{"id":34824,"date":"2016-09-18T09:24:12","date_gmt":"2016-09-18T14:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=34824"},"modified":"2017-06-07T11:51:18","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T16:51:18","slug":"its-all-over-until-the-next-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2016\/09\/18\/its-all-over-until-the-next-time\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s all over, until the next time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"boat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our Little Sister<\/strong> (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2015).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

The\u00a0perennial Silly Season topic, The Death of Film, is back.<\/p>\n

In June, Huffington Post<\/em>‘s Matthew Jacobs announced “The death of Movies As We Know Them.”<\/a>\u00a0He laments the loss of “solid storytelling and bankable stars.” In August, Brian Raftery\u00a0asked: “Could this be the year that movies stopped mattering?”<\/a>\u00a0The author argues that now movies are “Something to Do When the Wi-Fi’s Down.” Echoing the virality theme, Ty Burr announced<\/a> that two albums, Beyonc\u00e9’s “Lemonade” and Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” “came packaged with better movies than anything in theatres.” For Burr, the summer season confirmed that audiences are more interested in grazing among YouTube clips and luxuriating in eight-hour video serials than watching a feature film. “The two-hour movie, especially in its larger and more commercial form, is becoming a relic.”<\/p>\n

Richard Brody eloquently replied<\/a> to Raftery, noting Beyonc\u00e9’s debt to Julie Dash and Khalik Allah’s films. Brody has been around this block before, as I noted in a\u00a02012 blog entry.<\/a><\/p>\n

The cinema-is-dead complaint, Richard Brody<\/a> helpfully points out, is now an established genre of movie journalism. In the last few weeks David Denby<\/a>, David Thomson<\/a>, Andrew O\u2019Hehir<\/a>, and Jason Bailey<\/a> have in different registers sought to revive this quintessentially empty polemic. I\u2019ve gone on about the tired conventions of film reviewing about once every year on this soapbox. (Try here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a>; Kristin got in some licks<\/a> too). For now I\u2019ll just say that I\u2019m convinced that the Death of Cinema (or Hollywood, or the Intelligent Foreign Film, or Popular Movie Culture, or Elite Film Culture) is simply a journalistic trope, like Sequels Betray a Lack of Imagination<\/a> or This Movie Reflects Our Anxieties<\/a>. In short: an easy way to fill column inches.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But after four years, maybe things really have deteriorated. So let’s get specific. What’s really going down the tubes? The theatrical side of the industry? Quality? Cultural cachet?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Movies, your best entertainment value<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"orange-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bar area of Orange Cinema Club, Beijing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let’s look at some current evidence about the industry, thanks to the redoubtable Cinema research division\u00a0of IHS Media Technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The newest symptom\u00a0of cinema’s demise, according to many, is the rise of Netflix and other streaming platforms. Serial TV is attracting a lot of attention, true, but streaming has long relied on\u00a0licensing feature films from studios, independents, and overseas companies. TCM and Criterion are launching FilmStruck<\/a> as a new channel chock-full of classic films from Hollywood and elsewhere. Amazon and Netflix have\u00a0also begun\u00a0acquiring and financing features to guarantee a supply of those two-hour films that for some reason people still want to watch.<\/p>\n

But what about movies in theatres? Actually, things are pretty robust.\u00a0Despite everybody viewing at home and on the go, for many years theatre growth has been phenomenal. In 2015 the world added about 12,000 screens, hitting a new high:\u00a0153,163. Not counting\u00a0all our “second screens” (and third), there are more movie screens now than ever before.<\/p>\n

By the way, those of us, me included, who worried that the rise of digital exhibition would cause a drop in screens were wrong. Digital was a shot in the arm to theatrical exhibition, and it made 3D a viable platform. That format shows signs of growth, <\/a>chiefly because of China,<\/a> and now\u00a016-20%\u00a0of box-office grosses come from\u00a03D screenings.<\/p>\n

In keeping with the expansion of exhibition, for the last decade, the global box office has risen steadily<\/a>. Almost every year sets a\u00a0record. The new height is $37.7 billion for 2015, and it seems likely that 2016 will beat that.<\/p>\n

As for number of admissions, 2015 also set a record: 7.4 billion, a jump of 13% over 2014. This is a bit more than one ticket for every man, woman, and child on earth. The first half of 2016 is ahead of the same period<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

