It’s a strange time for the movie studios that defined the identity of Hollywood.  We know them as the Big 5; Warner Brothers Discovery, NBC Universal, Sony, Disney, and of course Paramount.  For the longest time, it was known as the Big 6, but the studio previously known as 20th Century Fox ceased to be independent after a merger with the Walt Disney Company that finalized in 2019.  It’s fate was one of the most revealing signs of an industry that was in flux and about to change forever.  The rise of streaming caused a disruption in the normal business model that Hollywood had been running over the last half century.  With the studios wanting to get in on the lucrative new distribution model, they went through a busy period of content consolidation, cementing stronger holds on the properties that they had acquired over the years.  This also led to several mega mergers like the Disney and Fox one, where combined catalogs of movies and shows would help boost the content library for these new streamers.  However, this streaming arms race led to several financial problems down the road.  Hard cuts have had to be made to these newly expanded studios like Disney/Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery, but no studio had a more dire outlook in these latter days of the streaming wars than Paramount Pictures.  Paramount, the last remaining studio actually located in Hollywood itself, was facing some economic shortfalls this year that forced it’s parent company, National Amusements, to pursue a sale.  The industry was watching this development closely, because depending on who ended up owning Paramount in the end could either signal a new era for the century old studio, or be a sign of the end of yet another storied brand within Hollywood.  History is important to the identity of Hollywood, but this is also a business that sometimes can steamroll over the past in the name of progress.

Throughout Paramount’s history, it has seen the studio pass through many different hands, but all the while it has still remained one of Hollywood’s most legendary studios.  Founded in 1914 by Adolph Zukor, it is the second oldest studio in Hollywood still running today after Universal Pictures.  Funny enough, Paramount started it’s history off with a merger between Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company and producer Jesse L. Lasky’s Feature Play Company.  They began to make silent pictures out of a small barn on what is now Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, giving their directorial duties to an inexperienced stage manager at the time named Cecil B. DeMille.  The barn still survives today, though it has been moved to Highland Avenue across from the Hollywood Bowl and is now the Hollywood Heritage Museum.  In the 20’s, they used the profits from their movies to establish a larger facility located on Melrose Boulevard and that’s been their home ever since.  In 1927, Paramount adopted it’s now iconic logo of a mountain top ringed by an arch of 22 stars.  The meaning behind the stars has been lost to time, but the logo has remained fairly unchanged in almost 100 years; merely upgraded graphically with the advancements in filmmaking over time.   At Paramount, the key to their success were it’s stars, and they were the home to all the silent greats like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino to name a few.  In the meantime, Paramount was also growing itself into one of the titans of exhibition as well, being the owners of numerous movie theaters across the country.  Unfortunately for them, their rapid growth in the exhibition side of the business would back and bite them, and the result would change Hollywood forever.

Paramount created a practice called “block booking” which made it so that any theater that wanted to screen a film starring one particular star would also have to buy a year’s worth of other Paramount movies.  Paramount wasn’t alone in this practice in Hollywood, but they were the most prolific studio owned theatrical distributor too, which gave them close to a monopoly in the business.  This practice of “block booking” made it impossible for independent theater owners to rise up in the business because it limited the amount of movies that would have been available to screen.  So, anti-trust lawsuits were filed, which were argued all the way up to the Supreme Court.  This led to the landmark United States v. Paramount Pictures decision of 1950, which effectively broke up the movie studios ownership of movie theaters and brought an end to the movie studio system as we knew it up to that point.  All of the studios in Hollywood were effected, but none more so than Paramount.  It lost a significant share of it’s yearly income after being forced to sell off it’s theatrical division, and it spent much of the 1950’s and 60’s struggling to regain it’s past glory.  Meanwhile, a corporate manufacturing conglomerate named Gulf+Western was beginning to pivot into the entertainment business.  They acquired two major Hollywood players in 1966, one was the television studio Desilu Pictures and the other was of course Paramount.  The combination of the two would prove fortuitous because Desilu happened to be the rights holders of a popular shows like  Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, two brands that would over time become some of the most valuable franchises under the Paramount umbrella.  Under Gulf+Western, Paramount would see a revival in the 1970’s, especially under the supervision of their new head of production, a young executive named Robert Evans, who would be a hit making machine, greenlighting beloved classics like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), Chinatown (1974) and The Godfather Parts I and II (1972, 1974) during his tenure.

The success continued through the 80’s and 90’s, and Paramount would also become the starting off point for some of the biggest power players in the industry.  Both Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg would capitalize on the success of their launch of the Indiana Jones franchise at Paramount by jumping over to the leadership at Disney.  Paramount also became the original home of the mega successful producer team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and they would deliver a huge hit for Paramount with the Tom Cruise led Top Gun (1986).  Cruise himself would also set up shop as a producer within Paramount, working almost exclusively with the studio for most of his career.  But, a pivotal moment came in 1993 when billionaire Sumner Redstone’s media conglomerate Viacom decided to add Paramount to it’s portfolio.  In a deal worth $9 billion at the time, Redstone’s National Amusements, the parent company of Viacom, became the primary shareholder of Paramount Pictures and all of it’s properties.  A few short years later, Viacom would also acquire the television network CBS, which now put all three Big 3 TV networks now under the control of movie studios (NBC and ABC were already owned by Universal and Disney respectively).  With the combination of it’s movie library, it’s valuable franchises from the old Desilu studio, and now a whole TV network under one roof, Viacom built Paramount into one of the most powerful studios in Hollywood.  Viacom would continue to expand into the cable television market, acquiring channels like Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and Nickelodeon.  As time went on, Viacom was looking to take it’s vast library of movies and shows and use it to make a foothold in the new streaming market.  Initially, they tried to make their launch under the CBS name, calling their platform CBS All Access.  It became clear that this wasn’t a strong enough brand to make a difference in the face of competition with HBO Max and Disney+.  So, Viacom decided to undergo a whole rebrand with the Paramount name being their flagship.  CBS All Access would become Paramount+ and Viacom would be renamed Paramount Global.

With over a hundred years of experience in Hollywood, you would imagine that the Paramount name would help bring fortune to this new era of streaming.  But even though they had some modest success, mainly helped by showrunner Taylor Sheridan and his hugely popular drama Yellowstone, Paramount+ has fallen well short of expectations.  Like much of the other studios in Hollywood who jumped on board the streaming craze, Paramount is learning the hard lesson that streaming wasn’t going to be the bottomless well of fortune that they all thought it would be.  For Paramount, their lack of growth in streaming combined with the enormous amount of debt they acquired in order to grow and acquire assets over the years, suddenly put them in a bind they haven’t experienced in a long while.  This all came to a head this year, as Shari Redstone, the CEO of National Amusements after the death of her father Sumner in 2020, was looking to offload the company and it’s assets.  This led to a lot of worries within the industry as to what would happen to the legendary studio.  Would it be swallowed up by another studio like Fox had under Disney.  Or would it be bought by a Wall Street backed corporate raider who would break it up and sell off the scraps of what the studio once was, effectively killing it completely.  It all depended on who would meet Shari’s asking price.  The bidding war itself became a bit of a fiasco, as what looked like done deals quickly fell apart as agreements would change seemingly every day.  All the while, Paramount Global’s stock value sank to it’s lowest mark ever, being traded at only a fraction of what it’s competitors Warner Brothers and Disney were trading at.  Thankfully, powerful indie producer Skydance Media, which has had a long history working in collaboration with Paramount, including being a part of the most recent Star Trek and Mission: Impossible films, offered a merger deal with Paramount Global valued at $8 billion.  Skydance CEO David Ellison would effectively become the head of Paramount under this new agreement and National Amusements would no longer have the controlling interest in the studio moving forward, ending their 30 year control over the studio.  For Shari Redstone, and most of the industry, this is the most ideal outcome as it keeps the studio as we know it intact, securing Sumner Redstone’s legacy as the head of the company, and prevents it’s assets from being sold off separately.

While it looks like Paramount is getting a happyish ending out of this, their struggle is still very much a clear example of how fragile legacies can be in Hollywood.  For a lot of Hollywood’s history, we’ve seen many film companies come and go, and when one ceases to exist, their library of titles suddenly hang in limbo.  If this were to happen to one of the remaining Big 5 studios, it would have a profound ripple effect across the industry.  With Paramount spending a few months of uncertainty during the bidding war, it made a lot of people worried that we were in fact seeing the last days of this storied studio.  At one point, Sony expressed interest in acquiring Paramount, which would reduce the number of big studios down to just 4.  Another merger on the level of what we saw with Disney and Fox would have been devastating for Hollywood as it would have put a whole lot of people out of work due to redundancies.  And then there was the possibility of the studio being dismantled in a fire sale of sorts, splitting all the different properties of Paramount apart and selling them to interested parties all across the business, making the former Paramount brand itself worthless.  This is something not uncommon in Hollywood.  Other once powerful studios like RKO were dismantled over the years and sold off in pieces to other studios.  These kinds of things happen in Hollywood usually due to movie productions that go way over budget, to the point where no amount of box office success will save them.  United Artists, the studio formed by the combined forces of former Paramount contracted stars Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplain, was once a powerful force in Hollywood and even made huge profits off of their American distribution of the James Bond franchise.  Then came the disaster that was Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), a box office bomb so costly that it put United Artists into bankruptcy.  They were eventually acquired by MGM, which itself fell into hard times and today is now owned by Amazon.  Smaller companies fare even worse as they lose control over their libraries of films, and those that can’t find a home in another studio end up getting lost in vaults over time and forgotten to the world.

So what does the Skydance and Paramount merger mean.  It’s still uncertain, as the deal won’t close until 2025.  But what likely will happen, as is the case with most mergers, is that there will be layoffs in both companies.  Paramount may need to offload some of it’s assets in order to meet Skydance’s offer price.  In the entirety of the Viacom era, Paramount saw massive expansion that saw their assets grow to a point where it may be too big to manage.  In all likelihood, where Paramount may make their cuts is in the struggling cable division, as streaming has become a bigger concern of theirs.  There are already interested parties who want the BET Network, so that is likely going to be one of the channels that will leave the Paramount portfolio.  Speaking of streaming, there is talk of Paramount+ either being completely overhauled, sun-setted, or merged with another streamer, as it currently is one of the key contributors leading to Paramount’s dire financial situation.   There’s talk of Paramount+ combining with Warner Brother’s MAX in what would likely be one of the biggest mergers yet to come in the streaming market, which itself will affect the industry as a whole.  But whatever move it makes, the goal is to preserve Paramount’s history as best it can be saved.  That was what Shari Redstone was so adamant about.  Her father built the company up over 30 years and she didn’t want that legacy to disappear.  Unfortunately, the nature of the business is not kind to legacy.  Shareholders were likely not happy with the prolonged and ever-changing process it took to reach a deal.  Some shareholders likely would’ve been happier if Shari Redstone had just started selling off the assets of the studio for short term profits.  Hollywood is first and foremost a business, and what it takes to make a studio like Paramount run is the confidence in investors that the company can continue to make money.  Too much effort put into preserving the past can make investors warry because they are more concerned about the future, and that’s what makes it so hard for studios to maintain their stature over time.  There’s no room for sentimental attachments in Hollywood.

One good thing about the Skydance/ Paramount merger is that it will give Paramount the chance to maintain it’s identity into the future.  And one of the biggest things that will remain as part of the company is the legendary studio lot itself.  Remaining in it’s same footprint over nearly 100 years, and the only studio to stay in Hollywood after all the others moved to the San Fernando Valley or Culver City, the Paramount Studio lot is a living monument to the history of cinema.  Walking under those iconic white arches you know that you are walking in the footsteps of giants, seeing soundstages where classics like Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Godfather, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Forrest Gump (1994), and many more were filmed.  Even today it’s a bustling, alive studio lot, with recent hits like Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022) keeping Paramount well positioned amongst the Big 5 studios.  Hopefully under new management with Skydance we’ll see a renewed energy at the studio that will help it survive for many more years as it currently is.  It’s just unfortunate that so much drama had to occur during the process of the company changing hands.  Paramount, for it’s whole history has had to overcome a lot of hurdles.  After being crippled by the dissolution of the studio system with the Paramount Decision by the Supreme Court, they managed to bounce back thanks to their pursuit of making quality entertainment.  They helped to revitalize old properties like Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and Transformers and turn them into billion dollar franchises.  They helped to take CBS from last place in network ratings to first place with well targeted programming like CSI and NCIS for the older crowd and The Big Bang Theory for the younger crowd.  Time will tell how Paramount+ will fare, but hopefully it doesn’t sink the future of this long time studio.  Both literally and figuratively, Paramount is Hollywood.  It’s a living reminder of what the industry has stood for, and hopefully the sun doesn’t set on the other side of it’s lofty mountaintop.

A lot of work goes into the making of a film.  A lot of money too.  And by the time it has reached the public, the hope is that audiences will not only enjoy what they see, but will want to see it again and again.  The life cycle of a movie is an interesting one to observe.  For the longest time the way a movie exists out in the world is that it first is experienced in a movie theater with a crowd of other people.  Then if the person in the audience felt a real connection with the film, then they may end up purchasing it, either as a physical copy or as a digital download online, after the film has ended it’s theatrical run.  The final stage for a movie afterwards is the licensing of the film to outlets likes television or streaming where the movie can be available to watch for the casual watcher to enjoy again or even discover for the first time.  There are even the movies that go full circle and end up getting theatrical releases again, for anniversaries or as part of a selection of titles for a festival presentation.  But it should be noted that only a select few films ever make it to this stage in their life cycle.  Sure, you would think that once a movie is made it should exist for all time.  But this sadly is not the case.  Film is a bit more finite than many of us realize and in a world that is dependent far more on digital media, we are actually seeing an acceleration of movies that fall through the cracks and are lost to time.  There are many reasons this happens, but one of the primary factors is the fact that film preservation is a costly and time consuming procedure, and the industry is just not as concerned about investing in the past.  But there is a lot of films from the past that are absolutely worth saving, even if they aren’t all classics.  It’s important because every film made, bad or good, is a record of cinematic history and that’s worth preserving.

