Blockbuster (entertainment)

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Queue for Gone with the Wind in Pensacola, Florida (1947)

A blockbuster is a work of entertainment—typically used to describe a

major film studio
, but also other media—that is highly popular and financially successful. The term has also come to refer to any large-budget production intended for "blockbuster" status, aimed at mass markets with associated merchandising, sometimes on a scale that meant the financial fortunes of a film studio or a distributor could depend on it.

Etymology

The term began to appear in the American press in the early 1940s,

RKO film, Bombardier, as "The block-buster of all action-thrill-service shows!" Another trade advertisement in 1944 boasted that the war documentary, With the Marines at Tarawa
, "hits the heart like a two ton blockbuster."

Several theories have been put forward for the origin of the term in a film context. One explanation pertains to the practice of "block booking" whereby a studio would sell a package of films to theaters, rather than permitting them to select which films they wanted to exhibit. However, this practice was outlawed in 1948 before the term became common parlance; while pre-1948 high-grossing big-budget spectacles may be retroactively labelled "blockbusters," this is not how they were known at the time. Another explanation is that trade publications would often advertise the popularity of a film by including illustrations showing long queues often extending around the block, but in reality the term was never used in this way. The term was actually first coined by publicists who drew on readers' familiarity with the blockbuster bombs, drawing an analogy with the bomb's huge impact. The trade press subsequently appropriated the term as short-hand for a film's commercial potential. Throughout 1943 and 1944 the term was applied to films such as Bataan, No Time for Love and Brazil.[4]

History

Golden Age era

The term fell out of usage in the aftermath of World War II but was revived in 1948 by Variety in an article about big budget films. By the early 1950s the term had become standardised within the film industry and the trade press to denote a film that was large in spectacle, scale and cost, that would go on to achieve a high gross. In December 1950 the Daily Mirror predicted that Samson and Delilah would be "a box office block buster", and in November 1951 Variety described Quo Vadis as "a b.o. blockbuster [...] right up there with Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind for boxoffice performance [...] a super-spectacle in all its meaning".[4]

According to Stephen Prince, Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai had a "racing, powerful narrative engine, breathtaking pacing, and sense-assaulting visual style" (what he calls a "kinesthetic cinema" approach to "action filmmaking and exciting visual design") that was "the clearest precursor" and became "the model for" the "visceral" Hollywood blockbuster "brand of moviemaking" that emerged in the 1970s. According to Prince, Kurosawa became "a mentor figure" to a generation of emerging American filmmakers who went on to develop the Hollywood blockbuster format in the 1970s, such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.[5]

Blockbuster era

1970s

In 1975, the usage of "blockbuster" for films coalesced around

major film studios and distributors planned their annual marketing strategy around a big release by July 4.[10]

1980s–1990s

The next fifteen years saw a number of high-quality blockbusters released including the likes of Alien (1979) and its sequel, Aliens (1986), the first three Indiana Jones films (1981, 1984 and 1989), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), the Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989 and 1990), Top Gun (1986), Die Hard (1988), Batman (1989) and its sequel Batman Returns (1992), and The Hunt for Red October (1990).[11]

21st century

Some examples of summer blockbusters from the 2000s include

X-Men (2000), Spider-Man (2002), Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel The Dark Knight (2008) all proving to be very popular.[12]

Blockbusters in the 2010s include

Criticism

Eventually, the focus on creating blockbusters grew so intense that a backlash occurred, with some critics and film-makers decrying the prevalence of a "blockbuster mentality",[14] lamenting the death of the author-driven, "more artistic" small-scale films of the New Hollywood era. This view is taken, for example, by film journalist Peter Biskind, who wrote that all studios wanted was another Jaws, and as production costs rose, they were less willing to take risks, and therefore based blockbusters on the "lowest common denominators" of the mass market.[15] In his 2006 book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson talks about blockbuster films, stating that a society that is hit-driven, and makes way and room for only those films that are expected to be a hit, is in fact a limited society.[16] In 1998, writer David Foster Wallace posited that films are subject to an inverse cost and quality law.[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Google Ngram Viewer". books.google.com. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  2. ^ "blockbuster | Definition of blockbuster in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries | English. Archived from the original on July 30, 2012. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  3. ^ "Advertisement for the film "Bombardier"". Variety. May 12, 1943. pp. 14–15.
  4. ^ a b Hall, Sheldon (2014). "Pass the ammunition : a short etymology of "Blockbuster"" (PDF). Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive. Retrieved 25 April 2018.
  5. . Retrieved 21 April 2022.
  6. . See pp. 27–40.
  7. ^ Neale, Steve. "Hollywood Blockbusters: Historical Dimensions." Ed. Julien Stinger. Hollywood Blockbusters. London: Routeledge, 2003. pp. 48–50. Print.
  8. ^ "Celebrating the Original STAR WARS on its 35th Anniversary". cinematreasures.org. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  9. ^ Gray, Tim (2015-06-18). "'Jaws' 40th Anniversary: How Steven Spielberg's Movie Created the Summer Blockbuster". Variety. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  10. ^ Shone (2004), Chapter 1.
  11. ^ "Did 'Jaws' and 'Star Wars' Ruin Hollywood?". Ross Douthat. 22 June 2010. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  12. ^ "Summer Blockbusters That Defined the 2000s". CBR. July 22, 2020.
  13. ^ "Our 25 Favourite Blockbusters of the 2010s". Gizmodo Australia. July 13, 2020.
  14. – via Google Books.
  15. ^ Peter Biskind: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Simon and Schuster, 1998.
  16. ^ Anderson, Chris. "The Long Tail" (PDF). Chris Anderson. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 5, 2010. Retrieved April 20, 2011.
  17. .

External links