Of course revenues don’t equal profits. Jacobs is especially concerned that some big films have been losing money in their domestic theatrical run. But most films lose money in that run. For a long time, ancillary markets (DVD, overseas cable, merchandising, etc.) made up for the deficits. More and more, overseas theatrical is helping in a big way. In a recent rundown, of the summer’s top twenty hits, a print story in\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> indicates that foreign grosses outweigh US\/Canadian ones in most cases, and sometimes by a lot.<\/p>\n

For example, big as Captain America: Civil War<\/em> was in the US, 65% of its $1.1 billion haul was due\u00a0to the offshore market. X-Men: Apocalypse<\/em> got half a billion theatrical, 71% of which came from the international audience. Ancillaries will still need to kick in, given the mammoth budgets of films like these, but those ancillaries piggyback on theatrical visibility. As ever, the big pictures pay for a lot of lesser films.<\/p>\n

Moreover,\u00a0so many costs are buried or dispersed in overhead, debt service, tax incentives, deferred payments, far-fetched\u00a0studio expenses, and the like that it seems hard to know what final profits really are. Nor will we know what, if any, profits are yielded by films from countries with subsidized film industries.<\/p>\n

There are many things to worry about in the exhibition business, but it doesn’t seem on the verge of collapse. Let’s keep a sense of proportion. Here is what the death of \u201cour cinema\u201d might really look like.<\/p>\n

Theatre admissions fall 45% over six years.\u00a0Studio profits fall 80%\u00a0over the same period.\u00a0One-sixth of theatres close.\u00a0Major overseas markets refuse to remit the earnings of Hollywood films.\u00a0Audiences turn increasingly to other leisure activities.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This was the state of the American film industry in 1953. The prosperous war years, culminating in the all-time admissions high of 1946, were over and the studios went into sharp decline. Thanks to the 1948 Supreme Court \u201cDivorcement Decree,\u201d the studios lost control of their theatres, relinquishing not only valuable showcases for their product but also millions of dollars of prime real estate.<\/p>\n

Yet as we know, 1953 didn\u2019t end cinema, not even American cinema. As the old studio system waned, a new one eventually replaced it. In the process, Hollywood continued to make major films. Filmmaking abroad\u2014in Asia, Europe, and South America especially\u2014flourished. Film festivals sprang up, and a new young public proved eager to watch movies from a variety of cultures. Avant-garde and documentary movements gained traction, partly because of the widespread dissemination of 16mm.<\/p>\n

No one, so far as I can tell, predicted the end of cinema, or Hollywood, because of the 1947-1953\u00a0crisis. That person\u00a0would have looked very foolish. Things today aren’t nearly so severe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Long, hot summers<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"lt-robin-300\"<\/a>What about quality? A. O.\u00a0Scott points out<\/a> that the way to quell fears for the End of Good Cinema\u00a0is to go to a film festival. It’s good advice that we\u2019ve given as well<\/a>. Richard Brody, who has I think seen everything, responds to Raftery by reminding us<\/a> of many valuable films that the naysayers ignore. Another way to remain calm is to look at a little history.<\/p>\n

Things often seem grim at summer\u2019s end. Let\u2019s go back fifty years, to the summer of 1966. In those days, the blockbusters and prestige pictures were saved for fall and winter. Indeed, the blockbusters were<\/em> largely the prestige pictures, the adaptations of novels and plays. The big grosser of the year was Hawaii<\/em>, released in October. Two others were The Bible: In the Beginning<\/em> (September) and A Man for All Seasons<\/em> (December). But two\u00a0of the top-grossers\u00a0hit the jackpot in the summer: Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/em> (July) and Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN<\/em> (June).<\/p>\n

Pause on this last title. Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN<\/em> was an\u00a0indisputably lowbrow hit, a Disney comedy starring Dick Van Dyke. The fact that it earned $10.1 million (about $75 million today) might well have set critics worrying about American tastes. Worse, they might have concluded there was no hope, because from 1950 to 1970, twenty Disney films appeared in the annual top five. That record includes not only animated classics but In Search of the Castaways, That Darn Cat,<\/em> and Darby O’Gill and the Little People<\/em>–enough to make intellectuals despair of American moviegoers. Robin Crusoe<\/em>‘s summer success\u00a0<\/em>might have seemed another sign of End Times.<\/p>\n