The biggest problem that affects most films, particularly old ones, is the way that time deteriorates our physical media.  Film stock in particular is especially volatile and requires special attention.  This is especially true with older movies, some of which were filmed on highly flammable nitrate film stock.  It is said that up to 80% or more films from the silent movie era are completely lost, and of the 20% that do survive, they may be fragmented due to parts being damaged beyond repair.  That is the nature of cinematic history, that the industry wasn’t really thinking about long term preservation of their work, because it was all about getting the movies made and out into the theaters.  As we look at film preservation today, the best that we can do to recreate the way an old movie looked in it’s original state is to have a digital scan of the original camera negative, and sadly, this is the thing that ends up deteriorating first.  To compensate, the next best option is to work from a print (and the older the better).  A pristine film print is helpful, but it also is not the best quality source either, because the duplication process used to create a print from the camera negative results in a downgrade in the image, and the results are worse if you end up making a copy from something that is already a copy.  And then comes the clean-up in film restoration, which itself is time consuming and costly, which is why only the films that are deemed worthy of preservation manage to get saved.  Basically, what we know about our film history is formed around what has managed to survive all these years.  And there are several factors that can still come into play with regards to what survives.  Films have been lost forever due to fires, floods, willful destruction, and just plain old apathy.  It’s a truth about all art in general as well, as great works of literature, sculpture and illustration all have to endure the flow of time, which isn’t very forgiving to physical works.

But, certainly with the limitless ability to store data in a digital realm, works of art such as film should be able to last forever, and defy the ravages of time that have caused so many works to be lost.  Even here there are some worries.  One, even though data is not finite it still is not indestructible.  Movies that are preserved as a digital master must exist somewhere, and that somewhere is on servers computing for the digital space you are accessing the movie from.  At this point, you are dependent on that digital platform for keeping the film in their library, and this is not always a guarantee.  Streaming has changed the game quite a bit when it comes to gaining access to a movie.  In some ways, it has helped to increase exposure for a lot of movies that otherwise might have been forgotten, as streaming is dependent on having deep libraries of content to entice subscribers to join.  But, with the movie studios being far more protective of their IP, this also has led to a decrease of the flow of movies across platforms that used to define the streaming market.  When it was just Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, the studios would be paid handsomely for the license to air their movies, much like how it worked on airing for television.  This would help to give more movies a longer lifespan outside of theaters, especially if there were long-term agreements set up for airings before a movie’s initial release.  But, the consolidation of IP into each studios’ in house streaming service is having the effect of a lot of these pre-release agreements not materializing anymore, and from that point it is left up to the studios to decide what they want to do with their movies.  You might think that it benefits movies to have a secure home on a streaming platform, but that really isn’t the case as the studios are also neglectful of even their own movies.

One of the biggest problems with the consolidation of IP for the purpose of streaming is that it takes the ownership away from the consumer.  Without the licensing model being put in place, movies are locked away within the vaults of the studios more strictly, and they ultimately determine what we are going to see.  Take the example of Disney, and their Disney+ streaming service.  Sure, you have easy access to all the familiar films that we know from the studio, with the big pillars of Disney Animation, Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel being the brands easily browsed on the service.  But, sadly, Disney is putting the value in their marquee titles and not on the deeper reaches of their catalog.  One thing that especially feels underutilized on their service is the library of films they acquired from their merger with 20th Century Fox.  A whole studio’s worth of movies and television shows that spans nearly a century, and only a small handful of their classics are found on Disney+, like The Sound of Music (1965).  Sure the further integration of Hulu onto the Disney+ platform is helping to expand the roster of Fox films on the service a little, but there are still literally hundreds of movies that are out of the public view because Disney is not fully integrating the Fox library onto streaming.  The same kind of limited library access is also affecting the other studio streamers as well, with platforms like Max and Paramount+ being very selective about what is available to watch on their platform.  These streamers are also governed by algorithms that determine what should be pushed towards their audience attention, which could also lead to a decrease in exposure for some movies.  There certainly are some benefits to be sure for streaming, especially with studios beefing up their investment in new digital masters for all their titles on there, including new restorations.  But, even with the vastness of potential on digital platforms, some movies are going to be lost.

And then there’s also the more insidious action taken by the studios to remove movies and shows from their platforms entirely.  We saw not too long ago where studios like Warner Brothers and Disney were removing content from their platforms purely in order to collect a tax write-off.  That means that these movies, many of which were exclusive to the streamers, just cease to exist.  Tax write offs only work if the studio promises to never profit off their removed content ever again.  That means they will never reappear on the streaming platform, nor be available to purchase anywhere else.  And it’s not just small films or shows that are getting this treatment.  Disney removed their expensive TV spin-off of the movie Willow (1988) and if you missed it the first time you are out of luck as the show was yanked for a tax write off.  On Max, Warner Brothers pulled the Doug Liman directed pandemic movie Locked Down (2021) which starred Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor for the same purpose, and I’m sure none of those A-Listers would ever have thought that one of the films on their resume would just cease to exist.  It’s a disturbing trend that movies and shows can just so easily be thrown away and kept from viewing eyes.  It really upends the life cycle of a movie, which for many movies still allowed audiences a longer time to discover a film as it went from theaters to home entertainment.  Locked Down didn’t even get a full year.  But, some people still feel that their access to movies are safe if they bought them through a digital retailer.  That unfortunately was challenged during a recent merger between two Japanese anime streaming providers.  Crunchyroll and Funimation were the leading online retailers of anime content, and late last year, they began the move to merge into one single platform.  Unfortunately, it was decided by Crunchyroll that none of the previous catalog purchases on Funimation’s site would carry over in the merger.  That means that people who paid to buy a digital copy of the movies on the Funimation website would no longer have ownership of their movies.  Understandably, people were upset that their purchases were basically voided out so that Crunchyroll could generate their revenue purely through subscription.  While this is not a widespread case in the industry yet, it could still easily happen elsewhere.  Sadly, the streamers have too much say in what is considered ownership of a film.

That’s why so many cinema fans out there are feeling more impassioned to put their money towards physical media.  When you own a physical copy of a film, it is yours to watch forever.  But sadly, with streaming still dominating the minds of studio executives at the moment, it is leading to a decline of the once prosperous home video market.  Disney earlier this year completely shuttered their own in-house physical media distribution wing and are now outsourcing their future releases to Sony instead.  We’ll still see some Disney movies released on physical media, but it may be determined solely on what they deem worthy.  In truth, far fewer movies are going to be released on physical media in the future; a privilege given to just a chosen few.  Other small movies may just only be lucky to get a special release from a third party publisher like Shout Factory or Criterion, but only if they somehow maintain exposure in the public eye.  Like so many works of art throughout the years a lot of movies may not survive this new world of home entertainment.  The studios iron grip on what gets put onto their platforms coupled with the decline of physical media production as well as the threat of streamers not honoring the ownership of past purchases all creates a great worry that we are going to see an acceleration of lost media in our lifetimes.  And that creates a lot of anxiety for cinephiles who worry that a huge chunk of our cinematic history could fade into oblivion.  Cinema may be only a bit more than a century old as an artform, but it has also become a crucial part of our heritage as a global community.  We let a big chunk of it fade into obscurity, or worse get deleted from the world based on the whims of the studios, we lose a bit of ourselves in the process.

So, what can be done.  We as individual collectors certainly can’t save every film; we don’t have the shelf space nor the money to make that happen.  What I have found to be a good way of preserving what we can of film history is to diversify our personal collections.  I for one make an effort to have all of my movies in both physical and digital form.  Most physical movies on the market from first parties do include a redemption code for a digital copy of the movie.  While not all of the studios allow you to redeem from all digital retailers (Paramount and Lionsgate are notorious for this), the codes are good pretty much anywhere digital movies are sold.  What I recommend is setting up an account with Movies Anywhere.  On this particular service, they do allow you to purchase off of their platform, but they are also valuable as a service that links your account with them to most of the other digital retailers.  By redeeming your code through them, your digital copy will be available to watch on iTunes, Fandango at Home (formerly VUDU), Google Play and Amazon.  Having accounts synced up like this ensures that your movie will be available to watch across multiple platforms, and that will help to safeguard your access to that movie in case one of those retailers decides to cut the film out of their library.  Back-ups are the key to helping keep a movie available to watch.  Physical media is the preferred format to watch a film, since you’re movie is being sourced locally from the disc itself and not through the internet.  But, physical media does deteriorate over time, so upgrading to better formats are ideal if it’s affordable and available.  I’ve gone through multiple purchases of the same films many times, from DVD to Blu-ray to 4K UHD, but if you only need that one time purchase, make sure to take good care of your films.  Safeguarding your movies in their original packaging is ideal, and make sure you avoid scratches and environmental dangers like extreme heat when the movie is outside of it’s package.  Downloading your movies and storing them in multiple Hard Drive back-ups can also ensure you have a movie preserved.  You may not help every movie survive, but if enough diligent collectors take the right steps, collectively we may all be able to safeguard enough movies to help most of them survive long term into the future.

I think a lot about how so much of our collective understanding about our culture is based what has managed to survive through the centuries.  I remember in my college English literature classes a lecture about the different tragedies that led to the destruction of key written works that gave a clearer picture of the times that they were written.  Think about what was lost in the fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria, or the art that was sacked and mishandled during conflicts like the Crusades or the Mongol Invasions, or the Cotton Library Fire that destroyed many medieval manuscripts.  As my English professor made clear, out of all this historical chaos, it’s a miracle that something as ancient as Beowulf managed to survive into modern times and helps us to understand the role of literature of in the times of the Vikings.  The same goes for monuments such as the Pyramids of Giza, or the Parthenon in Athens.  What we know of our history comes from what has survived all these centuries.  We can only piece together from fragments in order to create an understanding of the whole.  While cinema is still a young art, it is nevertheless prone to the same destructive forces of time like the rest of what mankind has created.  Time has already taken it’s toll on some of our cinema history.  And the increasingly short-sighted moves made by studios to give them more control over what we are allowed to see is making it increasingly possible that we are going to lose a lot more.  We can do something about it.  Hold the studios accountable whenever they deem your purchases voided.  Make demands on what movies you want to see preserved.  Do what you can to diversify your library, especially when it comes to physical media.  An analog collection of movies may be prone to the ravages of time, but it also ensures that you have ownership of that movie, and it can’t be taken away by a studio.  Movies should have long lifespans after they are released, because not everyone gets to see a movie the first time around and there are many cases where it took years for a film to truly achieve classic status with it’s audience.  Movies ranging from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) to The Iron Giant (1999) only became classics because they were given the chance to be discovered in other other mediums over a long period of time.  Now the are no longer cult hits, but rather mainstream masterpieces, and the current climate of short term success in the overcrowded streaming market would not let that happen.  The hope is that there are enough passionate movie lovers out there who will not allow for movies they love to fade away.  We owe it to ourselves to try all we can to help keep the movies immortal and last for generations to come.

In the annals of Disney Animation, and for all animation for that matter, no other film looms as large as The Lion King (1994).  The movie has become a global phenomenon that continues to be as widely popular now as it was when it first released 30 years ago.  In addition to conquering the box office, it has gone on to spawn numerous other properties that themselves become enormous hits on their own, such as tv spin-offs and an award winning Broadway show.  Even a “live action” remake from 2019 would go on to gross over a billion dollars on it’s own.  It seems like everything that this movie touches turns to gold, and it has been one of the primary engines of Disney’s success over the last quarter of a century.  But it may surprise you that Disney only viewed this movie as a major success after it was released in theaters.  Before that, it was viewed as the studio’s “B-Picture.”  The Lion King was developed in the middle of Disney Animation’s Renaissance period; a time when the studio was ramping up again in success after a long period of failure in the post-Walt Disney years.  The Little Mermaid (1989) is credited for kickstarting this new era and bringing Disney back to their former glory, and that success continued to build with Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992) soon after.  At this time, it seemed like the Disney formula of action adventure mixed with fairy tale magic was what was helping them win back audiences.  The Lion King on the other hand was a bit of an odd fit, so it progressed along under the radar of the Disney brass.  But to the surprise of everyone, the little “B-Picture” would be the movie that would transform the studio forever, both in good ways and in bad ways.  But how did this unexpected hit manage to take it’s place in the Circle of Life at Disney Animation.

In the late 1980’s, right before Ariel and friends would make their first splash on the big screen, the top brass at Disney Animation were brainstorming their next move at the studio.  Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin were no-brainers of course, fitting with the fairy tale background that had worked for Disney in the past.  But Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg was interested in exploring an animated feature that was set in Africa.  This idea interested his colleagues, Roy Disney and Peter Schneider, and together they sought out ideas from the filmmakers at their studio.  Director George Scribner, who was just coming off of the minor success of their latest film, Oliver & Company (1988), managed to pitch a story idea that appealed to the executives called King of the Jungle.  The story revolved around a coming of age tale of a lion cub named Simba who is separated from his pride, raised by a family of baboons and does battle with an evil band of hyenas before eventually reuniting with his pride and becoming their king.  Katzenberg referred to it as “Bambi in Africa” as some of the coming-of-age elements were similar to the Walt era classic.  Scribner would refine the story more throughout the years after, adding in more Arthurian and Shakespearean elements to Simba’s story that gave it more gravitas.  But, unlike the other films being developed at Disney at the time, King of the Jungle was not intended to be a musical fairy tale.  It was very grounded in nature, treating the African setting as something more akin to a nature documentary.  After a year into development, the Disney team hired Roger Allers to assist Scribner with direction, hoping to give the story more focus as Allers had did as the Head of Story on Beauty and the Beast.  Allers would bring in his own of story artists, including Brenda Chapman and Chris Sanders, both of whom were rising stars at the studio.  The team worked on the story for a good 2 years, all the while Disney Animation was growing by leaps and bounds.  All of this new change at the studio would have a profound effect on the development of the film, and for a time, it was not moving the movie in the right direction.

Under George Scribner’s guidance, the story lacked an emotional core, and the executives at Disney were growing nervous.  Amidst the success of their mega hit animated musicals, King of the Jungle’s non-musical approach was just not working anymore.  There was worry that the movie would soon be scrapped completely, which prompted a lot of the top talent at Disney Animation to jump ship and join a more sure-fire project that was in development at the same time; an animated musical about the Native American icon, Pocahontas.  For most of the animators, Pocahontas was going to be the next Disney classic, while King of the Jungle was going to be the studio’s “B-Picture;” a minor film tossed through the production line like so many forgotten films of the post-Walt era.  To change the fate of the film, Roger Allers and his team decided to pitch a version of the story that was friendlier to musical numbers.  This did not sit well with George Scribner, who soon left the project entirely.  The movie had lost it’s original director, but was on track to becoming something better.  The title was changed to The Lion King, which was welcome because King of the Jungle made no sense for a movie where there is no jungle.  Producer Don Hahn, an enormously successful talent at the studio who helped to shepherd Beauty and the Beast to it’s success was brought on board to guide this new direction for the The Lion King, and soon after animator Rob Minkoff was promoted to director to take Scribner’s place.  For the team that stayed with The Lion King, being on board this “B-Picture” became something of a badge of honor.  They were now the underdogs, and just like with most underdog stories the ability to overcome the odds stacked against them helped to drive their belief that they could make something really special.

