Yesterday on Facebook I had to vent about how the 2010's just stink for American cinema: “As the end of the decade approaches, I fear we’ve basically gone through the worst decade for American movies since the ’80s. It’s a good thing TV is going through an incredible golden age that far surpasses most of the stuff being released in theaters.”
Jeffrey Wells pointed me to a corresponding Hadley Freeman piece in the Guardian today: “From Top Gun to Stand By Me: Why the 1980s Is My Favorite Film Decade,” and reminded me of a Paul Schrader quote from a 2016 Little White Lies interview: “In the ’70s it wasn’t that the films were better, it was the audiences.”
He also pointed on his site to a comment by Tony Joe Stemme: “It’s easy to blame Hollywood for the lack of substantive, reality-based movies that get made, but the blame is squarely on audiences. They’re the ones that have made adult-themed dramas and comedies practically extinct. Folks see only superhero, sci-fi, fantasy and animated features? That’s what Hollywood is going to make. Kramer vs. Kramer made $400M in adjusted gross to today’s dollars. FOUR HUNDRED MILLION. For a divorce drama. Would a movie like that make even a quarter of that today?? Doubtful. Look in the mirror.”
My response: "You're not wrong but television also found a way to make "cinema" novelistic. It's the closest we've ever come to duplicating reading a book. The luxury TV has, that movies don't, is that there's more time to build up characters, storylines, atmosphere through a 10-12 hour season. We care more about the characters and are more involved because of that. A movie has to cram everything it has to say in just 2 hours."
I will close with this, if anything, American movies this decade have proven to us that fanboys drive the narrative of whatever is made, for better or for worse: I think genre movies were really great this decade, especially sci-fi and horror. Maybe the best decade ever for those types of films. It's a golden age for those kinds of films.