It'll take more than a man in a cape to save the cinema
“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman famously said of Hollywood.
As I ve said before, there are ’ few days when I don t think this ’ as I tune in to the latest news on the plague. Now, with the failure of the film that Hollywood was hoping would pull punters back into the cinema — Christopher Nolan s Tenet — the wise words ’ have lapped themselves as the pandemic cuts a swathe through an art form that we were already increasingly viewing as irretrievably decaying.
Not decadent, which sounds like fun, but actually crumbling. Hollywood was always corrupt from the moment the first pretty, powerless girl encountered the first casting couch. But the Hollywood sign was also paradoxically a symbol of hope.
From this outrageous melting pot of raw talent, making it up as it went along, always something astonishing emerged.
It hasn t been that way for a ’ while; the decline of the cinema has been a 20th-century thing, not a 2020 thing. In 1930, more than 65 percent of the population went to the cinema every week; by the Sixties, it was below 10 percent, due to the rise of television. The effect of coronavirus on the world economy is most often likened to that of the Great Depression, but the difference is that in the Thirties Hollywood s ’ fortunes were greatly improved by the rotten time everyone else was having.
In From the Crash to the Fair, Carlos Stevens wrote: Throughout “most of the Depression, Americans went almost compulsively to the movies ... the movies offered a chance to escape the cold, the heat, and loneliness; they brought strangers together, rubbing elbows in the dark of movie palaces and fleapits.”
“Netflix and chill ” had already replaced an invitation to the cinema as a way to make it obvious to someone that you were interested in getting to know them better; during lockdown it
The movies offered a chance to escape the cold, the heat, and loneliness; they brought strangers together, rubbing elbows in the dark of movie palaces and fleapits
gained another 10 million subscribers. It s telling that no-one ’ calls a TV set an idiot box any “” more.
For decades professional worrywarts had blamed television for “killing conversation and, ” with the advent of the internet, added the alleged atomising of “” families as each member peeled off to do their own thing.
To a great extent, Netflix has turned this trend around, as not just reunited families but whole nations shriek and gape through Tiger King or Selling Sunset.
For the past decade, cinema has been dominated by comic book superheroes, scoring the biggest box office for five years out of those 10.
But 2020 is set to be the first superhero-free summer season since 2001 as the studios hold back, unsure of what a maskwearing loner has to offer a public who can get that at home.
The trend in recent years has been to emphasise the vulnerability “of superheroes; now we ” see this as just another conceit.
“See how I suffer — and I still save the lives of the little people!” In a new world where the shelf-stacker is a hero, the man in the cape climbing up a building can t ’ help but seem a rather silly attention-seeker. It will take more than a Marvel to save Hollywood now.