The story definitely became more Shakespearean in tone over time, becoming less like Bambi and more like Hamlet.  Simba would be betrayed by his uncle Scar, witness the murder of his father Mufasa, and live in exile until he reached adulthood where he would challenge his usurping uncle for the throne.  The direction of the movie would also visually take inspiration from great Hollywood epics from filmmakers like David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille, helping it to feel grander and more in line with the true vastness of the open Serengeti where the movie is set.  Producer Don Hahn stated that there were three pillars in particular that define the movie above all else and helped to make it the masterpiece that we all know; three sequences in fact.  One is the opening scene that introduces us to the world of this story; second is the wildebeest stampede scene that the story pivots on; and the third is the most magical scene in the movie where Simba confronts his father’s spirit, speaking to him from the great beyond.  Each of these moments are what sets the movie apart from all the other Disney films, and each was groundbreaking in their own right.  The wildebeest stampede for example took the still primitive tool of CGI animation to the next level, creating an epic scale sequence that would’ve been impossible to pull off only a few years before.  It was a bold sequence to pull of visually, but it also needed to land with the audience emotionally.  Simba’s father, Mufasa, the great Lion King, is murdered by his treacherous brother Scar and young Simba is given his first brush with death.  The sequence recalls a similar scene with Bambi after he loses his mother; but this time, Disney chose to not shy away from confronting death.  Bambi’s mom is killed off screen and we never see her again.  In The Lion King, Simba finds Mufasa’s lifeless body and grieves over it.  It’s an emotional sequence, beautifully animated, that was key towards helping The Lion King feel more momentous than the average Disney animated flick.

The next big factor in The Lion King’s success of course was the music.  No other Disney film sounded like Lion King, with it’s sweeping score infused with authentic African melodies and instrumentation.  Hans Zimmer, an acclaimed composer of note in Hollywood, was brought on board to score his first animated feature.  His work was a welcome departure from the work of Alan Menken, who had successfully scored most of the Disney Renaissance movies.  Menken’s work is brilliant, but his melodies would have been out of place in this African set story; plus he was already deep into working on Aladdin and Pocahontas during that time, making him unavailable.  Zimmer was a much better match, given that he had been working African influence into a number of his film scores before Lion King, including one particularly influential film called The Power of One (1992).  On that film, Zimmer collaborated with a South African musician named Lebo M who he wanted to work with again on Lion King.  Lebo M would prove instrumental in helping to shape the authentic African sound of the score; helping to find the right collection of musicians and instruments, as well as coaching the choirs whose voices would become key parts of the overall score.  Lebo even can be heard in the film itself as the very first voice we hear, with his iconic “Naaaaaaah” sung over a rising sun in the opening shot.  The songs would also need to be special as well.  Lyricist Tim Rice was brought on board at Disney to help complete the song score for Aladdin after the tragic passing of Howard Ashman.  He then moved over to working on The Lion King, and he proposed the bold idea of getting Elton John to write the melodies for the songs in the film.  No one believed that a pop star of Elton’s stature would want to work on a Disney animated musical, but to everyone’s surprise, he said yes.  In total, Elton John  and Tim Rice wrote five original songs for the film; the upbeat “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” the traditional villain song “Be Prepared,” the silly comical song, “Hakuna Matata,” and the pop friendly love ballad “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” among them.  But, if there was one song that mattered more than the others, it was the one that opens the movie, “Circle of Life.”  One of the pillars that the movie rested on, there has never been a grander opening number found in any animated film before or since.  It was the perfect tone setter, a magnificent showpiece for this ambitious epic, and it probably stands second to “When You Wish Upon a Star” in the pantheon of monumental Disney tunes.

The third pillar that mattered to the film is the climatic moment where Simba must confront his past and take his place as king; a responsibility he had been running away from.  The message becomes clear to him after he sees the image of his father reaching out to him from the heavens.  If there is one sequence that defines the movie above all else, it’s this moment.  The image of Mufasa silhouetted in the sky by storm clouds, creating this heavenly visage, is a work of pure art that stands among the best at Disney; especially in the Renaissance era.  Apart from the stunning animation, it also mattered who got to speak for the character of Mufasa, because he demanded a voice of authority.  Luckily, Disney was able to cast the iconic voice of James Earl Jones in the part.  No stranger to voice over roles, Jones brings such a dignified presence to the character Mufasa; very much embodying the identity of a Lion King.  To bounce off of the power of James Earl Jones’ powerful voice, Disney perfectly cast actor Jeremy Irons in the scheming, slimy role of the villainous Scar, who provided the perfect counter to Jones’ performance.  A duo of teen heartthrobs from different eras, Matthew Broderick and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, were cast in the role of Simba at different ages in his life, and both managed to give Simba the right amount of boyish charm while at the same time giving him the right amount of emotional pathos in the heavier moments of the movie.  Thomas’ performance in the death scene of Mufasa really feels authentically heartbreaking, and Broderick likewise gives a powerful turn during the pivotal conversation with Mufasa’s spirit.  The rest of the cast is also filled with perfectly matched voices.  Broadway vets Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella were auditioning for roles as wisecracking hyenas, but the filmmakers realized they worked so well as a team that they instead got cast as Simba’s comical sidekicks, Timon the Meercat and Pumbaa the Warthog, both of which they were perfectly matched for.  And for the key role of the wise baboon shaman Rafiki, Disney cast legendary TV and stage actor Robert Guillaume, who really helped to ground the film with a dignified African sensibility.

Visually, musically and vocally, The Lion King had everything going for it by the end of it’s production.  Even the Disney execs were realizing that their “B-Picture” may be more special than they first thought.  But there were still some uncertain factors still in play.  One, the 1994 Northridge Earthquake that struck the Los Angeles area disrupted the workflow of the animation studio, so a lot of the animators had to bring their work home in order to get the movie done on time.  An eleventh hour change was also made to the “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” sequence after Elton John became upset that his love song was being sung by the characters Timon and Pumbaa, butchering what he had intended for the lovely ballad.  But probably what was most disruptive to the closing days of Lion King’s production was the simultaneous implosion of the Disney corporate level team.  CEO Michael Eisner had lost his right hand man, CFO Frank Wells, in a tragic helicopter crash, and had slighted Jeffrey Katzenberg who was seeking to fill that spot at the Disney company, making him the next in the line of succession at the company.  Eisner and Katzenberg’s relationship, which had always been contentious before, became un-reparable after that and just days before The Lion King was to premiere in the Summer, Katzenberg parted ways with Disney, leaving a major vacancy at Disney Animation.  Though the behind the scenes drama didn’t affect The Lion King at the box office too much, it did spell the beginning of the end of this monumental era known as the Disney Renaissance.  Despite all that, The Lion King not only started strong after it’s premiere on June 24, 1994, it would go on to break every record in the books that year for an animated feature.  By the end of it’s run, it was the then 3rd all time top grossing movie domestically at that time, right behind Jurassic Park (1993) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).  It would also collect two Academy Awards that year; Hans Zimmer for his score (his first) and one to Elton John and Tim Rice for the song  “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”  But the legacy of The Lion King wouldn’t stop there.  A couple years later, Disney tasked Avant Garde stage director Julie Taymor with adapting Lion King for Broadway.  The result was another smash hit that won the Tony for Best New Musical and continues to be performed on the Great White Way to this day, over 25 years later.

The success of The Lion King would still be a double edged sword for Disney despite all the great fortune it has brought them.  In a way it became too popular, raising the bar too high for Disney to match or even surpass in the years after.  It’s ironic that the movie that the top Disney talent thought was going to be the superior film, Pocahontas, ended up underperforming the following year in 1995.  To critics and audiences, Pocahontas just didn’t wow them in the same way that The Lion King did.  There would be a steady decline of Disney Animation in the years after Lion King, with some modest hits here and there like Mulan (1998) and Lilo and Stitch (2002).  Disney Animation would go through some drastic changes during this time as well, with Pixar Animation pushing the industry towards computer animation and also more competing animation studios outside of the Disney company also making their moves, including Jeffrey Katzenberg’s newly formed Dreamworks Animation.  The Lion King really was the crest of a wave that helped to revitalize a dying artform at Disney Animation and then inevitably also lead to it’s downfall again.  Even still, the film remains an all time classic and one of Disney’s crowning achievements.  It also proved to be a great launchpad for a rising crop of talent at the studio.  Rob Minkoff would later find success as a live action filmmaker, working on the blockbuster Stuart Little films for Sony.  Chris Sanders would become a successful animation director in his own right, making a big splash with Lilo and Sitich before heading over to Dreamworks where he would create hits like How to Train Your Dragon (2010), The Croods (2013) and the upcoming The Wild Robot (2024).  Brenda Chapman would make her way over to Pixar and create the first ever fairy tale adventure over there with Brave (2012).  That’s an incredible legacy for a team that were considered the underdogs at one time at Disney.  The Lion King has so many iconic moments that still have the power to amaze even 30 years later.  It’s not surprising that this was one of the films Disney selected for special IMAX presentations in the past, as the canvas for the film genuinely earns that enormous screen.  Eventually Disney Animation would find it’s footing again post-Renaissance with hits like Frozen (2013) and Zootopia (2016), as they always seem to do after down periods, but The Lion King still remains a high water mark for Disney.  Whether it’s the catchy songs, the unforgettable characters, the compelling story, or the majestic animation, there’s something for everyone in this movie that makes it special.  And the behind the scenes story of the movie defying the odds to become a reality is itself an inspirational tale.  As they say, “Hakuna Matata means no worries” and that belief in being true to yourself has helped this lion continue to roar all these years later.

It’s hard to think of what the theatrical experience was like 10, 20, or more years ago.  The theater experience has been an ever evolving thing with the times, with multiple changes made by the theater chains done in order to boost the amount of people coming through their doors.  But one thing is for sure, this century old industry has never had a easy road to success.  It takes a lot to get people to leave the comforts of their home and pay money to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers.  To make that happen, movie theaters need to be special places and not just a place to see a movie.  That’s why so many movie theaters today are trying very hard to make their venues more than just a theater.  With the increasing standard of lounge style seating in every theater and in some places interactive features like the 4DX experience with motion seats and in theater effects, movie theaters are making the effort to lure audiences back after several years of struggle.  When the competition is the living room, people need to be reminded that movie theaters offer a far better experience that immerses you better into the movies.  But, not every movie theater can change so quickly with the times, and that has led to a bit of a contraction within the industry.  Thankfully, the movie theater industry is not dead yet, but they have been barely hanging on after it’s near Armageddon during the Covid-19 pandemic.  And hopes of a huge bounce back post-pandemic have largely faded due to a variety of factors, but mostly the lack of event worthy films in the market.  There certainly have been some incredibly successful films in this post-pandemic era, but they have been coming few and far between compared to how they performed in the last decade.  It seems increasingly like the box office may never in fact reach the same highs of the 2010’s ever again, as the future looks increasingly less favorable to the theater business.  But, is that something that Hollywood wants to see happen?

To understand the state of the movie theater industry, we have to examine what is ailing it.  First of all, the under-performance of movies at the box office.  Box office is a tricky barometer for gauging a movie’s success, because it’s the most immediate information we get about how a movie is performing.  Movie studios pay very close attention to the box office receipts, because it’s a definable number that they can gauge their economic outlook on, which is helpful for getting the attention of investors.  But because box office numbers are public record, this can be a double edged sword as a movie’s failure can also be a visible thing.  Unfortunately, too much has been made about these immediate box office numbers as a defining factor in a movie’s success.  There are many cases where movies became bigger hits outside of their initial runs in theaters like The Big Lebowski (1998), Fight Club (1999) and The Iron Giant (1999) due to success in home video.  Sometimes it’s not about how well a movie opens, but rather about how long it’s remembered that helps to separate the successes from the failures.  Sadly, Hollywood over time put too much value in theatrical performances, especially in how movies do in their opening weekend, and it unfortunately leads to many films getting abandoned before they actually have a chance to build momentum.  It was definitely a true thing for movies before the pandemic, but the economic bind that the market disruption has put the studios through has made this reality even worse.  Unless a movie delivers on expectations, some of which may be unrealistic, the studios are likely to abandon it and leave movie theaters hanging with a movie that has to perform all on it’s own.  You see this now even with big movies; a less than stellar opening weekend, and the marketing for that film immediately dries up.  There isn’t even enough time to wait and see if word of mouth can help turn the fortunes of a movie around.  Studios are more willing to throw in the towel opening weekend and focus on what’s next than giving a movie a chance. and it increasingly gives movie theaters a hard time as more and more movies are shuffled through.

Of course the changes in the streaming market have changed the dynamic.  A lot of the movies that once used to give audiences a variety of choices at the movie theater have since moved to streaming, leaving the theaters with far fewer choices as a result.  The mid-ranged budget movies like comedies and action thrillers no longer are believed to be competitive with the likes of mega franchises like the MCU.  So, these movies have gone over to streaming instead, mainly because they don’t have to feel the pressure of showing strong box office numbers once they release.  Twenty years ago, comedic movies were seen as some of the strongest performers at the box office.  Even bad comedies like Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill (2011) were still capable of pulling over $100 million at the box office.  Now, those kinds of broad comedies are absent at the box office.  Sandler himself even abandoned theaters all together, as his Happy Madison production company now makes everything exclusively for Netflix.  It’s crazy to think that in the last five years the only Adam Sandler film released in theaters was the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019).  But this is where Netflix and other streamers have made a huge difference in the variety of movies that make it to the big screen.  Now, movie theaters can only depend on big studio tent-poles to bring audiences in, as well as small, low risk independents to fill in the rest.  The middle range that helped to give movie theaters an extra boost is all but dried up.  No more $50 million movies capable of grossing $200 million.  For most tent-poles now, $200 million has now become the minimum needed to turn a profit, and some movies now even require more.  With the bar for profitability now so high, it’s easy to see why more studios are opting for the streaming option, because if no one watches their movie, they won’t get that stigma of a public box office failure attached to their film.

The current problems for the film industry stem from these long in the making disruptions, but a lot of the problems they face are also self inflicted wounds that could’ve easily been prevented.  For one thing, the lagging box office of this Summer in particular is very much attributable to the needlessly prolonged strikes that occurred last year.  In the end, the studios ultimately acquiesced to the demands of the unions, showing that they could’ve easily reached a deal early on, but chose to string things out in the hopes that they could make the unions cave, which they didn’t.  So, Hollywood has no one else to blame for a work stoppage that went 6 months longer than it had to, and we are only now a year later beginning to feel the cost of that blunder.  The Summer 2024 movie season has not been on fire thus far.  So far, we’ve seen two movies perform well under expectations (Fall Guy and Furiosa) and another that is meeting expectations but not exceeding them (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes).  Some worry that this is a sign that the Summer season will be one of the worst ever, which is going to put pressure on a movie theater industry that is still reeling from the pandemic.  We’ve already seen a record low Memorial Day weekend, and given the lack of overall films due to the gap made by the strikes, there’s few films on the horizon that look to reverse the trend.  Also the lack of restraint on the way movies are budgeted is making it near impossible for for the theatrical market to pull it’s wait in showing that it can turn a profit for these movies, so many are trying to compensate by raising the prices of a ticket.  But, raising ticket prices is having it’s own negative effect on the movies, as cash strapped customers are more willing to stay home than spend a whole bunch of money on a movie.  It’s this combination of ticket inflation and the underwhelming product coming out of the studios that has led to this perfect storm of problems plaguing both the studios and the movie theater business, though it’s especially harder on the theaters.

