Boxoffice Pro - April 2020

ON SCREEN NUMBER CRUNCH
WHAT’S
NEXT?
Looking Back—and Ahead—
at the Cinematic Experience
of the 21st Century
BY SHAWN ROBBINS
Below: Robert Downey
Jr.’s Iron Man marked
the end of an era in
Avengers: Endgame.
As I took my seat for the very first
showing of Avengers: Endgame at
my local Imax auditorium last April, I
couldn’t help but notice the audience. My
wife and I were surrounded by hundreds
of other fans of all ages—moms, dads,
grandparents, millennials, teenagers—
there wasn’t one obviously dominant
demographic.
At the end of the movie, a couple of
teenagers sitting one row behind us were
audibly crying. We heard them describe
how they’d grown up with Tony Stark and
Iron Man, how emotional the entire saga
made them feel. It caught me off guard and
reminded me of the same feelings I’d had
watching other stories come to their end.
It brought to mind the experience of
seeing a certain James Cameron film
in the late 1990s, another memorable
cultural moment that left fans around the
world sobbing by the closing credits. A
stray thought dawned on me: Endgame is
Titanic for teenage boys and comic book
fans. (But don’t get me wrong—I may not
be a teenager, but I was in tears by the
credits of Endgame, too.)
Endgame, and every story that led up
to it, had an indelible and palpable impact
on its fans. It was a cultural event familiar
even to those with little interest in Marvel
movies. We all knew it wouldn’t be the
end of Marvel, of course, or even the final
time we’d see many of its characters, but
it was the end of an era. It was my most
memorable moviegoing experience of 2019
and one I’ll never forget.
So … what’s next?
Image courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
We can’t expect a cultural phenomenon
like Endgame to be released every year.
We can’t even expect a Force Awakens–like
reboot every decade. Those properties
were arguably the pinnacles of box office
achievement and the most significant
catalysts of communal moviegoing in the
past decade.
We’ve been here before, of course.
Avatar crushed global box office records
toward the end of 2009 and into 2010. It
was very much a transition period then,
too. Major franchises that had defined the
2000s had ended, were approaching their
end, or were simply past their peak: The
Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars prequels,
Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man,
The Matrix, Shrek, The Dark Knight, and
Harry Potter. Life after those, for their
fans, was hard to imagine.
Back then, no one could have predicted
the level of hype achieved by most of the
major film “events” of the 2010s. Disney
didn’t yet own Lucasfilm; additional Star
Wars films were but pipe dreams in fan
circles. Kevin Feige and Marvel were just
ramping up, with only Iron Man and The
Incredible Hulk under their belts, and
many doubted whether a shared cinematic
universe could ever work long-term.
(A decade later, Black Panther and the
two-part conclusion of the Infinity Saga
conclusively proved the naysayers wrong.)
The 2010s were undeniably more
reliant on fewer franchises than the
previous decade had been. Six of the 10
highest-grossing films (domestically)
were either from the MCU or Star Wars
franchise. Compare that to the 2000s,
when only one series (Spider-Man, twice)
topped the yearly domestic box office more
than once. But that stat, and the perception
that the future looks bleak without
any franchises to carry the weight of the
industry, overlooks the other incredible
success stories in recent years. Box office
hits outside Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm
have continuously graced the screens,
the likes of which included Mad Max:
Fury Road, Wonder Woman, Frozen, It,
Get Out, Bohemian Rhapsody, Inside Out,
Inception, Skyfall, Ted, Gravity, The Social
Network, American Sniper, 21 Jump Street,
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The LEGO
Movie, Gone Girl, The Hunger Games,
Deadpool, Jurassic World, Pitch Perfect 2,
John Wick, How to Train Your Dragon, The
Martian, revivals of the Mission: Impossible
and Fast & Furious series, Zootopia, The
194 April 2020