Like millions of Americans and movie lovers throughout the world, we spent our Sunday night on Mar. 10 glued to the screen watching the 96th Academy Awards.
Highlighted by big-budget epics, movie stars, and legendary and contemporary directors alike, we walked away from the Oscars with a renewed sense of hope and optimism for the future of film, especially blockbusters.
Evident with “Dune: Part Two,” which continues to captivate audiences and rake in box-office revenue, blockbuster filmmaking is currently all the rage. The “Barbenheimer” craze this past summer is representative of the upward trajectory of moviegoers returning to theaters for quality Hollywood blockbusters.
For a while, it felt like the only films being made were comic book movies and “Fast & Furious” sequels, which we think are enjoyable popcorn flicks, but were massively overrepresented for far too long.
We’ve seen in recent years, particularly in 2023, that audiences are experiencing superhero fatigue. This fatigue has been highlighted by multiple Marvel and DC films underperforming at the box office, with many citing a noticeable decline in filmmaking and oversaturation as the two biggest catalysts for the fatigue. With “Oppenheimer” dominating the awards season with 13 Oscar nominations and “Dune: Part Two” being lauded as a “masterpiece“ by critics, we are finally seeing studios give auteurs the resources they need for large-scale productions.
As young fans of film, we are also pleased to see a new wave of A-list movie stars emerge as the faces of our generation. Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler and Florence Pugh are not just the stars of “Dune: Part Two,” they are the actors and actresses with star power comparable to that of young Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts.
The success of recent filmmaking and a return to something closer to normal was merely a hope, if not an afterthought, prior to the industry’s success in 2023. First, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that drove people out of theaters and to streaming. It also stopped a significant amount of production. According to CNBC, over 3,000 screens closed from 2019 to 2023. Then, multiple strikes in Hollywood brought much of the industry to yet another halt.
It is thrilling to see the level of high-quality filmmaking that has emerged since the COVID-19 shutdown. Paving the way for this past year’s films, 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” brought cinema back to a place of relevance and put butts back in the seats of movie theaters.
Legendary video game designer Hideo Kojima wrote on X that “Dune: Part Two” will disrupt the growing trend of audiences watching films on streaming platforms. Because the film demands the biggest screen and loudest sound system possible, Kojima said audiences recognize the need to see this film in theaters rather than on their phones or laptops, which is how many watched the predecessor in 2021 during the height of the pandemic.
“This film shouts, ‘this is cinema!’ and provides the ‘spice’ that we need to live,” Kojima said.
Movies like these, and those being nominated for awards at the Oscars, are meant to be watched in a theater setting. That said, the reality is that streaming has become more and more of a focal point in the entertainment industry.
