By Roger Beebe, July 2008

The Hollywood Blockbuster has become such a part of our culture that we now take it for almost a natural phenomenon like gravity or ATM fees.  But there was a time not so long ago that the word “blockbuster” referred to something very different.

The term was originally coined in the 1940s to describe massive bombs developed by the RAF that were capable of destroying a whole city block. It started to be used in connection with the theater in the 1950s—“This new play is a real block buster!”— and, strangely, in the 1960s, it was also briefly used to describe unsavory property investors who forced integration in a neighborhood in order to devalue the property in order to snatch up low-cost lots.  It wasn’t until the 1970s that the use that we now know to describe mammoth Hollywood productions finally came to be the prevailing usage. 

This signal event that transformed Hollywood was the summer 1975 release of Jaws, which would quickly shatter box office records (dethroning The Godfather, which had pulled in $80 million just a few years earlier), ending up with a total domestic gross of over $100 million, the new standard for the blockbuster.  But it wasn’t just the box office tally that transformed the Industry; Jaws also marked a turning point in Hollywood’s release strategy.  Jaws premiered simultaneously at 409 theaters, a number that was unthinkable a decade earlier, when studios would release just a handful of prints that they’d slowly trickle down from major cities to smaller towns.  (The Sound of Music stayed on some screens for more than a year before being sent along to the next city.)

Despite the increased cost of striking hundreds of prints, Hollywood was hooked—here, finally, was their ticket out of the slump that had started in the late 1960s. And while there have been many developments in Hollywood in the past 3 decades, they’ve more or less just continued down the path that Jaws blazed. Summer blockbusters now open routinely on more than 6000 screens. The widest releases in the history of cinema have all been since 2004, including the latest Indiana Jones flick and Kung Fu Panda in 2008.  Hollywood features now spend more than $3 million per film in making prints to get on all these screens (which is one of the big reasons Hollywood wants to switch over to digital projection—it’s fundamentally about saving $3 million per film, not about some great new technology that’ll make our experience of the movies better).

So why would Hollywood blow this much money on prints when they could make, say, half as many prints and still have their films in every city with a stoplight. Well, first, they love that it makes their films critic-proof to open them wide. They routinely don’t offer advance press screenings for films that they want to market on hype alone, so all those folks who rush to the multiplex the opening weekend have no negative reviews to dissuade them.  They also love the favorable split that they get the first weekend, since their deal with the theaters is that they get as much as 90 percent of the door the opening week.  Their cut drops off significantly over the course of a long run, so the more they can get at first, the better.  (This is why your popcorn costs $6.  If the house is only making 10 percent off of the ticket price, they have to squeeze out profits elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, we’re at a point where we’re complicit in this system. Box office receipts now usually drop by 50 percent or more after the first week, so we’re clearly becoming well-trained Pavlovian dogs, racing out to take in whatever new offering Hollywood throws our way.  America has become obsessed with box office numbers, and all the chat shows report the weekend’s “winners and losers” as if the number of tickets sold opening weekend were a definitive pronouncement on a film’s merits.

Locally, as you’ve probably noticed, this has a remarkable impact. We’ve nominally got 30 screens on offer at the two big multiplexes in town (with another 4 at the outlying Gator Cinemas plus the single screen at the Hippodrome). On the 30 screens at those two multiplexes, there will routinely be as few as a dozen films total during the summer months. (Royal Park has only five films on their 16 screens the week that I’m writing this.) Because of the studios’ desire to cash in as much as possible in that first weekend, we see a real impoverishment of the local cinematic landscape. There’s less and less room for independent, foreign, and documentary fare in the summer months, as they’re crowded out by the blockbusters on three, four or five screens each.  Imagine if there were truly always 30 different films on offer at the local multiplexes— there’d still be plenty of formulaic Hollywood fare, but just to fill the screens they’d have to give us something more interesting as well.  Instead, when we do get something unfamiliar, they’ll put it on their tiniest screens and yank it after a week (as happened with the amazing animated film Persepolis, later brought back by the Hipp thankfully, or the most recent David Gordon Green film, Snow Angels). 

But we can turn the tide on this.  While the multiplex may have arisen in large part due to the distribution strategies associated with the blockbuster, all those screens could also nurture a real cinematic renaissance if we apply the right kind of pressure. 

First, stop racing out to see the newest blockbuster the day it’s released.  If you must see these things (and there are enough, like Iron Man, that are worth seeing), then wait a few weeks before checking them out.  The movies will still be the same whenever you see them, and not only will you send the message that you don’t need these films on 5 screens (when the theater owners start noticing empty seats on opening weekends), but more of the money will go to the theater, which might lower the cost of your popcorn. 

(Of course, Regal Cinemas is a giant corporation too, so they’re unlikely to pass the savings on to you, but at least it should keep them from jacking up the popcorn prices any further.)  Second, when they do book an indie film, race out to see that opening weekend instead.  The theater owners don’t make it easy to find these films—they release them with no fanfare and just expect you to do the work of finding out what they are and why you’d want to see them—but a little extra effort on your part will probably translate into more satisfying movie choices.  If you see something that’s worth saving, make sure you tell all your friends about it (instead of being content to go with the lowest common denominator and compare notes on The Incredible Hulk).

Ultimately, the blockbuster is probably here to stay—unless, as some have predicted, the oversized budgets finally bust Hollywood and force them to get creative (as happened during the slump in the late ‘60s that produced the amazing experiments of the New

Hollywood). Still, even if the blockbuster must hang around, we can probably figure out a way to make room for more adventurous fare alongside it.