The thing is, there are movies that still are managing to drive business to the movie theaters.  Since the re-opening of the theaters post-pandemic, we’ve seen record shattering runs for movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), and Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  Even this year, movies like Dune: Part Two (2024) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) have managed to demonstrate strong box office holds over multiple weeks.  It’s just that Hollywood is looking at all these examples of success, and not absorbing the lessons.  The thing that all of these movies had in common was that they were events.  They were the kinds of movies that demanded the attention of the audience, and were clearly movies that were meant to be experienced and not just watched.  Unfortunately, there’s no organic way to manifest a larger than life movie event that will generate the kind of box office that these movies did.  The Barbenheimer phenomenon was the biggest story in movies last year precisely because it was so unexpected.  The movies Barbie (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023) were expected to do well, but not to the tune of over $2 billion dollars collectively at the box office.  Movie theaters very much needed that Barbenheimer effect, but it’s something that could only have manifested in that particular moment, so it’s not something that can be conjured on demand.  But what Hollywood can do is to try to make movies that that are distinct from one another.  When the studios try to play things safe, all their movies will tend to just look the same, and audiences will eventually grow tired of that.  It’s something that is especially plaguing the super hero franchises at the moment.  The problem though is that Hollywood takes it’s time to adjust course and try new things.  Sequels and prequels are more likely to get the greenlight before any new intellectual property is ever gambled with by the industry.  And given that the examples I gave of the movies that performed spectacularly well in the last couple years were also franchise movies, the chances of anything new coming out of Hollywood anytime soon seem pretty remote.  But, the fact is that Hollywood has the capability of bringing audiences out to the theaters if they focus on the appeal of these movies and making them worthy of the big screen.  What ultimately draws audiences out of their living rooms is knowing that a theater gives them something more.

There are many ways to make the movie theaters more of a destination to be sure.  Going back to the early days of cinema, the medium of film was a place to experiment with many different techniques.  The introductions of sound and color made movies a whole lot more special, and when televisions started to challenge the superiority of the movie theaters in terms of exhibition, a new type of experience called widescreen began to emerge.  There were also gimmicks that didn’t quite take off as well as people hoped, like 3D and Smell-O-Vision, but these two had the effect of making going to the movies more than just “going to the movies.” There were also mad wizards like William Castle who went so far as to install buzzers into the theater seats to make his horror movies that much more electrifying for his audiences.  One wishes that kind of showmanship extended out into movies today.  In some places, you do see movie theaters that do cater to more to their audiences than just screening a movie.  There’s the Alamo Drafthouse style of Dine-In theaters that give you restaurant service within a theater setting that goes well above just popcorn and soda.  Also, one thing that has been consistently growing in success in the theatrical market in the last few years has been IMAX.  The company that produces the film stock has seen their business grow at a time when the rest of Hollywood has been either stagnant or shrunken.  More audiences are interested in seeing movies in premium formats rather than the standard presentation.  It was a big reason why movies like Oppenheimer and Dune: Part Two were able to be as successful as they were is because the IMAX format was essential to the experience, and audiences were willing to pay the premium ticket price to see these movies in the most ideal way possible.  They were also movies shot specifically for the format, meaning you are not truly seeing the true version of the movie unless you were watching it in IMAX.  True, IMAX is not ideal for every kind of movie, but what is ideal is for more movies that are made with the intent of utilizing their place on a big screen.

One other big thing that Hollywood should consider is to expand the exclusivity window for their films in theaters.  One of the unfortunate outcomes of the pandemic on the theater industry is that the theater chains gave up ground to the studios to allow for movies to go to digital platform earlier than they did before.  Before the pandemic, movie theaters had a 90 day window of exclusivity that allowed them to generate as much revenue as possible from a theatrical run before the movie would be available to buy digitally on places like iTunes or Vudu.  With theaters closed during Covid, the studios began demanding that the chains loosen that restrictive window to allow them the freedom bank off of these movies without having to wait three months.  The exclusive window was cut in half and has remained that way ever since, even with things large back to normal.  This change also allowed studios to begin a day and date style of release in both theaters and on streaming.  Unfortunately for both the theaters and the studios, this has caused a change in audience behavior that has caused movies in general to make less money in the long run.  People are no longer running out to see a movie when they know that it will be streaming within a matter of weeks.  This is especially true for family films, as parents are finding that it’s much less expensive for them to wait for the movie to appear on streaming than to spend tons of money on tickets and snacks from concessions.  The studios need to realize that there is no economic advantage to closing that exclusivity window tighter.  What is fascinating to see is that the movies that actually perform the best on streaming platforms are the ones that had full theatrical runs.  Disney’s Moana (2016) has consistently been present in the top ten streaming charts every single week, making it the most streamed film ever, even eight years after it first appeared in theaters, where it also did well.  It seems that movie theaters are still the ideal way for a movie to have it’s first good impression and that streaming is better used for the residual success that a movie experiences in the years after.  The big flaw of streaming is that the algorithms that they run on are geared to the viewers tastes, and for a movie to be seen on the platform it has to come with some built in awareness on the part of the viewer.  Otherwise it just becomes yet another thumbnail that we scroll past.

A lot of people are trying to assess what is going on with movies in theaters, but I don’t think anyone has the answer to how to fix it.  Even I don’t know, and my suggestions are just based on a handful of historic examples.  But, the sad truth is that movie theaters may never recover to where they were before.  We may be in for a period of decline that ultimately will lead to a significantly reduced theater market.  That doesn’t mean that it will go extinct.  There will always be a demand for the theatrical experience; it’s just that this kind of group of movie fans will have to be catered to with fewer options.  It saddens me when I see any movie theater closing, but it’s something that we are probably going to see much more of in the coming years.  Demand is not meeting up with the supply, so a contraction is inevitable.  But those theaters that do survive will be all the more cherished.  I worry most for those small town, mom and pop movie theaters as they are sometimes the only outlet for rural communities to have that cinematic experience, especially the ones that program an art house selection of movies.  But, the movie theater industry did face one of the worst shocks to it’s system during the Covid-19 pandemic and most movie theaters are still here, which is a hopeful sign.  Now Hollywood just needs to figure it’s own self out and actually see the value in making the kinds of movies that drive people to the cinema.  Not everything needs to be an IMAX sized event, but we do need a reminder that any type of movie is better seen on a bigger screen.  Whether it takes gimmicks like 3D, exclusive merchandise like custom popcorn buckets, or viral marketing like AMC’s Nicole Kidman ad, there are many ways to get people to come back to the movies. There’s also the great sense of community that comes from laughing and cheering with a room full of strangers during a great cinematic experience.  Streaming offers a lot of nice things, but it can’t replace the aura of a theatrical experience.  In this regard, the Nicole Kidman ad says it all: it makes movies better.

The stunt man is often looked at as the most thankless job in the movie business.  To perform a stunt on film involves a person literally putting their health and safety on the line to make an action beat feel authentic, and yet we don’t know the names of those who perform the stunt and we hardly ever see their faces.  And yet their work may end up being the most impressive thing that we see in any given movie.  Some of the greatest moments ever put on film are due to the work that these men and women do, and they are completely invisible.  At the same time, the stunt teams know that their job is to mainly make the movie stars look better.  The reason stunt teams exist at all is because movie studios will not risk endangering their actors, unless the actors do want to get more involved, which then will add more to the budget due to the insurance costs.  But there is little doubt that stunt work is an invaluable part of the making of a movie and more and more today we are seeing audiences becoming more appreciative of the work that these invisible men and women do.  After many years of tiresome CGI enhanced mayhem being overused by the industry, there is starting to become a growing appreciation for actual physical stunt work once again.  And this is due to the fact that people who have come up through the stunt departments in movies are now making their own movies and revolutionizing the action movie genre once again.  In the past couple decades, we’ve seen people like Michael Bay and Gore Verbinski become the leading action filmmakers, but these guys rose up into the director’s chair through visual effects and camera departments, making their action movies more visually oriented.  Today, the most celebrated action movies are the ones directed by former stunt performers like David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, who have brought action movies back to it’s grounded roots.  And as a result, the last few years have been something of a golden age for stunts in cinema.

Stunt work is a profession as old as the movies themselves, and even further back than that.  Stage craft as far back as the days of Shakespeare required performers who were skilled in combat and capable of feigning a realistic fight in front of an audience for the purpose of the drama.  That profession continued on and evolved as theater performances became grander spectacles over the years, incorporating elements that we still see today as part of the movie making business like wire work and acrobatics.  Once cinema arrived on the scene, performers who had trained their skills on the stage were necessary for making the illusion of life on screen feel authentic.  The first verified stunts captured on film were the of course in what is recognized as the first action movie, The Great Train Robbery (1903).  As primitive as the art of film still was in the dawn of the 20th century, The Great Train Robbery still had it’s actors acting out fights on real moving locomotives, which even today is something that requires a lot of risk taking.  That groundbreaking work of cinema paved the way for many more spectacles to come.  The silent era of film is one full of some death defying stunt work that honestly could never happen the same way today due to the fact that much of it was un-regulated at the time.  In those days, the actors themselves were required to do the stunts themselves because that was just the nature of filmmaking at the time, and some of their stunts involved falling from very high places or having something very heavy fall on their heads.  As movie stars emerged, it was recognized that these actors perhaps needed someone skilled to take their place for the more dangerous stunts.  And out of that, the stunt profession was born in Hollywood.  Movies from the great silent movie auteurs like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille would certainly not have made as much of an impact had there not been a dedicated stunt team there to make those battle scenes feel as brutal as they possibly could be.

But the silent era also showed us a different way that stunts could be performed in film, and that was in the service of comedy.  If anything, the stunts of the silent era that still astound audiences to this day are the ones found in comedic silent films, particularly those of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.  Charlie Chaplain had the occasional impressively choreographed stunt in his movies, but his comedic genius was more present in the small bits that he performed to perfection.  Lloyd and Keaton on the other hand went very big with their comedic stunts, often to the point where you feel they were tempting death in order to get the perfect shot.  Harold Lloyd’s most celebrated film, Safety Last (1923) involved the comedian hanging off of the side of a skyscraper, with the most famous image of the film being his clinging onto life by the hands of a clock face.  That moment was made possible before there was ever such a thing as rear projection or green screen, so to get the shot just right, Lloyd and his crew built a façade wall on the roof of an actual skyscraper.  Though he really wasn’t hanging right off the edge of a building, he was still very high up to get the real street scene below into the shot, so the stunt was still a huge risk to take.  In Buster Keaton’s movies, the gags were so elaborate and dangerous that there are several instances where if his timing was off by mere seconds, he would truly be dead.  The famous wall collapse in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928) is a great example of this, as Buster had to hit his mark perfectly or else he wouldn’t have been in the safe zone as the needle point poking through the window hole in the side of a whole building coming crashing down.  And there’s of course The General (1926) where Keaton is working with full size moving trains as his props, which could’ve spelled disaster if one mistimed stunt led to a derailment.  But as much as these comedians nearly killed themselves for the sake of comedy, the hard work still paid off, and you can see the inspiration they had on comedies thereafter, with stunt work playing crucially into the comedy of films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), The Naked Gun (1988) and so many more.

As the movies got bigger in the mid century, so did the stunts required to make the movie scenes feel more epic.  Two genres in particular began to advance the art of stunt work in this period; Westerns and Biblical epics.  For a lot of these movies, the ability to ride a horse (and more specifically to fall off one) became an essential skill for stunt performers.  This even led to an invention specifically made to help stunt actors, which was the L stirrup, which allowed horse riders to fall off a horse without getting their foot caught in the stirrup.  A lot of other inventions were created to also help enhance the stunt work performed on film, including air bags for falls from high places, air rams that were used to catapult performers into the air, and when censorship standards for on screen violence began to lessen, the introduction of squibs made gun shots all the more realistic on screen.  With the stunts becoming more complicated in these mid-century movies, the duty of a stunt coordinator became all the more important.  The stunt coordinator in many ways is a director of a film within a film, as their responsibility is to make sure the stunts are performed perfectly in conjunction with everything else on screen.  One of the most valuable stunt coordinators of this era was a man named Yakima Canutt.  Yakima was one of the most skilled horsemen in Hollywood in it’s early days, famous for having the first horse transfer ever put on film, which is to jump from one galloping horse to another.  Naturally, he was the go to guy for staging some of the most complex horse riding stunts in the movies, mostly in Westerns.  But his crowning achievement as a stunt coordinator can be found in the biblical epic Ben-Hur (1959), where he was the coordinator and second unit director of the legendary chariot race scene.  The chariot race in that movie is a monumental piece of filmmaking that still is unmatched over sixty years later and it’s due to the instinctive skills of a veteran stuntman who knew exactly what was required to work with horses in a big action sequence.

During the later part of the century, the profession of stunt work began to evolve again, stepping away from swords and sandals and heading more into the streets of modern society.  Stunt driving began to come into it’s own as vehicles became more streamlined and powerful on the road.  The most impressive stunts captured on film no longer were the kind that could be done on horseback but rather with horse power.  The Steve McQueen action thriller Bullitt (1968) revolutionized stunt driving with an extended chase scene in the middle of the movie, with real cars driving through the hilly streets of San Francisco.  The scene would go on to inspire many like it in movies like The French Connection (1971) and Vanishing Point (1971).  But that was not the only revolution in stunt work that was going on at the time.  In many ways, 1970’s was the first time where stunt performers were beginning to become appreciated and recognized by the average viewer.  Some former stunt men would go on to become movie stars themselves like Burt Reynolds.  But what really began to take hold in the 70’s was the influence of martial arts in movie stunts.  Audiences began to be wowed by more than one actor throwing punches at another; now they wanted to see high kicks, somersaults, and back flips added into the mix.  The martial arts master turned movie star that defined this shift in stunt work the most was Bruce Lee.  Lee, like many other stunt performers, was a trainer for movie stars for years before breaking out into starring in his own movies.  His life was tragically cut short right as his most famous film, Enter the Dragon (1973), was in theaters, but his legacy still remains strong to this day.  The Hong Kong based film industry that Lee rose out of itself would go on to revolutionize action films over the later part of the 20th Century, producing a impressive array of action film stars who were capable of performing their own stunts, like Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, and Michelle Yeoh.  In many ways, the Hong Kong action movie industry harkened cinema back to the early days where the spectacle of death defying action was the draw for the audiences, seeing just how far the performers could push themselves.

