BYE BYE, 2020!
It began with South Korea storming the Oscars and ended with Hollywood in freefall. And despite all the turbulence, there was plenty of movie magic along the way. We chart cinema’s year of drama, starting with an overview of just what happened
Empire blows a raspberry at the worst year in living memory. But hey, it wasn’t all bad, cinematically speaking. We celebrate the year’s best.
DANIEL — NOT HIS REAL NAME — remembers the days when he used to sell tickets to stories about planet-threatening catastrophes. In 2020, he and his colleagues found themselves at the centre of one. “It sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?” asks the currently furloughed employee of a north London chain cinema, who recalls a bright start of the year for his multiplex. “People were queuing up for 1917 and buzzing to see Parasite. One of our regulars had seen Jojo Rabbit six times.” Then came coronavirus, closing cinemas across the UK and plunging the industry into uncertainty. “It’s gutting — and not just because I don’t know how much longer I’ll have a job for.
I hate going past and seeing the lights off and everything shut up. There’s something so unnatural about not being able to go to the pictures, to disappear in the dark in front of a blockbuster.”
He has a point. Covid-19 has been described as the biggest disruption to British life since World War II. The truth is, not even wartime posed as big a threat to UK film. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, cinemas shut for two weeks, before reopening and reporting record numbers. This time around, movie-lovers have been stuck at home for much of 2020, with only their streaming services and Blu-ray collections for company. Cinemas have temporarily closed. Productions have paused. Film workers across all corners of the industry have been left without income, and audiences have been left wondering when — and crucially, where — the tentpole movies they’ve been excited for will see the light of day.
“It’s been a total rupture,” says Tricia Tuttle, director of festivals at the BFI — one of countless institutions that have had to urgently adapt. In March, Tuttle found herself informed the UK was going into lockdown — days before the start of BFI Flare, a festival dedicated to LGBTQ+ voices in film. “We had three days to virtualise the entire event, moving it all online,” she recalls. This was to be a recurring feature of film in 2020, as studios moved planned theatrical releases like The Invisible Man and Mulan onto home-rental services, and services like Netflix, Mubi, Prime Video and the newly launched Disney+ went from strength to strength.
Streaming was already booming before Covid-19 struck, says Craig Engler, general manager of horror streaming platform Shudder. “Lockdown took what was already a blazing fire and poured gasoline on it,” he explains. “Across the board, all streaming services saw a huge rise in interest.”
The decision to move movie releases online — or in the case of No Time To Die, Black Widow, Ghostbusters: Afterlife and others, to delay them entirely — caused huge fractures. Cinema chains complained of being left high and dry by studios who didn’t want to release their movies while multiplexes were under-strength. And in April, the entire movie-release ecosystem almost combusted in an argument over a band of guitar-wielding, spiky-haired ’90s play-toys. When Trolls World Tour skipped cinemas and went straight to VOD, AMC, the largest cinema chain in the US, announced a boycott of the studio that created it, Universal.
While all this was playing out, seeds of hope began to sprout. On 1 July, cinemas were cleared to reopen. On 11 July, Jurassic World: Dominion became the first UK production to resume shooting on heavily sanitised, regularly tested sets. Audiences began to trickle back to theatres, reassured by new safety measures. And in August came
Tenet — released in theatres at last after a series of date changes. “Huge credit has to go to Christopher Nolan,” says Vue Cinemas founder Tim Richards. “He’s a massive supporter of cinema-going. He wanted to do his part to get people back into cinemas, and what we saw was a pent-up demand to see movies on the big screen.”
The absence of massive blockbusters, Tenet aside, left room this year for indie movies to become breakout successes.
“Saint Maud had a day in the middle of its release when it was number one,” recalls Tuttle. “That wouldn’t have happened in a year where films with infinite marketing budgets were being released. There’s more room for greater flora and fauna.” There’s been great hardship in this period — but great resilience, too. “There’s been a lot of suffering and great people losing jobs. But what is positive is the spirit of innovation that we’ve seen. Fear has kept a lot of experimentation from happening previously. But we’ve had to do it this year, and there’ll be no going back from a lot of those changes. The industry’s finding ways to react.”
After much speculation, Warner Bros. did finally release its second major blockbuster since the pandemic began,
Wonder Woman 1984, at cinemas just before Christmas — a much-needed blast of bright, big-hearted positivity, even if tier restrictions meant not everybody could enjoy it. In America, the studio got around that issue by first deciding that the movie would get a simultaneous streaming release via their HBO Max streaming service (“At some point you have to choose to share any love and joy you have to give, over everything else,” said director Patty Jenkins), then making the bombshell announcement that all of its planned major 2021 releases would go the same way. The decision drew criticism from exhibitors and some movie fans who feared what it could mean for cinemas. But at least in the UK, Warner Bros.’ slate still looks set to get a traditional cinema roll-out next year.
For all cinema’s transformations in 2020, one thing stayed the same. As the world entered lockdown in spring and again in the late autumn, film-lovers competed in online quizzes, watched Zoom cast reunions, used apps that helped them watch movies remotely with friends as if they were in the room, and remained as passionate as ever about the movies they love. “We have this incredible desire that wasn’t extinguished this year, to gather around culture and talk about what we’ve seen,” says Tuttle. “Cinema is such an important part of that.”
Richards agrees, and predicts the greatest year for cinemas on record when the virus is brought under control, thanks to a combination of “pent-up demand” and the amount of tentpole movies currently backlogged. “2021 was already going to be a good year with the titles coming out. Drop Bond, Black Widow, Top Gun, Fast & Furious [9] and so on into that, and I honestly think we’re about to see a second golden age of cinema.” 2020 has been hard, but film-lovers aren’t done disappearing in the dark yet.