The summer without Hollywood blockbusters

What Hollywood’s big-budget mythmaking spectacles did for America, and why it’s all changing.Since the dawn of time — by which I mean June 20, 1975, the day Jaws chomped its way into movie theaters — the Hollywood summer blockbuster has been America in a nutshell: ambitious, expensive, loud, fond of firearms and legends and heroes, quippy, a little shallow, and always, always wrapped in the stars and stripes. To be American in the summer is to eat hot dogs, fry your skin in the sun, fight about baseball and politics, and go see a new movie in which humanity is under attack, stuff blows up, and somebody has to save the day.But this summer looked different, for the first time in 45 years. Blockbuster heroes respond to the call of duty, the charge to save humanity led by American authorities — or, in the event the government is in shambles, by everyday Americans. The very reason Americans — and the rest of the world — couldn’t go see any new blockbusters this summer has to do with American failure. With what might be the year’s biggest movie — Christopher Nolan’s Tenet — having just opened everywhere except America before slowly attempting to roll out here, it’s high time we examined what the blockbuster means for us, and how 2020 became the year everything changed.To start properly, we should go back 99 years before Jaws, to August 13, 1876. “He was a great theatrical thinker — he developed this new theatrical space that changed how audiences in the 19th century related to work onstage.” In short, Ross said, Wagner created a sort of prototype for the way that cinema, which wouldn’t debut for a few more decades, would operate. The legend of the Ring Cycle — of greed, foolish men, and the never-ending grasp for power — was a tale as old as time.In the early days of the pandemic in the US, New York’s Metropolitan Opera began streaming archived recordings of its most famous opera productions, for free. (J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote the books on which the movies are based, was explicitly answering Wagner in his tale of a golden ring of power.) The Lord of the Rings films have all the same elements, from magic and fire to sweeping centuries of history to the use of leitmotifs — little musical themes for different characters, a technique that film composers have borrowed from Wagner since film composition became a thing.With its myth-weaving and hero’s journeys, the Ring Cycle also feels closely related to the Star Wars movies. Audiences would want to go to see a summer blockbuster multiple times in the theater. “The allegory is not so simplistic.” The film is less about triumphant heroes saving the day and more about barely cheating death.Which is significant, because the blockbusters that evolved out of the Jaws approach gradually became more straightforward, predictable, and triumphalist as time wore on. In a large swath of classic summer blockbusters, humanity is threatened by ghosts (Ghostbusters) or aliens (Independence Day, Men in Black) or a meteor (Armageddon) or resurrected dinosaurs (Jurassic Park) or some other force, and it’s up to the hero or heroes to stop it, which they do, while cracking jokes and performing thrilling feats of strength and ingenuity. And he was played by Harrison Ford, who would later play one of the most American summer blockbuster heroes imaginable: Indiana Jones, who swung into theaters in the summer of 1981.Notably, there’s a touch of Siegfried — strapping young man, legendary hero, and (not accidentally) German nationalist icon in the 19th and 20th centuries — in all of them. If Wagner’s Ring Cycle is the forerunner of contemporary cinema as an experience, it’s also got all of the elements of a summer blockbuster, the most important of which, to my mind, is pretty simple: It’s very goofy.I mean, don’t tell Wagner I said that. Then the first two installments in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins in 2005 and The Dark Knight in 2008) expanded our vision of what a superhero film could do.And six weeks before The Dark Knight’s US premiere, in May 2008, a little movie called Iron Man hit theaters, birthing a cinematic universe that would grow up to swallow the summer blockbuster season whole. And true to summer blockbuster form, Endgame wasted no time getting its groove back.In spinning the yarn of the Ring, Wagner drew on Norse mythology, but he also sought to tell a tale that would resonate with his 19th-century German audience. And Siegfried, the hero, became so tied to Nazism that when American Nazis opened a camp on Long Island in the 1930s, they named it “Camp Siegfried.” The power of myth — big stories that tell us our origins, that give us a sense of who we are as a people — is what drives art. Under him, militaristic movies became more acceptable again, Hoberman says: “Once you had Rambo and Top Gun, that just became another aspect of summer fun.”The Hollywood blockbuster hero is embedded in a type of movie that doesn’t just tell a story; it envelops you in the story. In 2018, Skyscraper (that movie where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s main enemy is a burning tower) opened two weeks earlier in China than in the US, and featured global stars like Singaporean actor Chin Han and Chinese legend Tzi Ma. That same year, The Meg — which seemed almost to signal a perfectly symmetrical end of American summer blockbuster domination in its vapid, giant-shark-driven plot — also heavily focused on an international cast, with actors including Bingbing Li, Masi Oka, Winston Chao, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. Films such as these featured jokes about the American characters’ bad Chinese pronunciation, making space for an international audience to join in on the fun.Ultimately, they still followed the blockbuster formula; the big, flashy action stars (like The Rock or The Meg’s Jason Statham) fit the maverick mold perfectly. And downward trends at the summer box office — with flops like the X-Men film Dark Phoenix and Men in Black: International, which should have been franchise-driven hits — made me wonder, by the end of 2019, what the future of summer blockbusters might look like. And Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, from one of the few auteurs who can still draw an audience for an original film with little to no hint of what it’s about, finally opened abroad on August 26, and is slated to start a slow American rollout one a week later, in places where theaters are open.If those two releases go well, and if the coronavirus rears its head as schools open in the fall and people start spending more time indoors, then it seems quite possible the American audience’s dominance in Hollywood may weaken. And as insular as Americans may be, it’s part of Hollywood DNA that the movies are for everyone.”But as Ross pointed out, a change might have been a long time coming, because of what happens when legends are co-opted to propel nationalism and patriotism to the forefront of a culture. It’s such a comforting story to come back to, but the lease may be running out on the myth of American purity and heroic goodness.” (Indeed, if the massive worldwide success of 2018’s Black Panther — a February release that challenged the usual narrative peddled by superhero films — is any indication, that reassessment is already happening.) August closed in America with plenty of indies and international imports and streaming-only releases on offer, but no new Hollywood blockbusters.