It should be noted though that despite there being a healthy amount of performers out there ready to use their skills to make stunts look all the more spectacular on screen, as well as plenty safety precautions put in place to safe guard if something goes wrong, the risk factor still results in some unfortunate events.  There are many instances of actors and stunt performers who have been killed on set when a stunt goes horribly wrong.  There are many instances where the death of a stunt performer or an actor can cast a pallor over the movie.  Brandon Lee tragically follow his father Bruce Lee to an early grave after a prop gun discharged a loaded round into his chest during the making of The Crow (1993).  Actor Vic Morrow also met a grisly fate when a helicopter fell right on top of him during the making of a battle scene in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).  And these are the names we know; sadly too few people will ever know the names of the stunt performers who gave their lives for film.  There is also the residual impact of stunt performers who survive but are forever crippled by the experience of a stunt gone wrong.  A recent documentary spotlights one such person whose life was forever turned upside down after a catastrophic on set accident.  David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived (2023) tells the story of the stunt double for actor Daniel Radcliffe on the Harry Potter movies who was crippled by such an accident.  Because Daniel Radcliffe and David Holmes worked side by side for so many years on the Potter franchise, they developed a special connection, and the accident deeply affected Daniel, who spear-headed the making of this documentary as a way of drawing attention to David’s story and why it’s important to help out the stunt workers when their lives are forever changed.  David Holmes story is tragic but also inspirational, because of how he’s been able to bounce back and go on living, but he’s lucky to have people like Daniel Radcliffe in his corner who can provide him with the support he needs.  Too often stunt performers are unable to get the health coverage that they need in order to continue performing stunts for a living, and in some cases on smaller budgeted movies, they can also be dangerously exploited.  As we learned from the tragic shooting on the set of the Western Rust, which took the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, movie sets can still be dangerous places to be, even for seasoned professionals.

The positive thing is that in recent years, the work of stunt professionals has become far more appreciated by audiences.  It’s probably a response to the tiresome overuse of CGI in action movies that people want to see gritty, unfiltered in camera action again on the big screen.  And that’s why so many of the biggest action movies today are the ones directed by people who have emerged from the stunt departments of Hollywood.  One of the film franchises that has particularly led the way here is the John Wick series.  Star Keanu Reeves worked for years with his stunt double on the Matrix movies, Chad Stahelski, as well as the stunt coordinator David Leitch, on this passion project that was fully centered around stunts rather than visual effects.  The experiment worked and it has spawned a whole new generation of stunt heavy film in it’s wake.  This also coincides with the work of another movie actor who likes to do his own stunts, Tom Cruise, who has made stunts a center point for his Mission: Impossible franchise, as well as the blockbuster sequel Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  In the last couple of years, you’ve seen a bit of a return to the basics of stunt performance on film, but what is different this time is that the stunt teams are having more of a say in the creative process.  These guys want to show off their skills, and part of the thrill of watching movies in the Mission: Impossible or John Wick franchises is just seeing how creative these stunts can be.  And it’s a showcase built upon years of knowledge about the art of cinema dating back to the silent era.  When you see Tom Cruise climbing on the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), it’s not all that far removed from Harold Lloyd clinging to that clock in Safety Last; the only difference is the size of the building.  But there is a trust and an appreciation there on those Mission: Impossible sets between the stunt performers and the filming crew that makes all the difference.  Hollywood is no longer taking their stunt teams for granted and we are seeing audiences really taking notice of the astounding work that stunt performers are doing too.

It’s fun seeing the promotional tour of David Leitch’s newest film The Fall Guy (2024), which has involved actor Ryan Gosling bringing along his team of stunt doubles to every talk show and movie premiere appearance along the way.  It’s a very deliberate attempt to give the stunt performers their due with a movie that’s clearly a love letter to the profession.  But across the whole industry, there is a growing consensus that the stunt profession has been undervalued for far too long.  There has been a growing call for the Academy to add a category at the Oscars for stunts, which to many is a no brainer and it’s a wonder why it’s taken this long for the Academy to even acknowledge the profession.  Given the longevity and essential nature of stunts in movie history, it’s long overdue for the profession to be recognized by the highest honor in Hollywood.  But, some elitists in the movie industry still see stunt work as the hallmark of more low brow entertainment, and it’s something that they want to resist recognizing at the Oscars.  There may be a case where a critically panned movie might receive an Oscar nomination solely because of their stunts, but there are a lot of great movies that use stunts brilliantly as well, and it’s a shame that the stunt performers on those films don’t get their due recognition.  Wouldn’t the chariot race in Ben-Hur have been worthy of an Oscar?  Or the car chase in Bullitt?  Movies like John Wick and Mission: Impossible are showing us that there is an art to stunt work that is as impressive and integral to a movie as any other element of filmmaking.  We won’t be getting a Best Stunts Oscar next year, but I feel like it’s closer to becoming a reality than it has ever been.  And it will be long overdue.  At the very least now stunt performers are finally getting recognized as more than just a fall guy meant to be faceless and there to make the movie star look better.  They are now being seen as some of the hardest working people in the film industry.  It’s also helping to get them the attention they need to receive the care from the industry that is essential for helping them heal from the wounds of their profession.  Whether they are getting blown up, blown out, tumbled around, or tossed from a high place, these brave men and women are the reason why movies feel as magical as they do.

Mel Brooks, undoubtedly one of the most influential comedic voices of his generation and of all time, has left behind an incredible legacy over his near century long life and even at the ripe old age of 97 (as of writing) he’s still capable of making us all laugh.  Under the mentorship of Sid Caesar, Mel found his way through Hollywood as a successful joke writer before eventually deciding to expand into film.  His debut, The Producers (1968) was a smash hit, and earned the multi-talented comedian his one and only Oscar for Original Screenplay.  What particularly made The Producers stand out was that it bravely tackled a taboo subject, namely the horrific legacy of Adolf Hitler in a post-WWII world.  After the horrors of the Holocaust came to light at the end of the war, many people believed that it was in bad taste to make any jokes about the atrocities committed during the war, including any mention of Hitler himself.  Mel Brooks felt differently, seeing ridicule as the best answer against evil in the world.  He believed that by mocking Hitler and the Nazi regime through his comedy, he was robbing them of their power to inspire others that want to emulate them.  Mel knew very well that Fascism and xenophobia didn’t go away with the defeat of the Nazi regime during the war, and that the specter of Hitler still haunted humanity for many years afterwards.  That’s why his ability to mercilessly mock the imagery of Hitler and the Third Reich in The Producers was such a profound breath of fresh air when it premiered.  But Mel would continue to look to other targets for ridicule in many of his future films, including a place that rang a little too close to home in Hollywood.

The year 1974 was the zenith of Mel Brooks’ career as a filmmaker.  In that year, he released not one but two comedy masterpieces, both of which remain just as potent and hilarious as they were when they first released.  In the Fall of 1974, Mel produced and directed the classic horror spoof Young Frankenstein (1974), which was a farcical delight that at the same time was also reverential to the movies it was spoofing.  While most of the movie still holds up as a comedy, it’s also clear that Mel’s working in more of his comedy comfort zone with Frankenstein.  The other film, released in the early part of 1974, was a much more risky project for Mel, and one that fifty years later remains the most controversial film of his career.  But surprisingly enough, Blazing Saddles  (1974) didn’t start out as a Mel Brooks project, but was instead the brainchild of writer Andrew Bergman.  Bergman’s premise of a sleepy Western town that’s forced to change once they receive a new sheriff who’s Black instantly appealed to Mel Brooks, who saw the comedy potential in the material.  He worked with Bergman to flesh out the comedy even more, insisting to Bergman to write without being “polite.”  And touching up the comedy even further, Mel enlisted the help of one of the hottest stand up comedians of that time, the legendary Richard Pryor, who was also instrumental in shaping the racial commentary of the film.  But even with all of the comedy legends working together on this movie, the film was certainly going to be a hard sell.  Because of the no holds barred nature of the racial comedy, with shall we say very liberal use of a certain racial slur, the script was certainly going to face some roadblocks on the way to getting made.  Eventually it found a home at Warner Brothers, and Mel was granted access to one of the most legendary Western movie backlots in Hollywood to bring to life his silly little film.  In the shadow of Western sets that the likes of John Wayne, Errol Flynn, and Randolph Scott all shot their movies on, Mel Brooks would stage iconic comedic moments like a horse getting punched out by football star Alex Karras, the stunned silent arrival of Sheriff Bart to town, and the climatic brawl that spans the entire studio lot.

What makes the comedy so special in Blazing Saddles is the complete and full sincerity of the cast.  Each and every performer fully embodies the absurdist reality of this farcical spin that Mel Brooks has put on the Western genre.  The most instrumental casting of course is that of Sheriff Bart himself.  Though there was speculation that Richard Pryor himself would step into the role having contributed to the screenplay, Mel was insistent on getting an actor without a comedy background to play the part, as Bart needed to be a grounded character compared to the caricatures of the  rest of the cast.  He found his Sheriff Bart in Broadway actor Cleavon Little, who perfectly slipped into the role.  The crucial part of the character of Sheriff Bart is his confidence; he has to be the smartest person in amongst of whole slew of buffoons, and Cleavon plays that aspect to perfection.  His escape from a tense situation at his arrival is brilliantly realized as he uses the townspeople’s blind bigotry against them, leading to a satisfactory punchline where he says to himself, “Baby, you are so talented, and they are so… dumb.”  It’s a great summation of his character and Little’s subtle performance aids in making Sheriff Bart work as the heart of the movie.  He’s also perfectly matched with Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid.  Wilder, who previously work with Mel on The Producers, was not the original choice for the part, as veteran actor Gig Young had originally been cast.  However, Young’s drinking problem made him a liability on set, so Mel had to make the choice to let him go and re-cast the part.  It took a while for Mel to find the right actor to play the Waco Kid; he even attempted to enlist John Wayne himself at one point, who graciously declined due to the more objectionable aspects of the script.  Gene Wilder was reluctant to take the part, think that the part was too restricting for him as a performer, as he referred more bombastic comedy roles.  Eventually Wilder relented on the condition that Mel chose Gene’s script as his next project and that’s what led to the making of Young Frankenstein.  Despite Wilder’s misgivings, he was perfect for the part and some of the movie’s biggest laughs come directly from him.  Rounding out the cast, there are tons of comedy legends including Harvey Korman as the villainous Hedley Lamarr, Madeline Kahn as the vivacious Lilly Von Shtupp (who received an Oscar nomination for her role), Slim Pickens as the dim witted cowboy Taggart, and Mel Brooks himself playing the distracted Governor LePetomane.

Initially, Warner Brothers executives were hesitant in releasing the movie, as the subject matter and unvarnished language made this a very taboo project.  Upon the first screening, the executives were stunned silent by the uncomfortably frank way that Mel Brooks addressed racial issues within the film.  It was thought that the movie would either get shelved or dumped quietly into theaters in order to bury it as the studio had little faith in it’s success.  In the time in which this movie was made, racial tensions in America were still fairly raw.  The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s had been a tough fought battle for equality and it eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which broke down the Jim Crow segregationist policies of the South.  But even a decade later, racial tensions endured, especially as they were inflamed again by political opportunists like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.  There were certainly more opportunities growing for black  voices in entertainment at the time, as subgenres like Blaxploitation began to emerge, but Hollywood itself was slow to progress with the times.  What was particularly pointed in the subtext of Mel’s film was how the Western genre was itself complicit in creating this myth about America’s past; specifically putting an almost exclusively white face on it.  There were numerous stories of the old west that centered around African American cowboys and lawmen, but none of them were being told.  Sure, Mel Brook’s was approaching this subject in a humorous way, but the critique of Hollywood’s lack of diversity was certainly there as well.  Warner Brothers knew very well that this was going to be a controversial movie no matter what.  What ultimately led to the film making it to theaters was an internal screening with Warner Brothers staff, much of whom were better representative of what the typical movie going audience would be like, and they were hooting and hollering with laughter the whole way through.  Thus, Mel Brooks got his film out into theaters and of course it would go on to become an instant classic.

Looking back on the movie as it now approaches it’s 50 year mark, it is remarkable how well the film holds up.  A lot of the comedy, particularly the more slapstick gags still feel timeless.  A group of cowboys eating beans and blowing gas around a campfire definitely feels evergreen, especially with the hilariously over the top sound effects used.  But, the time that has passed with regard to the racial subjects in the movie put the movie in a different light today than it did then.  Race relations are somewhat different today than they were 50 years ago, though there is still a lot about the movie that feels sadly relevant as well.  Black representation on film has improved over time, both in front and behind the camera.  There are still some lagging factors when it comes to equality though.  Just because milestones like electing the first Black president have happened in the recent years doesn’t mean that racial tensions are gone forever.  Some would say that they are getting fired up again.  This is one aspect where Blazing Saddles is especially relevant to this day.  In the film, Hedley Lamarr appoints Bart the sheriff of Rock Ridge knowing full well that the bigoted townspeople would rather abandon the town rather than accept him as their new protector, and that will help him gain control of the land for his own aspirations.  A disingenuous politician stirring up racial tensions for his own gain feels all too familiar in today’s political climate.  There certainly are aspects of Mel Brook’s comedy that have not aged as well either.  Mel certainly is an equal opportunity offender in his many comedies, but there are times when some of the racial jokes fall into the point of gratuitousness.  Also if there was something that I think he would rethink in the film, it would be the depiction of the musical performers in the “French Mistake” number as reductive gay stereotypes.  It’s all still in good fun, and it’s clear that Mel’s intent is to poke holes in the absurdity of racial bigotry and not to indulge in the ugliness of it.  However, over time, some people have lost that context when it comes to celebrating the comedy of Blazing Saddles over the years.