Summer 1966\u00a0also saw The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Fantastic Voyage,<\/em> the remake of Stagecoach<\/em>, a Bob Hope comedy, the low camp of Batman<\/em>, and the high camp of Modesty Blaise<\/em>. The 1966 counterpart to our spate of superhero sagas was a cycle of spy movies, somber or spoofy. The summer yielded\u00a0Blindfold, Arabesque,<\/em> and even The Man Called Flintstone<\/em>. Along with these came Nevada Smith, Khartoum, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, This Property Is Condemned,<\/em> and Wild Angels<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Some of these are well-remembered, mostly by viewers exposed at an impressionable age. For prestige there was and remains Virginia Woolf<\/em>. For auteurists, there was Three on a Couch<\/em> and Torn Curtain<\/em>, and perhaps Modesty Blaise<\/em>. As for the rest, most were and are still decried as junk.<\/p>\n

Things were not looking good for American cinema. The Sound of Music<\/em> had just won the Best Picture Oscar, a middlebrow shot across critics\u2019 bow, and Pauline Kael was turning angry\u00a0firepower on the massive threat posed by\u00a0The Singing Nun<\/em>. In the summer, the Times<\/em> lambasted Hitchcock and Jerry Lewis. As far as I can tell, the follow-ups to the Bond boom pleased hardly anybody.<\/p>\n

In sum, we forget just how godawful summer movies can be, year in and year out. The few we remember after Labor Day bob up from a river of sludge. We should be grateful for Indignation<\/a>, Finding Dory, Lights Out, The Shallows, Hell or High Water, Don\u2019t Breathe, The BFG, Kubo and the Two Strings<\/em>, and probably half a dozen others I haven\u2019t seen. (But not Jason Bourne<\/em>, which I have.) Ben-Hur<\/em> wasn\u2019t as terrible\u00a0as I\u2019d been led to believe.<\/p>\n

And of course, everybody\u2019s pumped for the fall, for Snowden<\/em> and The Arrival<\/em> and The Birth of a Nation<\/em> and La La Land<\/em> and Manchester by the Sea<\/em> and all the rest. 1966 critics were looking forward as well, but to what? Not only Hawaii, The Bible, <\/em>and A Man for All Seasons <\/em>but also Is Paris Burning?,<\/em>\u00a0Grand Prix, Any Wednesday, The Sand Pebbles<\/em> and more spy movies (Gambit, The Quiller Memorandum<\/em>). Not so exciting by our standards; Big Pictures were more square\u00a0then.<\/p>\n

True, also coming up in the fall of ’66\u00a0were\u00a0The Fortune Cookie, Seconds, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fahrenheit 451, The Professionals, Loves of a Blonde,<\/em>\u00a0and Blow-Up.\u00a0<\/em>But\u00a0even then some critics stayed\u00a0unhappy. Kael denounced\u00a0Blow-Up<\/em>, and Vernon Young intoned: “The party’s over. . . . Another phase of film history, in many ways the most creative, is drawing to a close.” Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Conversation starters and stoppers<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"controversy-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"boycott-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"tokenism-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

End-of-movie writers argue\u00a0that pop music and Quality Television are usurping the cultural place of film. But I’m skeptical, because I don’t think film is\u00a0playing in the same arena.<\/p>\n

Odd as it sounds, film has never been popular on the\u00a0scale of other mass media. Before TV, radio listeners far outnumbered film audiences. Via radio and records, a hit tune reached more people than nearly any movie. Even today, radio audiences are surprisingly big. Nielsen reported in 2014<\/a> that just in the 18-35 age group, 65 million people listen to radio broadcasts each week. That’s nearly three times the average number of all viewers who attend movie theatres in a\u00a0week.<\/p>\n

Once TV came along, it became another truly mass medium. 73 million people, over a third of the US population, watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964. TV is still the big game. More than 20 million people watch The Big Bang Theory<\/em> each week. It’s reported<\/a> that \u00a08.9 million people watched the season finale\u00a0of Game of Thrones<\/em> in original cablecast, and 23 million in all its iterations. Yet, again, about 23 million people see all<\/em> the movies playing in a given week.<\/p>\n

