Arthur_Phuxache
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"Influential" is a qualitative judgement, but I suspect this is just semantics.
Indeed. Rob Liefeld's Youngblood is objectively one of the most important American comics of the 21st century
I don't think I've ever really grasped how big a year for film that was.
Sorry Atari, I'm willing to sacrifice you to preserve OTL
It makes for interesting speculation - I don't know if E.T. starts the genre or not but I feel like it's what inspired the "kids in peril" movies of the rest of the decade, some of which Spielberg produced. Things like The Goonies and Stand by Me are the famous examples. I feel like Home Alone was the pinnacle of that genre; I can't really think of any really big examples after it; maybe if Jurassic Park didn't have the adults in it, but it does, so it's not. But maybe if E.T. isn't about, those movies are just some more of the ones that don't happen, in addition to the ones you mentioned in the article.
Is 1982 the only time a movie like E.T. could become the biggest movie of all time? It feels like kind of an odd-one-out in that discussion. Before it, you have The Godfather which was a massive prestige thing that everybody had heard about. Jaws was the first summer blockbuster (but there is zero prospect that a borderline horror movie would be a fraction as big today as Jaws was in 1975). Star Wars was Star Wars. And then after it, Jurassic Park had realistic dinosaurs and everybody loves dinosaurs. Titanic was a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Avatar had legitimately unprecedented special effects work. Avengers: Endgame was the finale of its series everybody had been following for 10 years (I don't feel like it has the legacy you would expect but as @Thande pointed out to me that's probably because I block all comment sections everywhere on the Internet).
E.T. had everything going for it, but it's a family movie with a lot of heart but relatively little action in it, not much in the way of effects stuff. Basically it's got very little of the things that the so-called experts claim that movies in 2020 need to be a major hit, never mind the biggest movie ever.
You're ignoring the most important pop culture change: no ET means no Mac and Me.
The opening scene to Stranger Things would have to look for a different inspiration.
Something generally has to be popular to either 1) inspire others or 2) more importantly, persuade studios to sign off on said others. It's not enough to just exist.
If you asked people in the early 1970s "say they decide to bring back Star Trek and make a film out of it, what would it be like" absolutely nobody would picture what Star Trek: The Motion Picture turned out as - even though the concept of 'human probe sent into deep space goes mad, comes back and turns on humans' already existed and indeed had already been done in an episode of the TV series. The only reason that film was made as the very long, very slow-paced, very effects-heavy and cerebral piece it was was because of the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It'd be one of them, yes, but as Ryan argues, so's ET.
Between them, Jaws (first modern summer blockbuster), Raiders (major influence for 80s), Jurassic Park (kickstarting CGI effects and ending stopmotion), and Saving Private Ryan (reshaping how war was depicted), Speilberg's really got a record for that and that's not counting the films and cartoons and careers he oversaw as a producer. Bay's Transformers, even, which itself may be more influential than we want to think on subsequent summer blockbusters and exists due to Stevey.
Oh, yeah, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? happened almost entirely because Spielberg wanted it to happen.
At the absolute least, the Disney characters are in it because Spielberg wanted them in it and in 1988, even the Walt Disney Company coud not say no to Steven Spielberg.
I'm just saying, there's, "Is this movie influential?" and there's, "Is this movie good?" and the answer to both questions don't have to be the same.
Lots of people dislike, say, Jar-Jar Binks (not me, though), but the leap forward in motion capture technology that Jar-Jar represented can't really be exaggerated.
Does Gollum happen without Jar-Jar? I don't know, but Andy Serkis in a suit with a bunch of dots on it is probably an easier sell in a post-Jar-Jar world.
Is every significant film good? Certainly not. There's a lot of innovative techniques pioneered by D.W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation that might not have been widely adopted en masse if not for the success of that film. Doesn't change the fact the film did a lot to popularise the Lost Cause myth, portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and inspired their revival in the twentieth century opposed as they were to black characters portrayed by white actors in blackface as little more than animals.
Isn't it interesting though to consider how the Console Wars might have developed if when Nintendo arrives on US shores there is already a homegrown manufacturer who they would have to overcome rather than stepping into a vacuum left in the wake of their downfall? Even Sega may have a very different future, at the time of the Video Game Crash they were owned by Gulf & Western Industries in both the US and Japan, the US side was sold to Bally following a downturn in arcade revenue and the Japanese side was sold to a group of investors that built it into the company they would become. If the bubble does not burst they may retain ownership of either company (more likely the Japanese side) and then we might have the bizarre situation of a Japanese video game manufacturer owned by a US conglomerate in the 1980s.
Combination of a different time and the things it did have going for it. The blockbuster era may have arrived but they weren't ten a penny - aside from Jaws and Star Wars you had The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are similarities between all of them but on the surface level they're very different films, the blockbuster may have arrived but you couldn't define it to any single type of film. This was bore out later in the decade when you had as diverse a bunch as Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Aliens, Top Gun, Die Hard and Batman. You couldn't say what the next huge one would be, even leaving Summer behind briefly who could have seen Beverly Hills Cop as the highest grossing film of a year that already had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and Ghostbusters break USD100mm at the box office? Studios had to trust filmmakers to make good films regardless and hope form the dailies you might see what the next Big One would be and even then it was a crap shoot as to whether it would land or not. They didn't sink hundreds of millions into films in the hope of getting the same back. What E.T. did have going for it was one of the two biggest names in Hollywood at the time directing and accessibility to both full families and those who might not have been interested in the other concept movies out at the same time.
Even The Birth of a Nation wasn't groundbreakingly innovative so much as it consolidated all the innovations that were going on in silent cinema in the early 1910s around it.
(I don't really know a lot about the history of cinema but I wonder if perhaps we give The Birth of a Nation too much credit sometimes. An important film, certainly, but is it the important film people make it out to be? I'm really not sure. I am sure there are film historians who could tell me.)
What changed with the 50s onwards is that distribution really hits the point where a film can develop a new innovation and then get spread across the whole of the western cinema viewing audience at the same time. I'm not entirely sure what the dividing line is- it might arguably be the combination of Gone with the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz- but there's a definite point where that line gets crossed.
Americans setting up minimum quotas of their movies to be shown in countries benefitting from their loans?
Didn't France try to counter it by taking whatever the American quota was a s screening an equal number of French films?
Americans setting up minimum quotas of their movies to be shown in countries benefitting from their loans?