Hollywood Trends: What’s Happening in Cinema Right Now?
By Loki De Pontes
The year is 2019. You just walked out of your screening of Avengers: Endgame. Your ears are ringing from the amount of people that were screaming their lungs out when Cap picked up Mjolnir. This is also the first time you’ve seen an alarming amount of grown adults cry at a movie, let alone one where one of the major characters is called “Rocket Raccoon”.
Fast-forward five years and you think someone told you there’s a Superman movie coming at some point, and the only Marvel movie you watched recently was Deadpool & Wolverine. What happened, and what’s coming next?
PAST
The superhero movie phenomenon seemed invincible at some point. However, I think the cathartic experience that was Spider-Man: No Way Home, and finally being able to see Zach Snyder’s vision of DC’s Justice League served as a perfect bookend to its sensational status.
Numerous reasons can be given for how they started to falter, box office revenue tanking due to COVID and the rise of streaming services among them. More than anything, I think they fell under the weight of their own success, with Marvel and DC pushing out underbaked productions every few months in an attempt to hit the jackpot. Recently, there have certainly been more misses than hits.
If you look at the worldwide box office numbers for 2023, only 2 of the films in the top 10 can be described as “superhero movies”—those being Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Go even a year back and it’s double that amount. Superhero movies are far from over (Deadpool & Wolverine grossing over a billion being a prime example of that), but I think it’s clear that their heyday is firmly in the rearview mirror.
PRESENT
We seem to currently be in a sort of “biopic renaissance”. It seems everyone’s favourite young actor or actress has either recently starred or is about to star in a dramatic retelling of someone’s life—for better or worse. Oppenheimer, being both a box office smash and an Oscar darling, has certainly not done anything to slow the avalanche.
As with most film trends, these movies have been on both ends of the quality spectrum: from The Iron Claw and Nyad being critically praised to the mostly underwhelming releases of Bob Marley: One Love and Back To Black.
More blockbuster biographicals are on the way, including Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown releasing later this year and Jaafar Jackson playing his uncle (in the aptly-named Michael) in April 2025, to name just two. How long it will last is anyone’s guess, but at least a few more years is most likely.
FUTURE
Predicting the future of Hollywood, or any industry right now, is a difficult task. I highly doubt Sam Raimi, or anyone involved in Tobey Maguire’s first Spider-Man film, had any idea what was to happen in the next two decades. However, by looking at box office trends, we can definitely see what type of bets big executive producers will be more willing to make.
2020 might have been the most catastrophic year for entertainment media ever, but seeing the Bad Boys franchise make a comeback almost 20 years after its last installment was certainly an eyebrow-raiser. 2022 was, for many, the first year with a “return to normalcy”, and with it came the absolute phenomenon that was Top Gun: Maverick, grossing just under 1.5 billion dollars. Three and a half decades after the original, Tom Cruise proved that old ideas can work just as well in our metamodern hyper-online reality. This, along with recent success stories like Twisters and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, seem to indicate that audiences are very keen on the “legacy sequel”, even if they haven’t watched the original film (as many had not even heard of the original Twister until recently). Greenlighting these films is also a big win for Hollywood, as it allows them to market to a nostalgic audience while still advertising their new budding stars (a prime example being Glen Powell). The result of this fusion of reusing and pioneering allows for a certain degree of experimentation while still being familiar enough to attract audiences—and if executives love anything, it is getting butts in seats.
The future of Hollywood is most definitely not certain at this critical juncture, something which wasn’t at all aided by the SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023. However, there is now hope that this reality check can lead to many more diverse ideas, many more interesting stories, and a whole lot more Glen Powell.