 What’s
this, you ask? Twenty years of summer blockbusters?
But we all know that the summer blockbuster phenomenon started
unexpectedly with the release of Jaws in
1975, and was perfected two years later with the Earth-shattering
arrival of Star Wars. Shouldn’t it
be “31 Years of Summer Blockbusters”? Or if nothing
else, shouldn’t we start with the legendary summer of
1982, when any given week would see the release of such true
classics as E.T., Fast Times At Ridgemont
High, The Thing, Blade Runner,
And Jekyll And Hyde... Together Again?
Well, first off, 20 is a nice round number.
More specifically, the summer of 1986 was my first summer
as a teenager, a crucial formative year that was also the
first year I started regularly seeing movies on the big screen.
And face it, it was a pretty damn good summer to have been
a 13-year-old kid: Aliens, The
Fly, Big Trouble In Little China, and
the movie that started the summer in classic blockbuster fashion
— Top Gun.
Top
Gun
It could be argued that for all the historical importance
placed on the earlier Lucas and Spielberg summer juggernauts, Top Gun was the first definitive contemporary,
slicked-up, studio-engineered cash cow; Where Lucas’
and Spielberg’s creations were born of their wonder-eyed
nostalgia and torn from their boyish imaginations, Top
Gun was a piece of shrewd calculation by a couple
of shrewd middle-aged white-guy producers -- Jerry Bruckheimer
and his late, great partner, Don Simpson. Having honed their
mass audience-pleasing skills on Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop (which was, astonishingly,
a winter release in late 1984), Simpson and Bruckheimer,along
with uber-stylish director Tony Scott (then making only his
second film) said to hell with earnest auteurship, let’s
“package”  something so slick, flashy, and awesomely
soulless, it virtually DARES even its intended audience to
take note of how transparent it is.
The contemporary blockbuster, not to mention
the A-list career of Tom Cruise, was born.
And for those who think the market has changed
immeasurably over the years, that “things aren’t
as they used to be,” reflect on this: The summer of
1986 began with a showdown between a glossy Tom Cruise adventure
flick from Paramount, and a stripped down, 90-minute meat-and-potatoes
action flick starring a middle-aged action hero from Warner
Brothers -- Sly Stallone’s Cobra. All
similarities to the current MI:3/Poseiden showdown are strictly coincidental.
 The
Late ‘80s
The Simpson/Bruckheimer template now firmly in place, the
next logical extension was the Joel Silver template-- he being
the action maestro now more commonly associated with The
Matrix, but then the genius behind the slightly older-skewing
upscale action extravaganza both elaborate (Lethal
Weapon, Die Hard) and joyously low-rent
(Road House, Action Jackson).
If Tom Cruise flying planes in an MTV-overloaded youth flick
laying the smack down on Sly Stallone was a shocker in 1986,
the following summer the message was loud and clear. Simpson,
Bruckheimer, and Scott’s even more icily constructed Beverly Hills Cop II came out of the gate
strong, laying immediate waste to the early summer’s
other supposed “blockbuster”-- Ishtar,
featuring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as middle-aged
songwriters in an Elaine May-directed shtickfest.
The end of an era was definitely signaled: We were still
okay with guys like Hoffman and Beatty come December, but
in the summer, we wanted Schwarzenegger and RoboCop firing
off millions of rounds of ammunition, we wanted hot chicks,
we wanted simple plots, we wanted hot-looking chicks, and
we wanted it all to happen under hazy golden skies with lots
of ceiling fans and Venetian blinds.
The following summer sealed the deal with Bruce Willis in
John McTiernan’s Die Hard, which to
this day remains the very model of action film excellence.
I’d add that it’s timeless and holds up to this
day, but all know goddamn well that if it were made today,
Willis would still be played by Willis, and Bonnie Bedelia
would be played by ... probably Lindsay Lohan. Score one for
2006.
 Batman
Flash forward a few years: 1989 brought back some familiar
faces (Gibson and Glover, round 2, Indiana Jones, round 3,
Clint Eastwood as a bounty hunter with, er, Bernadette Peters????),
but most crucially, it was all about Batman.
While Jaws and Star Wars and E.T. get “blamed” for starting
the culture of emphasis on first-week grosses and saturating
the multiplex market, Batman is probably
a more accurate place to pinpoint blockbuster hype (and over-hype).
When a bunch of shop-class rubes in rural Pennsylvania are
wearing the fucking T-shirt a month before the movie comes
out, you know you’re living in a world where Danny DeVito
and Michael Douglas dancing with Billy Ocean isn’t quite gonna cut it as a summer “blockbuster” anymore.
People had to see this movie, and they had to see it RIGHT
AWAY! With only Superman (and a Cannon-produced
Superman cheesefest in 1987 at that) having been the only
recent major superhero flick, it seemed logical for Hollywood
to turn to comics for blockbuster inspiration.
 1990
Or comic strips, at least. The following summer’s Batman was Dick Tracy, with Warren Beatty, Madonna,
and a shitload of overacting, overqualified guest stars. It
was a hit, but surprisingly the classic comic hero shtick
didn’t catch on for another decade or so. Instead 1990,
in retrospect, looks a lot like our current blockbuster season
line-up-- sequels in the form of Die Hard 2, Another 48 Hours, Robocop 2,
and Days Of Thunder, which was basically Top Gun 2 only with a Cruise in a cool blonde
perm, and Cary Elwes instead of Val Kilmer.
Why am I highlighting 1990? Do I have something profound
to say about how it relates to today and how blockbuster formula
was run into the ground by greed and a bunch of clumsy sequels?
No, I just wanted to tip the hat to a year where I could strap
on my Skidz pants and smoke some Newports and listen to M.C
Hammer and feel like king of the world driving my beater to
the multiplex to see the Diceman in Adventures Of
Ford Fairlane. ‘Twas a magical year, I tell
you.
Boring
Blockbuster: The early ‘90s
T2... Point Break, Robin
Hood, Batman Returns, Lethal
Weapon 3, Forrest Gump, blah, blah,
blah. Plenty of legit blockbusters in the early ‘90s,
and even some remarkable films, but it was almost a quaint
era compared to the adrenaline-fueled hugeness of the ‘80s.
Old men were back, in the form of Clint kicking ass in  Unforgiven and In The Line Of Fire, and Harrison Ford
on the lam in The Fugitive. I remember this
as more of a time of old-man-centric espionage flicks and
legal thrillers than for superheroes fighting crime in rural
British Columbia, as is now the norm for a major summer flick.
And while there were some Silverian sequels in the form of
the phoned-in third Lethal Weapon and the
underrated Die Hard With A Vengeance, Simpson
and Bruckheimer were pretty much on hiatus for five years
after the relative disappointment of Days Of Thunder.
Even Cruise was stranded in jolly ol’ Ireland in Far
And Away, when he should’ve been racing helicopters
in some neon-drenched Scott brothers flick.
The bright-and-shiny blockbusters of the 1980s seemed dead.
A relic of the not-too-distant past. But that was all about
to change. Enter Bay.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Next >> |
