Alo Party Peoples.Jurassic World is dominating the box office. It has trampled and devoured the competition to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time. As I write this, it has passed the billion dollar mark worldwide and become the eighth highest grossing film ever, according to Box Office Mojo. It is, to overuse a pun, a monster hit.
This isn't a discussion of Jurassic World's artistic merit, not by a long shot. Box office has never been an indicator of quality, for example, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is also on that list, and Avatar is the all time champ. I'm not interested in whether Jurassic World deserves to be doing so well, I'm interested in why. Why this film? Why is what amounts to a multi-million dollar B-movie so massively, utterly dominating movie screens?
This isn't like the original Jurassic Park where the CGI creatures were a novelty by virtue of being CGI, today practically everything remotely difficult to film is done via CGI, and Jurassic World's CGI isn't even that impressive, the dinosaurs never feel real, they feel like ethereal forms floating about among the actors. Nor does it have the natural talent of Spielberg backing up the spectacle, this has a no-name indie brat brought on-board by Universal since new talent is easier to control. Even if he did get some cheeky gags in about the bloated nature of blockbuster sequels (see the screenshot of a CGI monstrosity devouring a shark, i.e. the natural results of forty years of post-Jaws stakes escalation in blockbusters) they're clearly not the primary intent of Jurassic World.
In the absence of any other explanation, the reason Jurassic World is ruling the Earth right now is the same reason that Transformers dominated the box office, the same reason that Sony has fought tooth and nail to keep some aspect of Spider-Man under their control, and the same reason that a Jem and the Holograms movie is happening at all, let alone decades after it was supposedly popular. It is the nostalgia-industrial complex. The only thing that Jurassic World's box-office haul means or proves is that it is powerfully profitable to pander to an entire generation's desire to wrap themselves in warm memories of their late-20th Century childhoods.
The late 20th Century was in many ways a massive turning point for the way people consume media. The Digital Revolution made it easier and cheaper both to find and find out about all sorts of shows and songs and movies and everything else, the Blockbuster Age brought a standard release cycle to the film industry and brought it out of the Broadway model of touring films across the country, but there was also one other change. As part of the Reagan administration's aims of supercharging the American economy via deregulation, the FCC's rules against television shows being 30 minute advertisements were done away with.
While shows aimed at adults mostly resisted becoming more blatantly commercial, since adults tend to notice that, shows aimed at children almost immediately embraced the new reality and started turning out half-hour toy commercials by the truckload. The result is that Generations X and Y are the first generations for whom their pop-cultural touchstones came in commercial form. And when those children grew up and had disposable income, the entertainment business wasted no time in repackaging those properties to turn a tidy profit off of their happy childhood memories with the dawning of the Franchise Age.
You'll find no one more dismayed by the current status-quo of American film making more than I am. I am dismayed that the Adam Sandlers and Michael Bays of the world can put the least effort imaginable into their craft and still get the mobs of Middle America to turn over their money hand over fist. I am dismayed that studios hyper-focus on existing intellectual property to the extent that a movie about Peeps is happening, and that we're already on our third cinematic Spider-Man. I am especially dismayed that this also means that shallow vlogger after shallow vlogger are able to get films, while tens of thousands of people with talent and vision to burn slaving away in the commercial and music video salt mines would kill for that opportunity.
But I'll never say that that is the entire film industry. The indie scene has never done better for itself, Whiplash, Ex_Machina, and Birdman were all able to find dedicated audiences, and that last one even won Best Picture. For every Happy Madison there is also a Pixar. For every Last Airbender there is also a Lego Movie. For every Boyhood there is also a Grand Budapest Hotel. Is the bad stuff incredibly, omnipresently visible? Absolutely, but there is still a lot of good stuff if you go out and look for it.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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