One of the things that has been said a lot about Blazing Saddles is that it’s a movie that could never be made today.  There’s a lot of truth to that, as the making of the movie was very much a response to the racial politics of the time in which it was made.  But, for some, they use Blazing Saddles as an example of how Hollywood has lost it’s way.  There are many critics online who point to this film to say that movies have gotten too “politically correct” or Hollywood has gotten too “woke.”  It’s interesting that they would single out Blazing Saddles of all movies as being the film that represents a time in Hollywood that wasn’t “woke” as it’s a movie that honestly is one of the most socially conscious films ever made by a major studio.  It was “woke” before that ever became a term.  Mel Brooks is and has always been an outspoken defender of civil rights movements in America.  Even in his late 90’s, he still speaks his mind on these issues.  One of the last social media posts made by his late friend and fellow comedy legend Carl Reiner before his death in 2020 was pictures of Carl and Mel at the latter’s then 94th birthday party, with both of them proudly wearing shirts that said “Black Lives Matter.”  Being called “woke” would be a compliment to Mel and not an insult.  But, for some reason, the anti-woke crowd wants to claim Blazing Saddles as a movie that speaks for them.  You have to wonder, what is it exactly about the movie that they like?  It certainly can’t be the criticism of naked racism, as Mel Brooks is clearly making fun of the complicit nature of white bigotry that pervades the Western genre.  I shudder to think that the only reason some people like this movie is because of it’s un-censored use of a certain word.

Here’s the thing about the way the movie uses racial slurs in the film.  Never in the whole movie is a racial slur meant to be a punchline for laughter.  Sure there are situations in which the n-word is skirted around in a hilarious way, like the old prospector character Gabby Johnson getting drowned out by a church bell right as he says the word or when Governor LePetomane asks Hedly Lamarr, “What are you nuts?  Can’t you see that that man is a Ni?”  But when the actual word is spoken, it’s not taken as a joke, but is instead intend to be a shocking jolt.  It also is important to note that the word is said by some of the dumbest and most ignorant characters in the movie.  They are the subjects of ridicule in the movie first and foremost, and that’s the intent of the story Mel is trying to tell.  Stories of the American West have long glamorized the image of white Americans taming the old west, while whitewashing all of the racial injustices that happened along the way.  Primarily it was the slaughtering of Native American tribes that got left out of the myths of the Old West, as indigenous people were reduced to savage obstacles in the way of progress, but also at the same time settlers of other races, including Blacks and Asians, were also left out of the Western myths too.  Blazing Saddles breaks down that myth by making it clear to the people of Rock Ridge that bigotry is their own worst enemy and that using a slur is just a sign of their own stupidity and blindness.  If there are people out there who find the n-word usage to be the one funny thing from this movie, and that it’s the thing that they lament as not being able to be done today, well, they are telling a lot about themselves then; and also making Mel Brooks’ point for him.  As the Waco Kid succinctly says in the movie, “These are people of the land.  The common clay of the new West.  You know… morons.”

That’s why it’s a good thing that a movie like Blazing Saddles couldn’t and shouldn’t be made today.  Blazing Saddles is a comedy that needed to exist in it’s own specific time; a time where naked bigorty needed to be called out and that Hollywood had to be confronted over it’s own shameful history in perpetuating the stereotypes that fan the flames of racism.  It’s a movie that should stand on it’s own and speak across generations.  The reason why a movie like it shouldn’t be made today is because I don’t think anyone would be able to offer the same thing that Mel Brook’s added that made the difference; a feeling of hope.  Today, comedies are far more cynical and geared toward the irreverent, because the belief is that positivity is a gateway to sappiness.  What is important in Blazing Saddles is that in defiance of all the bigotry he faces, Sheriff Bart fulfills his duty as a protector of his town and ends up saving the day in the end.  Even more than that, he does so by using his intelligence to win the day, not just outsmarting his enemies but also winning them over to his side.  The movie is hopeful about overcoming prejudice, even though it’s still aware about the long arduous road that is, with Sheriff Bart at one point saying, “Someday, they’ll even address me in broad daylight” when talking about the townsfolk he just saved.  There are many people who have tried to emulate what Mel Brooks has done with movies like Blazing Saddles, but few capture the same amount of wit and intelligence that his movies contain.  There is a very nuanced and pointed commentary about race in America amidst all of the fart sounds and sex jokes.  That’s what makes Blazing Saddles such a special comedy; it truly hits so many levels when it comes to comedy, with a sharp satirical edge and a fair amount of broad slapstick for good measure.  And it never fails to make us laugh, even after 50 years.

There’s one thing that is interesting about the growing list of Oscar winners over it’s 96 year history.  That thing is how each year’s selection of winner becomes a bit of a time capsule of their era in film.  Of course there are some winners that do remain timeless and feel just as fresh and entertaining today as they were when they first premiered in theaters, such as Casablanca (1943), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), or both The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974).  But then there are some winners that don’t quite translate as well over the years as the tastes of movie audiences change.  For some of them, historical context is necessary towards understanding why this particular film rose to the top of the Oscar field.  Some are just due to studio politics, such as the dated and cliché The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) beating out the timeless High Noon (1952).  But other times a winner is just the product of it’s era and just doesn’t translate well over time.  It doesn’t always mean that the movie is bad, but it is clear that some movies age poorly.  By all accounts How Green Was My Valley (1941) is a charming little family drama, but the only thing we seem to know about it today is that it’s the movie that beat Citizen Kane (1941) for Best Picture.  For their time, honoring these kinds of movies would’ve made sense, because they reflected the mood of Academy voter, who have more than not favored the more uplifting film.  But, there are times when you see the Academy choose a winner that feels like a breakthrough film at the time which unfortunately over the years begins to look more and more like an out of touch exercise with hindsight.  And I don’t think that I have ever seen a Best Picture winner fall of the pedestal harder than the 1999 champion American Beauty.   25 years ago, American Beauty looked like it was going to be the herald for a new era in cinema.  Nowadays, it comes across as naïve and pandering, and even more surprisingly, almost completely forgotten.

I remember the way that Hollywood fawned over this film when it first came out.  This was going to be the movie that shaped a new era in Hollywood with it’s tackling of then taboo subjects of suburban malaise, teenage sexuality, and homophobia.  It also had a high pedigree of talent behind it.  With the backing of Hollywood rising star Dreamworks and it’s trio of super producers Katzenberg, Geffen and Spielberg, this movie was design from the get go to dazzle the Academy.  West End stage director Sam Mendes was called upon to make his big screen debut after dazzling the theater world with his acclaimed re-imagining of Cabaret for both London and Broadway.  Veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) was hired to shoot the picture and Thomas Newman was given the duties of scoring the film, and in each case they were breaking the mold of a Hollywood prestige picture.  Then there was the cast, which included established stars like Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning as well as young newcomers like Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, and Mena Suvari.  And it was all centered around a screenplay from longtime sitcom writer Alan Ball that Spielberg was said to have fallen in love with immediately.  Overall, this was a movie that came together with all the right ingredients at the right time, which is the case with most movies that end up collecting multiple awards.  But for it’s time, this movie was believed to be something else entirely.  Understanding the context of it’s release, American Beauty was coming out at the tail end of the 1990’s, which at that time had seen high budget period dramas dominate at the Oscars, including Braveheart (1995), The English Patient (1996), and Titanic (1997).  The year prior, the very safe pick of Shakespeare in Love (1998) had upset Saving Private Ryan (1998), so the Academy was beginning to be criticized for being out of touch, which may have been what prompted the turn that benefitted American Beauty in the eyes of Academy voters.  And boy did it, as it not only took home Best Picture, but it was one Best Actress award short of completing the Oscar Hat Trick, which is winning the top five awards (Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Director, Picture), a feat only three films have ever achieved (1934’s It Happened One Night, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs).

So what was it about the film that cast this spell on the Academy.  The movie looks at the lives of two suburban families going through various crises.  The Burnhams are a nuclear American family on the verge of implosion after years of sexual frustration on the part of the depressed patriarch Lester (Kevin Spacey).  Living next door are the Fitts family, which is lorded over by a disciplinarian and homophobic father named Frank (Chris Cooper) who clashes constantly with his artistically inclined son Ricky (Wes Bentley).  Both in many ways represented the ideals of the nuclear American family that so many in conservative media like to push forward, and this movie takes a sledgehammer to that image and exposes all the cracks underneath.  Lester is depressed by his lack of urgency over his life, and then is “awoken” after being aroused by his daughter’s “sexy” best friend.  From that moment, he disrupts all of the routines that have governed his life and begins to do things his way, much to the chagrin of his career driven wife (Annette Benning), whose got her own subversive issues going on.  And of course the kids are going through their own hormonal awakening throughout the movie.  And then there is the Colonel, whose external homophobia we learn is a mask for his own self-hatred.  It’s in general a critique of the societal masks that we impose on ourselves to function in a modern society, and the movie examines if those masks themselves are part of the problem we face everyday.  After a long line of safe, studio driven fare, I can see how the Academy believed that American Beauty was this subversive gem that would start a new era of filmmaking in Hollywood.  In some ways it kind of did, but not in a way that would put American Beauty as the touchstone film that they thought it would be.  In general, 1999 was a year full of movies that would shake up Hollywood, and some have held up much better over time than American Beauty did like Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), Magnolia (1999) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).  Those films continue to inspire filmmakers to this day, but I can’t think of any other movie that strived to be the next American Beauty.

So, why is it that 25 years later American Beauty has fallen off people’s radar despite being such a big winner at the Oscars.  It’s been out of print as a physical media release for nearly a decade now, and you’d have to dig pretty deep to find it on streaming (currently it’s on Paramount+ along with most Dreamworks catalog titles).  I think the primary reason that people no longer talk about this movie these days is pretty obvious, so I’ll just get to the elephant in the room.  The depiction of Lester Burnham in the movie seems to diminish the pedophiliac nature of his character.  He is the main protagonist of the story (the whole thing is framed through his post-death narration) so we are observing the movie through his perspective.  And Lester’s main motivation is that he wants to have sex with an underage girl.  25 years later this element of the character cannot in any way be justified.  Now truth be told, he doesn’t go through with it, but the movie does comes as close to the edge as it can with the subject matter and at the same time, this sexual drive is seen as a positive thing for his character development because it’s what pulls Lester out of his mid-life funk and let’s him feel alive again.  The implications of that are just icky in today’s culture, especially in a #MeToo world.  But if it was just the character development in the movie, maybe you could just dismiss it as out of touch for it’s time.  Unfortunately, we have learned of Kevin Spacey’s real life sex crimes, and it make the character of Lester Burnham almost unbearable to watch now.  Unlike Lester, we know Spacey actually went through with his molestation of underage victims, by his own admission.  It’s a disgraceful revelation that in many ways has clouded the reputation of American Beauty more than anything else.  With things hitting pretty close to real life, I wonder if Alan Ball has any regrets in letting his main character be let off the hook for almost committing statutory rape.  I get that exposing the cracks underneath polite American society was the aim, but some things need to be called out as unacceptable and this movie just seemed to forget that.

Before the exposure of Kevin Spacey as a perverted monster, American Beauty faced another backlash over the years since it’s release, and that was the perception that it was a pretentious movie.  American Beauty rides that fine line between the naturalistic and heightened sense of reality.  While the movie is grounded in a contemporary (for it’s time) American setting, the film also takes several turns into flights of fantasy, mainly as a way of looking into the minds of the characters.  We especially see this with the moments that Lester lusts after the character Angela (Mena Suvari), with deep red roses being a heavy metaphoric presence.  Sure, those moments are beautifully shot by the late Conrad Hall, but in the end they are more style over substance given how heavy handed these moments are.  Still, those are the moments that helped to sell the movie and remain the most memorable to this day, so that’s a credit to the craft of the movie.  Where most of the pretention lies is with the dialogue found in Alan Ball’s script.  Originally, American Beauty was originally conceived as a stage play, and that helps to make the heightened dialogue feel more within context.  The characters in this movie do not talk like real human beings, but more like they are characters within a play whom the actors must imbue with heightened emotions.  For the most part, the lines that are supposed to be profound just become annoyingly cloy.  This is especially true with the character of Ricky, whose artistic sensibilities come across as particularly hollow.  The notorious trash bag scene over time has become the poster child moment of this movie’s pretentious reputation.  What was supposed to sound deep and poetic in it’s day now in today’s eyes just looks like a privileged white boy’s low effort attempt at filmmaking.  There are stronger moments in the movie that do still work, like the escalating tension of the dinner scene where Lester throws the plate of asparagus at the wall, but for the most part you can tell a lot of this script would’ve hit a bit harder if performed on a stage, instead of being awkwardly translated for the screen.

There is one thing about the movie that I do think has subtly worked it’s way through the culture at large since it’s premiere.  The character of Lester Burnham in many ways started the trend of “difficult men” on both the small and little screen in the 20 years since it’s release.  This is particularly the case on television, where you see characters like Tony Soprano and Walter White emerge in pop culture in the 2000’s and beyond.  While Lester Burnham was not the first of these kinds of characters (a main protagonist that is interesting to dissect while at the same time hard to sympathize), he certainly helped to popularize the type.  As problematic as Lester is, his character evolution is in itself an interesting catalyst in examining the subversive fractures of American society, particularly when it comes to masculinity.  You see many more characters of this kind post-American Beauty than before, which in the 80’s and 90’s leading up to it kind of presented a more idealized portrayal of the modern American male.  Lester Burnham was a deeply flawed individual, but that ascension of his own worst instincts bubbling to the surface made him a far more interesting character as a result, and it changed the perception of what constituted a portrayal of masculinity in movies thereafter.  But, at the same time, the movie does have it’s own dated portrayals of masculine/feminine dynamic that haven’t aged very well either.  What is surprising is that Alan Ball, who is a queer writer himself, seems to perpetuate the antiquated idea of deep in the closet resentment being the driving force behind homophobia.  We learn that Colonel Fitts’ virulent homophobia is it’s own mask for his own closeted feelings, but this feels like a story element that minimalizes the horrific nature of violence towards the gay community.  Yes, there are cases where homophobes have been exposed as having secret gay affairs, but for the most part violence committed against the gay community has just been the result of pure bigotry.  To pin internalized homophobia around Colonel Fitts’ motivations is a very reductive approach to a very serious problem that still affects the queer community in American society today.  I feel that with hindsight, this is a part of Alan Ball’s script that likely would be much more nuanced today.

