Blockbuster (entertainment) - Blockbuster Films

Blockbuster Films

Before Jaws set box office records in the summer of 1975, successful films such as Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, Gone With the Wind, and Ben-Hur were called blockbusters based purely on the amount of money earned at the box office. Jaws is regarded as the first film of New Hollywood's 'blockbuster era' with its current meaning, implying a film genre. It also consolidated the 'summer blockbuster' trend, through which major film studios and distributors planned their entire annual marketing strategy around a big release by July 4.

Jaws exceeded $100,000,000 in ticket sales and for a time this was the point at which a film could be designated a blockbuster in North America. However earlier films such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Sound of Music (1965) easily passed this threshold.

After the success of Jaws, many Hollywood producers attempted to create similar "event films" with wide commercial appeal. Film companies began green lighting increasingly high budgeted films and relying extensively on massive advertising blitzes leading up to their theatrical release. Spielberg and his fellow filmmaker George Lucas (whose 1977 film Star Wars was the most successful film of that decade) are the film-makers most closely associated with the beginning of the blockbuster era.

Although the term 'blockbuster' was originally defined by audience response, after a while the term came to mean a high-budget production aimed at mass markets, with associated merchandising, on which the financial fortunes of film studio or distributor depended. It was defined by its production budget and marketing effort rather than its success and popularity, and was essentially a tag which a film's marketing gave itself. In this way it became possible to refer to films such as Hollywood's Godzilla (1998) or Last Action Hero as both a blockbuster and a box-office disaster.

Eventually, the focus on creating blockbusters grew so intense that a backlash occurred, with critics and some film-makers decrying the prevalence of a "blockbuster mentality" and 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. An opposing view is taken by film critic Tom Shone, who considers that Lucas and Spielberg's reinvention of blockbusters as fast-paced entertainment reinvigorated the US film industry and deserves greater artistic and critical recognition.

In a book written by Chris Anderson titled The Long Tail, he mentions the many different possibilities the Blockbuster film brought to Hollywood, and the many ancillary markets that followed. He even states 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. Anderson notes in The Long Tail, the example of a world that thrives on that is a world of scarcity. As the transition of online distribution made way, what was seen evidently was that we are now entering a world of abundance, and not of limited possibilities. As time went on, and people became more comfortable with it, the changes were astounding. He also speaks on the society and how the voice of society is listened to. If a movie was a blockbuster hit, it may have only seemed that way to the people who traveled to spend their money on it. For the individuals who did not, their voices were somewhat silent. And when directors would sit down to make a blueprint of another blockbuster film, they would keep in mind only the reviews of the people that watched the film, instead of a collective whole.