New Hollywood - The End of The New Hollywood Era

The End of The New Hollywood Era

In retrospect, Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) marked the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood era. With their unprecedented box-office successes, Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas's films jumpstarted Hollywood's blockbuster mentality, giving studios a new paradigm of how to make money in the changing commercial landscape. The focus on high-concept premises, with greater concentration on tie-in merchandise (such as toys), spin-offs into other media (such as soundtracks), and the use of sequels (which had been made more respectable by Coppola's The Godfather Part II), all showed the studios how to make money in the new environment.

On realizing how much money could potentially be made in films, major corporations started buying up the Hollywood studios. The corporate mentality these companies brought to the filmmaking business would slowly squeeze out the more idiosyncratic of these young filmmakers, while ensconcing the more malleable and commercially successful of them.

The New Hollywood's ultimate demise came after a string of box office failures that many critics viewed as self-indulgent and excessive. Directors had enjoyed unprecedented creative control and budgets during the New Hollywood era, but such expensive flops as At Long Last Love, New York, New York, and Sorcerer caused the studios to increase their control over production.

New Hollywood excess culminated in two unmitigated financial disasters: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) and Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart (1982). After astronomical cost overruns stemming from Cimino's demands, Heaven's Gate only earned $3.5 million in box-office sales after costing $44 million to produce. The loss was so great that it forced United Artists into bankruptcy, resulting in its sale to MGM. Coppola, having flourished after the near financial disaster of Apocalypse Now, plowed all of the enormous success of that film into American Zoetrope, effectively becoming his own studio head. As such, he bet it all on One from the Heart, which only took in $636,000--barely a fraction of the $26 million it cost to make. The film lasted only a week in theaters, bankrupting Coppola and his fledgling studio. (Following the box-office disaster, Hollywood wags started referring to the picture as "One Through the Heart".)

These two costly examples, as well as the above-mentioned box-office failures, coupled with the new commercial paradigm of Jaws and Star Wars gave studios a clear and renewed sense of where the market was going: high-concept, mass-audience, wide-release films. Therefore, the costly and risky strategy of surrendering control to the director ended, and with that, the New Hollywood era.