.  Bird was part of the same class at Cal Arts that also included Pixar Animation co-founder John Lassater, and both men started out as junior animators at Disney in the early 80’s, so they were already familiar to each other.  Bird, however, left Disney fairly early on to pursue independent work.  He would work on projects such as Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series, as well as directing a couple episodes of The Simpsons, including creating key supporting characters such as Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob that still remain a part of the show to this day.  It was, however, when he made his feature film debut in 1999 with The Iron Giant that Brad Bird began to make a big splash in the animation industry.  Though The Iron Giant is celebrated as a masterpiece today, it did not have a great opening in theaters and ended up prematurely closed the studio that made it, which ended up making Brad Bird a free agent again.  Regardless of box office, the love for Iron Giant was strong across the animation industry so there were a lot of studios that were willing to meet with Bird during this time, and that’s when John Lassater decided to call up his old colleague.  It would prove to be fortuitous because Brad Bird had been developing this idea for a film centered around a family of super heroes that fit perfectly with the desire of Pixar to experiment more with stylized human characters.  Up to this point, the Pixar legacy team had consisted of the people who worked on the original shorts as well as Toy Story.  Lassater had directed the firs three features, while Pete Doctor and Andrew Stanton helmed Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo respectively.  The Incredibles would be the first new film by someone who had not come up through the ranks of Pixar, but as evidenced by the results, Brad Bird fit in very much with the Pixar community.

There are a lot of layers to what makes The Incredibles a perfect super hero movie.  For one thing, the film is not about the characters doing super hero things, but rather it shows us how they try to build a life outside of their super powered identity.  In the world of The Incredibles, super heroic acts have been made illegal due to a string of incidents where people have become collateral damage in the fights between super heroes and super villains and in turn have led to law suits.  As a result, super heroes have live anonymously underground, forced to suppress their abilities.  The Parrs, a family of “supers,” try to blend in with this new normal and this is the focus of the story.  The movie has fun with how the Parrs use their powers in this domestic setting, but it’s ultimately about how they function as a family unit rather than what they must do to save the world, which does come into play in the final act.  The movie brilliantly allows each character to have their own power type too.  Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, has super strength; his wife Helen is super stretchy and goes by the alter ego Elastigirl.  And their children are unique as well; shy Violet can make herself invisible and creates a force field around her, while hyperactive Dash has super speed.  And the baby Jack-Jack, well, that would be spoiling too much.  The Parr family also has a close relationship with Lucius Best, whose freezing powers have earned him the name Frozone.  You can see the parallels with these characters with pre-existing characters from comic books, like Ice Man, Invisible Girl, or The Flash, but putting them together as a family was a unique way of framing their story and examining how being super would function in an average family narrative.  Super hero families aren’t a novel idea; Marvel has tried for years to make a Fantastic Four movie work, with attempt number three coming next summer.  But with The Incredibles, it’s a focal point for the story that works and helps to endear each of these super beings in a way that makes them relatable to the everyday average family.

But what was the thing that set The Incredibles apart as a super hero movie.  What Brad Bird did, in addition to directing an action packed film, was craft a script that in many ways deconstructed the very idea of being a super hero.  The brilliance of the story is that the super heroes are forced to suppress their powers in order to function as a citizen of society, and if a super hero can’t use their powers, what are they left with.  Bob Parr’s crisis in the film is that he has all this power, and yet he has to work a boring day job like everyone else.  What this motivates him to do is to break the rules just a little bit while still trying to balance his home life, with a wife who is more determined to keep him and the family in check.  We see that Bob is a hero to his core and wants to use his powers for good, but is foolhardy to the point where his desires don’t take into account the repercussions of what his actions may do.  By looking into this side of Bob’s character, we see how Brad Bird is examining the duality of being both a god among men and a flawed human being at the same time.  It’s a more introspective examination of the tropes of super herodom that in many ways has found itself worked into the whole genre at large.  When Marvel began their MCU, it was noticeable from the get go that they were taking a much more introspective look at the characters themselves.  The humor of the MCU is definitely more meta than super hero films of the past, and you can’t help but recall how a lot of their deconstruction of super hero tropes fell reminiscent of the ones from The Incredibles.  There’s a through line to be sure of the jokes in Incredibles about villains monologuing leading to 20 years later where Wolverine punches out a villain and says “Not everyone gets a speech,” as seen in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