The plain fact is that visiting a theatre to see a movie has been, throughout most of American history, a middle-class pastime. It’s relatively expensive, and getting more so. It’s not quite niche, not as rarefied as theatre or concert music or novels, but still not on the scale of other\u00a0media. We ought to expect that memes will spread faster and more pervasively in pop music and television platforms.<\/p>\n

Our critics are concerned\u00a0that films aren’t part of what Raftery calls “the pop-cultural conversation.” “What in popular culture got people excited or even interested over the last few months?” asks Burr, going on to worry that movies didn’t do so. This is a strange criterion for judging films. Hula hoops, Rubik cubes, Chia pets, and Donald Trump’s coiffure have all been part of the cultural conversation. Some good films excite lots of people, and some don’t (partly because those people don’t know of them). And of course many\u00a0people got excited by films Burr and Raftery considered bad, like Suicide Squad<\/em>. Excitement may not be a great standard for excellence.<\/p>\n

The cultural-conversation gambit suggests that mere popularity needs to be accompanied by a special jolt, the hum of nowness, the throb\u00a0of hipness. Financially successful films like The Jungle Book<\/em> or Finding Dory<\/em> don’t give off much buzz. Where does that special ingredient come from? Apparently, now, the Netizens.\u00a0It’s natural that critics, who are assigned to surf the waves of mass tastes, would identify important art with what’s trending on Facebook. It’s their job to hop on what’s hot.<\/p>\n

\"ttt-epk-helms-deep-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Or in truth, help make it hot. When critics treat\u00a0what’s buzzy as\u00a0valuable, they\u00a0agree with marketers, and cooperate with them. How many critics who loved The Dark Knight<\/em> had been prompted by the campaign that played up “Why So Serious?” and other memes<\/a> that publicists thought would stick? Kristin has documented<\/a> how The Lord of the Rings<\/em> marketers set the agenda for\u00a0 journalists by means of junkets and\u00a0Electronic Press Kits (above), while wooing fans with carefully judged opportunities to participate online (a “pop-cultural conversation,” for sure). The typical big film is positioned by the marketing campaign, and\u00a0even unanticipated responses, especially if the film is strategically ambiguous<\/a>, can feed ticket sales.<\/p>\n

The People don’t start the cultural conversation; they react to what they’re given. The conversation is started by the studios, and they try to channel\u00a0it. They generate the “controversies” about making the protagonists of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens<\/em> a woman and an African American man. The critics pick up the story. (Remember: column inches.) Viewers dutifully\u00a0enter their opinions on blogs, tweets, and comments columns–which the critics then re-spin. As Brody points out of Quality TV, it’s all about expanding discourse, indefinitely. Criticism begets “comments” which beget chitchat. This is less\u00a0a conversation than\u00a0a perpetually chattering\u00a0flashmob.<\/p>\n

A side note: I wonder if making cultural buzz a criterion of worthwhile cinema doesn’t owe something to the influence of Pauline Kael. She sent contradictory signals on this score, worrying that audiences were too easily bought off; the industry jollied them into accepting junk as fun. But she thought that one\u00a0reason to like, say, Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> was the fact that it was “contemporary in feeling.” It brought into movies “things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.”<\/p>\n

For a moment let’s accept\u00a0the assumption that worthy\u00a0movies have some broader cultural impact. How could we measure that? I suggest the Tagline Test. A movie enters the culture when a line becomes instantly recognizable. At its best, the tagline applies to an immediate situation. You step into a startling new setting and tell your friend you don’t think you’re in Kansas any more. You talk about your boss making you an offer you can’t refuse. You’re bargaining and you say, “Show me the money.” TV gives us plenty of catchphrases, of course. (“You rang?” “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” “Don’t have a cow, man.” “That’s what she said.”) This is one symptom of a show’s\u00a0buzziness.<\/p>\n

When I came up with the Tagline Test, I thought it supported the doomsayers’ diagnosis. I couldn’t think of many memorable lines from films after the 1980s.\u00a0Had TV taken over the traffic in catchphrases? Crowdsourcing among two fairly diverse populations came up with a big set. Here’s a sample:<\/p>\n

