Is the Blockbuster dying?

We've had a number of very disappointing opening weekends for highly anticipated movies the last year or so.

The Lone Ranger bombed at the box office, and World War Z had a slightly less than anticipated opening.

What exactly is the underlying cause of this, and what can be done to stop it?

Not only are ticket prices higher than ever, concession prices are causing audiences to avert from theaters a lot of times, not to mention the relative discomfort of 3D cinema at times....

"Less than anticipated" isn't a failure, and we've also had plenty of blockbusters that hit it out of the park. Last year's The Avengers made more money than technically exists in the world.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but the point stands: blockbusters are doing just fine.

Although if you were to ask Hollywood, they would answer that the problem is piracy.

Isn't it already functionally dead?

The last year or so had the newest Transformers, the first of the Star Trek reboots and the aforementioned Marvel movies (and the Iron Man movies). All of those had wildly successful opening weeks.

Also there were the Twilight films.

No, that's called "a few crummy movies failing". This year hasn't seen any hits on the scale of The Avengers, but that doesn't constitute a trend; the simple fact that Avengers was such a spectacular hit contradicts your hypothesis.

The question is asked every time a movie comes out with an inflated budget and underwhelming returns. A few years ago it was Prince of Persia and The A-Team.

edited 11th Jul '13 3:40:31 PM by KJMackley

The blockbuster will die only when there is something to replace it. Before the blockbuster took over the summer, it was porn and exploitation films that filled the gap. A gap as large as the summer needs a replacement.

No one payed any attention to my horrible joke :(

If someone could figure out a good formula for teaching Average Joe and Jane and Their Average Kids some important life lessons or skills in a movie that is also entertaining I think that would be a good successor to the mindless popcorn flick.

An intelligent popcorn flick, so to speak.

I paid attention and it was funny.

Mark Kermode seems to have come up with a formula for blockbusters that looks like it's working.

here

It's not going to die anytime soon, people just have some standards about big budget stuff even if it's not necessarily what critics or others think.

edited 11th Jul '13 5:48:41 PM by ShadowScythe

I don't think the blockbuster is dying. Considering Man of Steel just broke box office records, the blockbuster will still happen. I think we're seeing a case where there aren't a lot of stars that are guaranteed box-office draws.

I don't think it's dead, but I do believe the blockbuster is dying off. Yeah, Man of Steel broke records, but take Star Wars for example:it was #1 for weeks and weeks, while modern "blockbusters" like Man of Steel stay on top for two weeks at best, and then get booted down. To me, that isn't really a blockbuster.

Well yeah but I think that's more of a change in general distribution. Movies, regardless of quality, stay in theaters for less time than they used to and go out to home video quicker. Home video didn't exist when a lot of the older movies came out.

I think the studios really need to find ways to prevent budgets from going too overblown. Many 'underperforming' movies could have been considered real blockbusters if they hadn't had such a long story of false starts, Development Hell expenses and Troubled Productions behind them.

Blockbuster films are facing a huge amount of changes in the range of challenges they are facing from when I first started going to the pictures in the 70s. And yes, I am an old fart. It isn't just television, or video or dvd, it's on-demand on all sorts of devices, its computer games like what Yahtzee calls the spunkgargleweewee genre, the most recent of which, CODBLOPS 2, made an absolute fortune.

And we are still in a period of great economic difficulties across the main markets for Hollywood films. You will still get a few films which make back their huge budgets while they are still playing in first run cinemas, but they are getting increasingly rare.

More and more films are, in my view, going to follow the model set by Ben Wheatley's latest, "A Field in England" which went for an all the formats, all at once release. Look that one up, it's a quite interesting picture of the future.

Maybe the blokes cooking up sales numbers will have to reach across all formats as well including copies moved through creative methods.

I think it's less that the Blockbuster is dying and more that there is an additional hurdle to take nowadays for the studios. In the past, they just had to show some nice effects in the trailer and the people would watch it. Nowadays, the audience is way more critical but above all, way better connected. We are not dependent on professional reviewers anymore, we write out own reviews and comments, and share out opinion. So it isn't enough for a movie to be flashy, it has to convince the audience, immediately.

edited 13th Jul '13 3:38:53 AM by swanpride

I can't see the blockbuster dying anytime soon. I do hope though, that pre-2000s standards are coming back in style. I mean, what was essentially a blockbuster back then is a B-movie by today's standards. Attack The Block would've been one hell of a summer movie in 1987. DREDD would've walked among the likes of Robocop.

edited 13th Jul '13 3:57:07 AM by TAPETRVE

I doubt it. Not in terms of the style and themes ( those come and go ), but in terms of the simple fact that an R-rated blockbuster won't work. Big success requires big crowds, and that requires teens and families.

Don't forget that back then, PG/PG-13 actually was actually a lot more lenient than today. Many Films that got a PG back then would be R-rated nowadays. The new Lone Ranger flick seems to be the first film in many years to remember this.

edited 13th Jul '13 6:54:11 AM by TAPETRVE

I'm not sure if it's because censors (and parents) are looking more closely or if they're just getting more crotchety as they get older. Wouldn't younger officials who grew up with said looser ratings be expected to have lower standards?

Or it could just be that, when the PG-13 rating was created, there wasn't a clear consensus about what sort of content it signified, so it was applied more haphazardly than it would be in years to come. Basically, Early-Installment Weirdness.

There's also the fact that ticket prices have become ridiculously inflated nowadays and overpriced, so that could be yet another blow to the blockbuster.