But The Incredibles is far more than just examining the home life of super heroes.  The point wasn’t to just show what Superman does when he is only Clark Kent.  Brad Bird’s film is ultimately about embracing the special part of what makes us who we are; something that is a common theme in his films.  Some have criticized the movie for promoting an Ayn Randian objectivist point of view; where exceptional people should be held up as better than the rest of society.  The Randian elements seem most pronounced in the movie with Bob Parr’s frustrations over being held back by the anti-super laws, but I don’t see the movie as a validation of Randian beliefs either.  If anything, Brad Bird’s point in the film is not objectivism, but rather the way society scapegoats it’s problems on those who are different.  Ultimately, the Parr family realizes that just sitting on the sidelines doesn’t make society better either, and that the need to conform is not just restrictive to them, but it’s also preventing them from having a healthy family life as well.  When they get to be super powered in the open, they grow closer together as a family.  Exceptionalism, according to Brad Bird, is not in being better than everyone else, but in being the best version of oneself.  That’s something that he showed more definitively in his next film, Ratatouille (2007), where the motto “Anyone Can Cook,” reveals itself to be the idea that a great artist can be anyone, even the least expected.  And he also celebrates the idea that people who chose less power can often be the best representation of oneself; such as The Iron Giant choosing not to be a weapon and instead becoming “Superman.”  This is another idea that has helped shape the characterizations of super heroes over the last 20 years.  It’s the motivation that makes Wonder Woman walk into No Man’s Land and act as a human shield, or Spider-Man choosing to let everyone in the world forget who he is, or Thor letting his home world be destroyed in order to save it’s people.  Like the Incredibles family, modern day super heroes don’t just choose to be super to be better; in many ways they have no choice but to do what’s best for those they care about.

It’s the complexity of character that The Incredibles brought that certainly helped create ripples throughout the super hero genre, though there certainly were many cases before of complex characterizations.  One other thing that the movie had a strong influence on was the way it showcased the power sets of it’s characters.  The movie seems to have the most fun with Helen’s Elastigirl power set, as her stretching ability gave the animators a lot to work with.  One of the biggest highlights of the movie though is the sequence dubbed the “One Hundred Mile Dash.”  It’s a chase scene involving Dash as he tries to escape guardsmen trying to hunt him down.  Even to this day I don’t think super speed powers have been as showcased as well on screen as it is here, and we’ve had two Quicksilvers and one Flash in the movies by now.  There are many other great elements of the movie that the movie set a high bar for that I don’t think any other super hero film has been able to match.  One is the presence of the character Edna Mode (voiced by Brad Bird himself).  We see all these amazing super suits in Marvel and DC movies, but are never given an explanation about who makes them, with a few exceptions.  A character like Edna is a great addition here, and it makes sense that a person who designs suits for super heroes would be a type A personality herself.  She is easily one of the highlights of the movie and a character type you wish would be more present in the genre.  One other brilliant part of the movie is the villain, Syndrome; easily one of the greatest in all of Pixar’s canon.  Syndrome’s role is a great deconstruction of toxic fandom, where one’s fascination with super powers often leads to eventual loathing of not having control over it, and a desire to flip the power dynamic in their favor.  Syndrome wishes to create a society where everyone has access to super hero ability (which he will profit off of by selling it to them), so that in his eyes, “when everyone is super, than no one will be.”  He’s a character that has become frighteningly all too real in the last 20 years, as tech bro billionaires have used their wealth to bully their way into politics and culture.  Given Pixar’s close proximity to Silicon Valley, it’s almost like Brad Bird and his team knew what was coming and tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen and are now in a world increasingly run by Syndromes.

Unlike The Iron Giant, Incredibles was an immediate success upon it’s initial release.  The movie grossed a respectable $260 million domestic and Brad Bird won his first Academy Award for Animated Feature that year.  What’s more, it was a major milestone for Pixar Animation, as it helped them improve their style of animation and showed that they could tell a human story without having to be rigid in their animation of the human figures.  You know you’ve got great stylized human characters when each one’s silhouette alone conveys personality.  It also was a great leap forward in staging, pushing the medium of computer animation further into a cinematic mode, with the movie very much reaching epic heights in it’s sense of scale.  But at it’s heart, Brad Bird drove home the idea that this was a family film as well.  The heroes aren’t just defined by their deeds, but in how they act as a family unit as well.  And it contrasts so brilliantly with a villain who only sees the powers as the only thing that makes a hero who they are, completely missing the whole point of what heroism is.  While The Incredibles is working with tropes that were already there present in the genre, it did help us to look at them in a fresh new way, and that in many ways guided the shifting winds that would define the genre through the whole rise of the MCU and the DCEU.  One noteworthy contribution to the genre that definitely has a direct connection to The Incredibles is the contributions of it’s music composer Michael Giacchino.  After writing music for television and video games for years, Giacchino was able to make his studio feature film debut as composer for The Incredibles, with a mid-century jazz score reminiscent of the James Bond films. Cut to a decade later, and Giacchino is credited with writing the fanfare for Marvel Studios.  You now hear his music before every Marvel movie, which is quite a legacy to leave behind, and it all started with writing the score for The Incredibles.  Marvel even gave the longtime comic book fan a chance to make his debut behind the camera as director of the special Werewolf by Night (2022) for Disney+.  Even 20 years later and The Incredibles still remains a high water mark not just for animation, but for super hero films in general.  Even it’s sequel, Incredibles 2 (2018) performed like a MCU film at the box office, grossing over a billion worldwide.  Culturally, it is undeniably Brad Bird’s most influential film, and that’s saying a lot for a man with multiple masterpieces on his resume.  It’s an action packed ride, but also one where the heart is in the right place, showing how heroism in the end is not about personal glory, but instead about discovering the best way to use what you have for good.  It’s old school in that way, and there’s no school like the old school.