Hasta la vista, baby. Houston, we have a problem. That’ll do, pig; that’ll do. I drink your milkshake. The Precious <\/strong>(enunciated in a high voice). \u00a0With great power comes great responsibility. Stop trying to make fetch happen. She doesn’t even go here. Stay classy. That escalated quickly. The first Rule of Fight Club… 60% of the time, it works every time. Little golden-haired baby Jesus in the crib. Schwing! Coffee is for closers. King of the World! Stay alive; I will find you.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Big Lebowski<\/em> is a virtual encyclopedia of them: The Dude abides. Obviously you’re not a golfer. That rug really tied the room together. Nobody fucks\u00a0with the Jesus.<\/em> <\/strong>So too Napoleon Dynamite<\/em>: Whatever I feel like I wanna do GOSH! I’m pretty much the best in the world at it.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe you don’t agree that these are all equally common; I didn’t know about the Mean Girls<\/em>\u00a0and Napoleon Dynamite<\/em> ones. But all I need to show is that recent\u00a0movies have entered the “cultural conversation” quite literally. Maybe it just takes months or years\u00a0for movie taglines to replicate in everyday life. Anyhow, those who want movies to get all buzzy don’t have to worry. With Oscar season upon us, the frenzy will begin. In fact it already has, with Nate Parker’s\u00a0The Birth of a Nation.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who’s we?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"now-you-300\"<\/a>In talking about “our” cinema, I’ve been too glib, though this angle fits with an\u00a0assumption of the death-knoll critics (“Movies as We Know Them”). Of course, Jacobs, Raftery, and Burr all acknowledge that Hollywood isn’t making movies just for us; it’s a world industry. People elsewhere\u00a0(many recently arrived in the local equivalent of the middle class) seem keen to participate in American popular culture, with fashion, music, TV, and websites. Hollywood entertainment, lame as it often\u00a0is, is part of being cosmopolitan.<\/p>\n

Still, maybe it’s time to admit that we don’t own Hollywood. Maybe we never did, but it seems clear that with globalization “our” popular cinema is becoming something else–not exactly “theirs,” but not wholly ours either. Now You See Me\u00a02<\/em> may have attracted\u00a0only mild interest here: little\u00a0cultural chitchat, except maybe among magicians, and $65 million box office (less than Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN<\/em>). But it garnered $266 million internationally<\/a>. Nearly a hundred million of that came from China<\/a>, perhaps partly owing to long stretches set in Macau and short stretches featuring Jay Chou Kit-lun<\/a>. And the director was Asian-American Jon M. Chu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now Lionsgate announces<\/a> a Now You See Me<\/em> spinoff, a feature co-production with China that will use local stars. So who owns this franchise? “Us” or “them”? If it disappoints us and pleases them, how does that mean that movies are so over? Maybe other countries’ cultural conversations are pulsing\u00a0with talk of the Four Horsemen (one of whom is a woman).<\/p>\n

It’s long been obvious that other film industries create their own versions of Hollywood. Europe, India, and Hong Kong have done it for decades. Current Chinese hits borrow from “our” rom-coms, action pictures, and comedies. In\u00a0Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s The Mermaid<\/em>, you can watch\u00a0a blockbuster premise coming unglued. It’s a mixture of sentiment, message, slapstick, and bad taste; Hollywood twisted up in\u00a0Chow’s characteristic\u00a0funhouse mirror.<\/p>\n

This won’t stop. One of the most astonishing and puzzling facts of contemporary cinema gets almost no press, maybe because it contravenes the death-of-film narrative. Over the last ten years, there has been a huge rise in the number of feature films.<\/p>\n

In 2001, the world produced about 3800 features annually. The number passed 4000 in 2002, passed 5000 in 2007, and passed 6000 in 2011. In\u00a02014, IHS estimates,<\/a> over 7300 feature films were made in the world. There are now fifteen countries that produce over 100 features a year. As a result, only 18% of the world’s features come from North America. The boom took place\u00a0despite the rise of\u00a0home video, cable, satellite, DVD, Blu-ray, VOD, and streaming. And it happened\u00a0despite the fact that American blockbusters rule nearly every\u00a0national market<\/a>. This may be a bubble, or it may be genuine growth. In any case, we ought to investigate the reasons that\u00a0a great many\u00a0people around the world stubbornly persist in\u00a0making two-hour films.\u00a0They don’t appear to care if We sense\u00a0a summer slump.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