The movie primarily has the problem of just being too tied in with it’s era.  It is a very Clinton-era movie, made back in a time when the worst that this country was going through was the scandalous thought of an American president being unfaithful to his wife.  In some ways, I kind of see what may have inspired this movie to begin with.  American Beauty definitely feels like a cry out into the dark abyss of modern American malaise.  It was a post-Cold War world where we as a society were growing comfortable with the idea of being the world’s sole super power.  American Beauty was very much a wake up call to remind us Americans that society is not as candy colored as it seems.  America is a complex society of many divisions, and trying to mask over that with an unrealistic picture of polite, suburban values is doing more harm than good.  Now, the delivery of that message in American Beauty is undermined by it’s own pretentions, but the underlying idea behind it is still sound.  One thing that I think unravels the movie as a whole from achieving it’s goal is the way that it handles the ending.  Spoiler Warning, but the movie closes with the murder of Lester Burnham.  The death has been telegraphed throughout the movie, as Lester is speaking in narration beyond the grave (an inspiration from the classic Sunset Boulevard).  What I think would have made the movie much more of a masterpiece is if it left the identity of the murderer ambiguous.  We see fully who pulled the trigger on Lester (Colonel Fitts) and it kind of robs the movie of it’s most profound moment.  There are several culprits who may have wanted Lester dead by the end, and the mystery it left behind would’ve been a great thing to leave the audience with.  This moment would’ve felt even more poignant years after, because in the context of the movie, Lester’s murder is the catalyst for destroying any remaining perception of the perfect American idealized world left in the lives of these characters.  Honestly, there’s a story to be told about what happened to all these characters afterward, because just like the families in the movie, America itself was on the verge of it’s own traumatic upheaval.  American Beauty was the first Best Picture winner of the new millennium, and in the 25 years since America has seen the 9/11 attacks, decades of war, economic upheaval, a rise in Fascism, and a crippling pandemic.  American Beauty warns us of how we grow too complacent sometimes, and the years since have only reinforced how much we take for granted with our own comfort.

American Beauty unfortunately is undermined with it’s own dated sense of values from the time it was first written and filmed.  The world has changed considerably in the last 25 years, and a pretentious examination of suburban malaise just doesn’t have the sting that it used to.  The fall from grace that Kevin Spacey has gone through hasn’t helped either.  Still, there are many things about American Beauty that still hold up very well.  One is Annette Benning’s incredible performance as Carolyn Burnham.  Her career obsessed matriarch driven to the extreme to uphold her place in society is still a potent character portrayal.  The scene where she has an emotional breakdown after having a terrible Open House showing for her clients, with the backlighting of the closed blinds perfectly captured by Conrad Hall’s camera, is a definite highlight of the movie.  And unlike Spacey, her career is still in top form as Ms. Benning has just been nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars again for the movie Nyad (2023); he fifth overall.  Sam Mendes, who is only one of three directors to ever win for a debut film, has only gotten better in the last 25 years as a filmmaker.  His follow-up to American Beauty was in my opinion his masterpiece with the amazing Road to Perdition (2002), and he’s made many other astonishing films such as Skyfall (2012) and 1917 (2019) since then.  Conrad Hall would sadly deliver his swan song with Road to Perdition as he passed away before it’s release, and he won a posthumous Oscar for his work.  Both that and American Beauty represented a fantastic late career resurgence for one of the master cameramen of Hollywood.  And Alan Ball’s sensationalized style of writing would find a better place back on television with hit shows like Six Feet Under and True Blood.  For the movie American Beauty, it remains a film today that’s both infuriating for it’s pretentiousness but admirable for it’s artistry.  Given the crazy quarter century that’s we’ve been through, I honestly think it would be interested to revisit this kind of story.  Perhaps Alan Ball and Sam Mendes should consider a stage version like it was originally was supposed to be, but with a more contemporary context, especially when addressing Lester Burnham’s problematic underage lust.  It is fascinating how in 25 years, this movie went from the peak of Hollywood glory to a cinematic footnote.  It’s both deserving of scorn, but also much more interesting than that.  At the very least, it’s worthy of a re-watch.  Times change, but cinema is forever, and this may be a plastic bag caught in the wind of a movie, but that in a way is it’s own beautiful little time capsule.

Looking at the state of film criticism in our social media driven world, I feel like there has developed a disconnect over what people actually think a film critique really is.  In the last few years, film discourse has very much opened up to allow more voices into the conversation, with social media amplifying opinions across the spectrum.  This democratization of film criticism, which has allowed fans and casual viewers to have a voice that reflects back towards Hollywood, has certainly helped to change things for the good in the industry.  Instead of having the trades and large media conglomerates dominate the discourse around film, groups that otherwise never had a voice before with regards to media are able to deliver their own takes about Hollywood that break through the wall of insider talk.  Minority groups can voice their criticism about representation in various forms of media, and their critiques can now lead to a new re-examination on Hollywood’s part in order to rectify that disparity.  But, there is a downside to the increased input of the casual film criticism out there in the media, and it has had it’s own negative effect on not just the media, but the culture as well.   Part of the problem is that we’ve reduced film criticism down to a mathematical formula, which itself is a reductive action done to what should be a personal experience.  And it’s a problem that Hollywood has only themselves to blame, because they have put too much stock into scoring their outputs in a way that is more friendly to their data driven work flow.  While it may help to cover their bottom line by getting quantifiable numbers to base their actions on, it also belittles the art of filmmaking itself as everything becomes standardized.

Of course, the current media trend that I am talking about is a thing called Critic’s scores.  These are accumulated numbers based on published film reviews that are put together to create an average percentage that quantifies a movie’s overall score.  There are numerous sites that offer this kind of ranking, but the most well known of these is a site called Rottentomatoes.com.  Rottentomatoes.com was started in 1998 by a group of undergraduates from the University of California, Berkeley.  The site was simply a statistics site that used movie reviews as the catalyst.  Interest in the site grew over time, and they eventually were bought by larger media conglomerates; first IGN in 2004, then to Flixster in 2010, and then finally by movie ticket retailer Fandango in 2016, who have been running it ever since.  Rotten Tomatoes gained their notoriety through their distinguishable ratings system, which much like a school grading system offered up a pass or fail metric to base a movie’s reception on; only by their branding based on tomatoes, movies either fell into fresh or rotten categories.  Anything above 60%, and the movie would be fresh.  Anything below that, and it would be rotten.  A few years in, once Rotten Tomatoes gained more notoriety, they began to give movies a certified fresh ranking, meaning that the movie statistically could never fall out of fresh territory based on the ratio of the number of reviews and their aggregate score.  With certification like this, Rotten Tomatoes scores became marks of quality for films, and film companies began to use their Tomatoes score as part of their marketing.  If Rotten Tomatoes deems it fresh, then you will hear of it.  Other sites like IMDb and Metacritic also have developed their own ratings systems that in some way or another grab the attention of movie executives.

While seeing how well a movie performs on Rotten Tomatoes can be informative, the statistical aspect of their ratings system can also be misleading.  Film criticisms are often multifaceted and nuanced, and it can’t just be summed up in binary fresh or rotten ranking.  Sometimes, critics find themselves in the middle, neither loving nor hating a movie, but find the good and the bad in movies that are often hard to fully sum up.  Sometimes, critics even change their mind about a film after a sitting on it for a while, giving it a re-consideration after a second or third viewing.  But that kind of nuance is just not acceptable in a business that requires immediate feedback.  While Hollywood is able to get a quantifiable score out of places like Rotten Tomatoes, they are also getting a snapshot of that movie’s response.  And sometimes, that can actually have a negative effect on itself.  Something of that order happened happened to Disney with two of their films this last summer.  Disney decided to gamble big on the releases of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) and Pixar’s Elemental (2023) by having them premiere at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.  The reception from the festival was tepid to say the least, and it resulted in both of the films sitting with Rotten scores on RT.com for almost a month before their wide releases based on the few, high brow reviewers who saw it at Cannes.  This had a negative effect on both film’s box office, as they performed well below their expected openings.  But, over time, Dial of Destiny and Elemental did pull themselves out of the Rotten territory and ultimately ended up fresh at 70% and 76% respectively, with Elemental even earning a very late Certified badge.  The movies’ overall response in the end turned positive, but the damage had already been done by those low numbers and both movies struggled at the box office.

We are at a point where audiences are very well aware of the Fresh vs. Rotten metric, and it’s affecting their choices in what movies they go out to see.  This is largely due to the fact that movie tickets today are quite expensive and the customer is very discerning about what they want to spend their money on.  The Rotten Tomatoes score has become a powerful metric within the film business because it’s an easy to understand rating that all audience can look towards.  Much like all consumer ratings out there, people just want to look at the score and determine if it’s worth it to them to invest in it.  This is nothing new for film criticism.  For most people, when they look at a movie review, they don’t want to waste time reading through the critic’s every well thought out analysis; they just want to see the score.  That score of course varies from critic to critic.  Critics either use a letter grade, or a star rating, or in my case on this blog a number grade.  Some critics even just uses a simple binary rating system in the positive or negative.  It’s all based on how the critic wishes to quantify their overall response in a simple way to sum it up for the reader.  This of course is what fuels the scores of sites like Rotten Tomatoes, which takes those scores and creates an aggregate number.  But there is a flaw in the way this score is put together.  Quantifying a review in many ways is subjective.  There are plenty of film critics out there who don’t even give a score.  How does Rotten Tomatoes take their critiques into account.  At this point, we see where the binary system becomes a bit flawed, as a review that sounds negative in certain areas and positive in others without giving out a score messes with the algorithm of the site’s metric.  As a result, a guess is made as to where the movie falls, and that can have an effect on the overall score of a movie.  This of course becomes even more of an issue because these are numbers that matter a lot right now to Hollywood and has an influence on how they market a film as well as how what they greenlight in the first place.

Published film critics’ scores being aggregated into a number is one thing that becomes a problem when that number doesn’t reflect nuance.  It’s also another thing when there is also a user rating in play.  Rotten Tomatoes and other sites do offer a secondary number based on input from their own users, which on it’s own is a worthwhile service that allows the casual user to have a say as well.  The unfortunate thing about user ratings is how open they sometimes are, which can sometimes lead to abuses of the ranking system.  There is this practice that has arisen on places like Rotten Tomatoes called “review bombing,” which is where a coordinated effort is made to load a bunch of negative reviews all at once onto a websites user rating in order to purposely drive the overall score down.  Most often, this is done with the purpose of damaging the public perception of a movie, which the organized group can point to as proof of their own slanted opinion.  You definitely see the effect of this with movies that have very polarized critics’ and users’ scores on Rotten Tomatoes, such as Captain Marvel (2019), Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and The Little Mermaid (2023).  What makes review-bombing a suspicious activity is that it usually happens before a movie comes out, as most of the user reviews seem to have been purposely negative without even having the context of seeing the movie.  As observed, the most often reason for these review bombs happen is because a group is attacking a film for it’s content rather than artistic merit, such as if it is focuses on a marginalized group or contains a message that they object to.  The intent of the review bombing is to get Hollywood’s attention and make them believe that these often small minority opinions are much bigger than they really are and try to force the industry to conform to their own narrow-minded worldview.  It may be dishonest, but it has had an effect before.  I would argue that Lucasfilm took the review bombing of The Last Jedi too seriously and it caused them to do too much over-correction which resulted in the mess that was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).  Rotten Tomatoes even recognized the damaging effects of these trolling review bombs and they changed their metric to only reflect certified user reviews.  Sadly, we are in a place where valid criticism and baseless trolling get mixed together, and it unfortunately becomes even harder to allow genuine non-professional voices into the mix without having to gatekeep free speech.

So, how do we look at fair film criticism in this kind of environment where opinions are too often hard to take seriously.  I try to look at what I value in film criticism.  When I was developing into a burgeoning cinephile in my formative years, I took the opinions of film critics seriously.  My childhood overlapped with the rise of film criticism as entertainment, as part of my weekly routine was to watch Siskel & Ebert’s syndicated review show on TV.  Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert may have unfortunately also contributed to the reductive binary rating metric that place like Rotten Tomatoes emulate; famously popularizing the thumbs up or thumbs down rating on their show.  Truth be told, that’s what made their show a draw for me as a young film lover, as I eagerly wanted to see which way the thumbs would fall for each movie on their show.  But having gone back to look at some of their old reviews on YouTube, another thing occurred to me about what they brought to their show; something that I probably didn’t rightfully appreciate as a teenager.  Their reviews were simply not just about the binary thumbs rating; it was about how they expressed their thoughts about the movie.  That was the key to their success as film critics.  They could articulate why a movie was good or bad.  That’s the art of criticism that you just can’t put into a numeric score.  Film criticism is about engaging with a work of art, and stating what effect it had on you.  That’s what makes being a film critic worthwhile; it’s a art form within itself inspired by the response that we have to any type of media.  Some can deliver a succinct opinion within a strongly worded paragraph while others can spin a thesis’ worth of thoughts across multiple pages, and any one of these criticisms can be just as valid whether positive or negative because it is genuinely coming from an honest place.  It’s that kind of personal touch that in more and more ways is getting buried down in the discourse of film criticism as movie ratings are becoming more of an impersonal metric.

As it has become increasingly clear over time, the perceptions of Hollywood’s highs and lows are becoming increasingly manipulated into becoming part of larger narratives about culture and the arts.  People want to draw their own conclusions about Hollywood and they use simplified metrics like those found on review sites like Rotten Tomatoes to define their narrative.  People attacking Hollywood for going “woke” for instance cite user ratings from Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb as proof of Hollywood being out of touch with the audience, though as I stated before those ratings can be heavily manipulated.  At the same time, certified ratings can also be skewed in favor of a positive response for a movie.  Sony Pictures got caught red handed with having a fake film reviewer submit positive reviews of their movies, and this may have juiced the numbers for some of their films on these ratings sites.  As we’ve seen, systems that can be easily manipulated should not have this kind of influence over an industry, and yet they are increasingly getting the notice of Hollywood who desperately want to use that Fresh rating in their marketing.  Those abusing the privilege of contributing to a film’s overall ranking are doing so with the intent of manipulating Hollywood, and that could lead to some dangerous consequences, like the silencing of disenfranchised groups who don’t have the same obsessive drive as internet trolls to hijack the narrative.  In the end, though site like Rotten Tomatoes have an immediate impact on a movie, it at the same time is not a long term one.  You’d be surprised how many movies receive a Rotten rating on RT.com and then years later develop into cult classics.  I can think of a dozen movies even in the last year which I think were rated too low or too high for my opinion.  A movie I liked, Shazam: Fury of the Gods (2023), received a rotten 53% from critics, which shows that I fell outside the majority consensus on that movie.  But at the same time, it doesn’t motivate me to change my opinion either.  Those critics ratings on Rotten Tomatoes or any other site are not a monolith, and if you disagree with the overall ratings, that’s fine.  Movies are a subjective art and we should all like what we like and not feel pressured to accept the “narrative.”