While I was preparing this entry, Kristin and I went to Our Little Sister<\/em>, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s 2015 film about three sisters\u00a0abandoned, first by the father, then by their mother, and raised by the moderately stern oldest sister. The plot follows what happens when the trio takes\u00a0in\u00a0their half-sister after her mother dies. This is a movie that’s bereft of villains and almost totally lacking in conflict. The sisters’ misjudgments and flaws cause them problems, and sometimes they quarrel, but mostly we see decent people trying to lead happy lives, and largely succeeding. Compared to Kore-eda’s debut, Maboroshi<\/em> (1995), it’s pictorially rather conventional. (That damn sidling camera.) But its episodic, open-textured plot, its quiet depiction of changes across seasons and years, and its casually serene vision of family and community\u00a0make it one of the most enjoyable and moving films I’ve seen this year.<\/p>\n

Based on the graphic novel Umimachi Diary<\/a><\/em>, the film participated in\u00a0Japan’s “cultural conversation.” It’s certainly a mainstream commercial movie, of a sort that Japanese studios have turned out for decades. It won solid\u00a0attention on the festival circuit too. It earned\u00a0a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>, up there with Kubo<\/em> and Hell or High Water<\/em>. But such a reserved, sentimental film will never get the edgy buzz that our doomsayers want. Sentiment, after all, is anathema to our dominant mode of consuming pop culture, that of cool, ironic\u00a0knowingness.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to oversell Our Little Sister<\/em>: Kore-eda is no Ozu. But this film and many others remind us that\u00a0worthwhile films are still made, and released, and available outside the circus tent of Entertainment Weekly<\/em>\u00a0cover stories. (In this case, Americans’ thanks should go to Sony Pictures Classics<\/a>, now celebrating its 25th anniversary.)<\/p>\n

In short: Forget\u00a0the zeitgeist; it likely doesn’t exist, apart from marketers’ dreams and journalists’ deadlines. Forget\u00a0the cultural conversation; there’s not\u00a0only one. Seek out the films that matter to you, and not “to us.” Stay classy!<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks to correspondents on two listserves, that of Communication Arts film folk and that of the Art House Convergence<\/a>.\u00a0A great many people made many suggestions, with the inevitable duplication, so thanking everyone by name would be protracted. But you know who you are.<\/p>\n

My information on worldwide production and exhibition comes from issues of\u00a0IHS Media & Technology Digest<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and Cinema Intelligence Report.<\/em>\u00a0Special thanks to David Hancock, Director\u00a0of IHS Cinema division. Pamela McClintock’s “Summer Anxiety Despite Near-Record Numbers” in the 16 September Hollywood Reporter<\/em> print edition contains the top-twenty film list I mention; that chart isn’t included\u00a0in the online version<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the summer 1966 US releases, see The Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures 1967<\/em> (Film Daily, 1967), 144-168. I charted\u00a0the year’s top-grossers from Susan Sackett, The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits<\/em> (Billboard, 1996).<\/p>\n

My quotations from Pauline Kael come from her Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> review reprinted in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang<\/em> <\/a>(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968), 47. \u00a0My quotation from Vernon Young is the opening of his “The Verge and After: Film by 1966,” in On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art<\/em> <\/a>(Quadrangle, 1972), 273.<\/p>\n

It’s probably irrelevant to mention that both Scorpio Rising<\/em> and The Brig<\/em> were released, in some sense, in summer 1966.<\/p>\n

P. S. 18 September 2016:<\/strong> And see the practically real-time followup<\/a>. Remember when blogs were like\u00a0Twitter is now?<\/p>\n

\"baahubali-600\"<\/a><\/p>\n

12,000 tickets are sold for premiere\u00a0screenings<\/a> of\u00a0 Baahubali<\/strong> (2015) in Hyderabad, India.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Little Sister (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2015). DB here: The\u00a0perennial Silly Season topic, The Death of Film, is back. In June, Huffington Post‘s Matthew Jacobs announced “The death of Movies As We Know Them.”\u00a0He laments the loss of “solid storytelling and bankable stars.” In August, Brian Raftery\u00a0asked: “Could this be the year that movies stopped mattering?”\u00a0The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,74,6,57,40,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-comments","category-film-criticism","category-film-industry","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-hollywood-the-business","category-readers-favorite-entries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34824"}],"version-history":[{"count":62,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37165,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34824\/revisions\/37165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}