And while I do point out a lot of the flaws of the Rotten Tomato critical metric, there are some positive things that the site has done for movies in general that are worth celebrating.  The site does spotlight movies that otherwise would’ve gone unseen and it does function as a genuine entertainment new site, though one that is imbedded with the industry itself.  The same goes for IMDb, which is an invaluable resource for film information of all kinds.  People just need to look beyond the surface level of those Fresh or Rotten ratings and they’ll see the added worth of the sites they visit.  That’s something that is true about all film criticism in general.  Don’t just skip ahead to the final rating; read through and engage with the opinion that the film critic presented to you.  You may not agree with it, nor should you be obligated to, but taking into consideration the arguments made by a critic will allow you the view to have more nuanced reactions of your own.  When visiting Rotten Tomatoes, look through the blurbs of each critics reviews; you’ll find that sometimes there’s a caveat to a positive review or a silver lining to a negative one.  Maybe use those blurbs to seek a link to the original review itself if you are compelled to read more.  Some movies generate some very clear cut, one-sided opinions, but you’ll find a lot of other movies that often leave people conflicted.  One thing that I do like about the Certified Fresh label given to movies on Rotten Tomatoes is that they are often almost always won by small movies that normally would go unseen by mass audiences.  If the Rotten Tomatoes metric carries that much weight in the industry, it’s best that movies that should be spotlighted are the ones that receive the best responses with critics, and they are able to float to the top thanks to Rotten Tomatoes Certified label.  That’s ultimately what we want as film critics, to help get something that meant a lot to us seen that otherwise would be ignored.  We use our voices to articulate the love we have for film, and some of us do so in writing.  That’s why I created this blog site.  You may not agree with every opinion I have to say here, but I tell you that every word I write is my own and I am happy that it inspires any engagement from any of you, even if it’s in conflict with my opinion.  While Rotten Tomatoes and other sites like it are valuable as an aggregate collector of film critiques, just know that movies are more than just Fresh or Rotten; they are experiences that defy being just a number.

We all know the kinds of Christmas movies we prefer to watch every single year during the holidays.  Speaking for myself, I’m partial to Christmas themed comedies, like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1988) or Home Alone (1990).  For others, old classics like Holiday Inn (1942) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) are what they prefer, or some like to indulge in the dark side of Christmas with horror themed holiday movies like Krampus (2015).  But if there is a particular subgenre that has emerged as the most dominant among Christmas movies, it’s the romantic comedy.  Rom Coms are by far the most prominent, and some would say over-represented of genres during the Christmas season.  But the reason they are so omnipresent during the holidays makes a lot of sense.  No other genre of Christmas themed movies knows their audience better than the rom coms, and the people who make them target that audience with laser like precision.  For many people, the holidays is all about family and home based comforts, and that’s what these movies deliver on every single time.  Some would complain that the Christmas rom com has become the most cookie cutter of subgenres in all of cinema, because the vast majority of them pretty much recycle the same formula with only minor tweaks to differentiate themselves.  But, this is where the appeal lies for many.  The predictability of Christmas rom coms can sometimes be it’s asset because it helps them to go down easier for the tastes of it’s audience, many of whom prefer the same and comfortable over the challenging and unexpected.  Though many studios have contributed to the vast library of Christmas themed rom coms, there is one producer that not only has cornered the market, but has over time created a huge money making machine based around this genre of film.  Of course it makes sense that a company specialized around warming peoples hearts through greeting cards over the last century would also do the same on the small screen as well.

The Christmas card maker Hallmark has spun off into many different branches of holiday themed merchandise over the years, which includes gift wrapping and tree ornaments on top of their base production of greeting cards.  In the 1990’s, they began their first steps towards a whole different avenue of business, which was entertainment.  Since the 50’s, Hallmark had lent it’s branding towards film and television productions under the banner of “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” basically using it’s wholesome name to steer people towards media that shared the values the company wished to promote.  In 1991, Hallmark formally created Crown Media Inc., which would be the official media wing of the Hallmark corporation.  From this point on, Hallmark would be in the business of not just giving their name to other people’s productions, but would be in charge of making their own.  Over the 1990’s, Hallmark would co-produce several made for TV specials, films, and mini-series.  One of their favorite partners to work with was the Jim Henson company, whom they collaborated with on the ambitious mini-series Gulliver’s Travels (1996) for the NBC network.  The partnership with the Jim Henson company led to the next big extension of their media empire, as the two companies acquired major stakes in the faith based cable channel called the Odyssey Network.  Eventually, the duo of shareholders re-organized the network, creating more secular programming and reducing the religious content to a minimum four hour block.  Finally in 2001, the Odyssey Network was officially re-branded as the Hallmark Channel, which would be the official home of all past and future Hallmark branded programming.  The channel proved to be an enormous success and the network has grown since then with Hallmark Movies and Mysteries being spun off in 2004 and Hallmark Drama launching in 2017.

Of course Hallmark Channel carries a variety of programming throughout the entire year, but it’s the holiday season where the channel really sees a spike in viewership, and they are quite aware of that fact.  Christmas time is Hallmark’s bread and butter, so it’s only natural that they would go all out for the holiday season.  The network premiered it’s first original Christmas themed movie during it’s inaugural year with The Christmas Secret (2001), starring Beau Bridges and Richard Thomas.  In the 22 years since, the Hallmark Christmas movie library has grown to nearly 500 titles.  That’s an average of 20 new movies a year, and we’re only talking about the Christmas ones Hallmark releases.  To say that Hallmark Entertainment has been prolific over these last several years would be an understatement.  But, it’s not particularly surprising either.  Hallmark Christmas movies are not expensive to make, and they usually run a breezy 90 minutes in length (2 hours with commercials).  They don’t require extensive post-production, as most of their films are grounded, with the only magical films falling into a modest magical reality.  In many ways, the Hallmark Christmas movie machine runs much like the way old Hollywood did in the studio system days, including the fact that they usually draw from the same stable of actors and actresses for many of their movies.  Some would say that Hallmark Christmas movies is the last resort of has-beens churned out by the Hollywood machine, but there are a fair amount of actors who have willingly pursued being a part of the Hallmark Channel stable of stars, and they have managed to thrive on that platform as Hallmark’s popularity has grown.  The current queen of the Hallmark Channel is former Mean Girls and Party of Five star Lacey Chabert, whose been the star of over 30 Hallmark Christmas movies as of 2023.  And by starring in, I don’t mean any small part; she is the leading lady of that many films, something that you don’t normally see in Hollywood over that short amount of time.  The movies may all be the same re-packaged fare re-released ad nauseum, but Hallmark certainly knows what it’s doing with the business model they’ve set up.  Their Christmas programming is now so vast that their entire programming block between late October and the end of December has been dubbed the “Countdown to Christmas,” and it is consistently their highest rated period of the year.

So what makes these Christmas movies so appealing to audiences.  For the most part, Hallmark has worked the rom com formula down to a science.  For the most part, the movies are centered around a central romance; often between polar opposites.  A lot of the time, the central character (mostly the leading lady) is career obsessed and alone during the holiday season, and through a series of holiday centric events, they find true love and live happily ever after.  In a Hallmark Christmas movie, it’s the holiday traditions that bring the people closer together.  Sometimes it’s through meeting the family of the loved one for the first time during the holidays that does the trick.  Sometimes it’s helping that special crush finally achieve success in their Christmas time competition.  There’s also quite a few of these movies that end up with one of the fated lovers having to chase down the other to tell them that they love them; most often it’s at an airport, because you know the holidays.  Along the way, there’s a colorful cast of side characters, including the sassy co-worker, the warm-hearted mother and father, and the precocious little kid.  What I’ve described is pretty much 2/3’s of all the plots of the Hallmark Christmas movies.  Even the marketing of the films features very little deviation, because it often shows the two love birds embracing in front of a Christmas tree under a starry sky or in a field with freshly fallen snow.  You pretty much know what you are going to get when you tune in to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie.  It is not high art cinema, but rather comfort food, and Hallmark is very well aware of the kind of media they are producing.  Their movies are more life-affirming than mind-opening and the fact that they continue to make the same kind of movie year after year is because they know that their audience is not expecting any more or less than what they’ve had before, and that’s a formula that is in no need of changing.

The one thing that probably defines Hallmark movies more than anything else is that they propagate the idea of traditional values.  Hallmark is by all accounts politically neutral, but their programming does very much stick to a sense of old time ideals.  The world of Hallmark Christmas movies is very much an aspirational one; where there is no violence or vulgarity, and everyone is polite to one another.  There is definitely a sense of competing values in Hallmark movies, but it often cuts down the line of complicated lifestyles versus the simple joys.  Often the countryside is portrayed as the idealized place to be, where time moves more slowly and the worries are millions of miles away.  There are people out there who point to this aspect of the Hallmark movies as being agenda driven.  Given that the Hallmark Channel started off as a Christian based network before it’s re-branding, it can be expected that some of the residual religious influence carried over into Hallmark’s mostly idealized worldview.  The romances in Hallmark movies are extremely chaste compared to most other rom coms.  For many years, it would’ve been even unusual to see a kiss longer than a few seconds in most Hallmark movies.  Though Hallmark Channel movies are for the most part extremely tame in general, they are also at the same time not pushing any particular agenda other than just wholesome Christmas tidings.  I think the critique of containing an agenda stems from the fact that religious propaganda over the years have in many ways been co-opting the Hallmark style, seeing it as an effective tool to spread their more overt agendas to the same kind of audience that watches Hallmark films every Christmas.  Hallmark for it’s part has tried to avoid dipping it’s toes into the culture war, hoping to appeal to all audiences with it’s simple greeting card messaging of hope and love.  But, unfortunately, their idealized sense of the world doesn’t always mix well in an environment that has grown more polarized.

There have been a variety of controversies that have arisen over the years with regards to Hallmark’s place in the so-called “culture war.”  In 2020, Hallmark found itself in the cross-hairs of right wing critics who protested an ad run on the channel by the wedding planning app Zola, which featured testimony from a same-sex couple who used it’s services.  The backlash prompted an immediate pull from the airways by Crown Media’s then CEO Bill Abbott.  The censoring of the ad then led to a counter protest from the LGBTQ community, who also made a point of the lack of representation on the Hallmark Channel.  This led to a quick reversal by the Hallmark Corporation, who stated that their aim was not to offend anyone by either airing the ad or pulling it from the air.  Despite their best efforts to avoid getting into the political conversation, Hallmark was unfortunately now right in the thick of it.  Given the fact that the year 2020 forced many new conversations to open up about diversity and representation in general, Hallmark began to listen to the complaint that their programming was lacking in representation across the spectrum, especially with people of color as well as the LGBTQ community.  Unfortunately, the head of Hallmark’s media division, the ultra-conservative Bill Abbott was not receptive to these changes he called upon now had to enact, so he promptly resigned after a decade in charge of the Hallmark Channel and it’s subsidiaries.  In the following year, he launched the new network Great American Country (GAC) which would now be the right-leaning alternative to the diversified Hallmark Channel.  This move then led to a very publicized departure from one of Hallmark’s biggest stars, Candace Cameron Bure, who like Abbott also objected to Hallmark’s move for diversity.  The fundamentalist Christian actress (sister of far-right actor and filmmaker Kirk Cameron) signed an exclusive deal with the GAC channel and Hallmark suddenly found itself facing competition not just for it’s wholesome image but for it’s hold on traditional value audiences.

It can definitely be said that while Hallmark wasn’t political in itself as a broadcaster, it’s audience nevertheless was made up of primarily right-leaning baby boomer generation viewers.  It was the premiere channel for middle aged to elderly women across America, many of whom gravitated to Hallmark’s simpler, idealized view of American life.  But, there is another block of audience members that has been growing over the years for the Hallmark Channel.  Believe it or not, the Hallmark Channel, and in particular their Christmas movies, are very popular in the gay community.  Of course, these two blocks of audiences are watching Hallmark movies for different reasons; the older audiences for the affirmational traditional values espoused by the films, and the gay audiences for the camp value.  But that’s a generally nice thing to think that conservative mothers and their queer children can have something to bond over during the holiday season as they watch the Hallmark Channel together.  Thankfully, this is something that the Hallmark Channel has embraced in the last couple of years.  After Bill Abbott’s departure, Hallmark has held true to it’s promise to expand representation on it’s network.  While Hallmark movies remain fairly chaste with their romances, there is a decidedly stronger mix of color amongst the couples, including far more interracial relationships.  Actress Holly Robinson Peete has emerged as one of the top stars on the channel in the last couple of years, marking a strong presence for people of color on the channel.  But, the biggest sign of Hallmark’s progression into a more inclusive studio was in Christmas 2020 with the premiere of the movie The Christmas House, the first Hallmark movie to feature a same-sex couple prominently in it’s story.  While performers of color and different sexual orientations were always a part of Hallmark movies in the past, they were now being allowed to take center stage and have their own stories told by the same studio that had shepherded their careers for so long.  And the last couple of years have shown us that embracing diversity has not hurt Hallmark one bit.  In fact, their influence on the holiday season has only grown over time.

The Hallmark Christmas movie model has expanded beyond just Hallmark’s reach.  You now can find the same kind of wholesome holiday entertainment premiering on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon each year.  There are literally hundreds of new Christmas rom coms to choose from each holiday season, and this is largely due to the fact that Hallmark’s formula has been such an effective one.  They are not expensive to make and they already have a reliable, built in audience to capitalize on.  Hallmark itself has taken advantage of the rise in streaming with an exclusive deal struck with Peacock.  Hallmark also has it’s own VOD service where people can purchase their movies directly through their app.  Despite the controversies that caused an uproar in the Studio City production offices a couple of years ago, Hallmark is finding that change is good for business.  Sure they lost a big name talent like Candace Cameron Bure, who was the face of Hallmark through most of it’s formative years in the 2010’s, but as we’ve seen there are many other talented actresses waiting in the wings ready to take the spotlight at Hallmark that don’t share her toxic aversion to diversity.  It’s also pleasing to see that longtime queer stars from many past Hallmark movies, like Luke MacFarlane and Jonathan Bennett, no longer have to remain in the closet on screen and are now able to be romantic on film truer to their own experiences.  Hallmark Christmas movies are certainly not for everyone; I myself tend to steer way clear of them.  But, despite their simple, cliched nature, the Hallmark Christmas movie experience definitely delivers for the audience that it appeals to.  What is pleasing to see is that Hallmark is growing bolder over time with how they approach growing their audience.  They rightfully recognize that their films should be more representative of the way that America looks today, which is not something that should ever been dismissed as “political.”  The reason I think a channel like Hallmark has a brighter future than a more agenda driven one like GAC is because they see that the broadest audience appeal will be the key to long term success.  GAC only appeals to a very narrow audience block of fundamental traditionalists, which is not a demographic that organically grows over time.  Hallmark knows that appealing to younger, more diverse viewers is the key to their future growth, and they are able to grow that reach without breaking out too much from their tried and true formula.  The stories remain the same familiar re-treads, but the players are changing, and for the better.  In the end, a Hallmark Christmas movie is very much the embodiment of that sweet, saccharine poetry that they’ve been putting on a card every Christmas for the last 113 years.  They may be manipulative and corny, but on a cold Christmas Day, they can be as comforting as a cup of hot cocoa while resting under a warm blanket by the glow of a twinkling Christmas Tree.