We All Want to Be the Christopher Columbus of Cinema

Or: one theory about why American film and the theatrical experience are flailing

Director Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers (2024) leaped from the big screen to streaming a while ago. As soon as I read the news, I insisted that my wife sit down to watch it with me. She was confused because I’d just seen the film at the movie theater. But I told her I wanted her to see it, too. I felt compelled to share it with her.

As we’re both filmmakers, our conversation quickly led to Challenger’s exceptional box office and musing as to why it was so successful in a market where other notable films regularly tank. I argued it was because of people like me – the very high number of ticket buyers who saw it and felt the need to tell everyone about it because it was so much fun. Specifically, I said, this fun derived from the sense that we’d discovered something. I alluded to the American independent film movement of the late 20^th century when you could regularly see new films and feel so blown away by their originality, how unexpected everything about them was, that you felt creatively invigorated for days and wanted to share it with everyone you know. (I discussed this recently with indie producing legend Christine Vachon, which you can read about here.)

What I’m describing here isn’t “word-of-mouth”, but the need to evangelize for a film – to believe in the experience of it so much you must make converts of as many people as possible.

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What I’d like to discuss today is the sense of discovery that was and still should be integral to a healthy cinema ecosystem and our culture in general. I regularly discuss the value of originality here at 5AM StoryTalk, as well as our collective desire to experience something new. But it’s not just new we’re after, is it?

We want to Christopher Columbus art.

My reference to Columbus is intentional here, as he didn’t actually discover anything, of course - and neither are any of us when we experience a film for the first time. But it sometimes feels like that when it happens (a feeling many of us also have with music, plays, novels, and so on). Our lives are momentarily and sometimes dramatically changed, not dissimilar to when we encounter something borderline numinous in nature. We want to make others understand the wonder we felt. We want to relive that first instance with them. And we’ll probably spend the rest of our lives not entirely letting it go either.

This is an effect I wager many of us recently had watching Barbie (2023) or Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) for the first time. Or, going further back, Moulin Rouge! (2001), Before Sunrise (1995), and Pulp Fiction (1994). Even further back, Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), Annie Hall (1977), and Easy Riders (1969). And so on.

Each of these experiences felt like we were discovering cinema all over again, you might even say. Yes, yes, I know these aren’t universal opinions. Maybe you hated some of these films. But they are cultural touchstones now, and I think it’s safe to say the majority of us were deeply impacted by them in some way or another.

What I can’t help but wonder is: is this one of the reasons why Hollywood’s 21^st-century obsession with intellectual properties — specifically its endless train of big-budget sequels, remakes, and reboots — is producing increasingly diminishing returns at the box office?

From where I sit, articulated this way, I find it hard to argue with this thesis. While what I’m describing is partly anecdotal, I know my experience of the theatrical experience, in particular, is far from unique. We crave and seek out new experiences in every aspect of our lives, we’re always after that dopamine hit however we can get it, so why should cinema be any different?

When I look at the past decade or so of Hollywood releases in the context of what I’m describing, I find myself tired and largely uninspired and I suspect you do, too. Certainly, there’s very little that left me feeling like I discovered something. I’m not saying I wasn’t entertained and moved…but did I Christopher Columbus as many films as I did in the Aughts? No, no I did not. And as for compared to the ’90s? The only answer to that question is loud laughter.

It’s easy to say I’m biased against, say, superhero films — which I write about quite a bit here — but I do still enjoy them. What I don’t do is feel excited by them anymore. How can one feel inspired by watching a variant of the same story from the same studio that’s been pumping similar enough films out for fifteen years? The fact that the idea of the multiverse has introduced endless “variants” to this conversation, removing true stakes from the cinematic experience, doesn’t help – it only makes things worse and somehow feels more desperate.

Mostly, though, I just feel existentially bored by this superhero obsession. I doubt I’m alone.

That’s because the bar for “new” with superhero films is now so ridiculously high that you essentially have to shoehorn earlier iterations of a character into a film (Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021) or smash actors/characters together in some absurd way to once again excite audiences otherwise numb to your tricks (Deadpool & Wolverine, 2024).

I tend to believe this is part of the reason why the DC cinematic universe has so far failed to match the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success – and probably will continue to underwhelm at the box office. By the time Warner Bros. began to abruptly force its characters into stories together, everything it was doing already felt familiar and uneventful in the marketplace of ideas known as Hollywood. I mean, if you’re producing any kind of popcorn movie that doesn’t vibrate as an “original event” for audiences, you’re pretty much fucked. Exceptions exist, but for the most part, audiences don’t show up when they start to feel like they’ve seen something too many times before.

While I am a massive fan of James Gunn — who has co-inherited the DC universe from several troubled regimes before him — let’s consider two comic book film series from him. In the case of the MCU’s Guardians of the Galaxy, he launched a film trilogy that wowed audiences and critics alike. Hell, Guardians of the Galaxy was my favorite cinematic experience of 2014. Back in ’14, we were told this unknown property was a gamble by Marvel, but, as it turns out, that’s one of the biggest reasons it resonated with audiences – its startling sense of originality.

But a few years ago, Gunn wrote and directed the DC Suicide Squad sequel doing his same trademark fun and irreverent take on a superhero group dynamic - albeit darker and more violent. It turned into a box office dud despite exceptional reviews. Why? I’d argue that as fun as the film looked, it also felt familiar in the context of everything else that was happening at the movie theater and maybe even Gunn’s own oeuvre.

It’s difficult to evangelize for a cool experience that seems in any way like an experience you already evangelized for, is my point.

This isn’t to argue that audiences always show up when you give them something wholly original. Audiences are fickle and regularly reject the very kind of films they demand to be made. Very few low- to mid-budget films (like Challengers) do break through anymore because of this.

Consider: If go to a restaurant that serves you steak every night, even if the sauce and sides change, you’re still eating steak. Is it any wonder you eventually get bored with the restaurant and stay home and make something different to eat instead? It’s certainly been easy to do this with the ascendance of streamers providing you thousands of options to choose from (even if most of them aren’t worth your time).

But ironically, you can’t count on streaming platforms to do more than what Hollywood tentpoles have done to the theatrical experience. In fact, they’re even worse in this regard. That’s because their algorithms create such a curated experience for you that the chance of discovering anything new is almost entirely eliminated from the viewing experience. Here’s something independent film producer Joana Vincente said back in 2019 when she was the executive director and co-head of the Toronto International Film Festival:

“The onslaught of large amounts of content, combined with large platforms’ personalized curation, makes it all but impossible to discover new voices through traditional distribution. It is becoming harder and harder to stumble upon a film that ends up changing one’s life.”

Perhaps the fact that so little on streaming platforms can inspire this sense of discovery is part of the reason why streamers have had so much difficulty creating zeitgeist moments similar to what movie theaters had regularly done for a century before them. If you constantly steer your viewers toward more of the same, then why would they ever feel that need to evangelize for your films?

From where I sit, until wider audiences learn to trust there will be something other than steak on the menu, that going to the movies is a way to experience something exciting and new, that the movies themselves are an opportunity to discover something that changes your life forever, then Hollywood’s grasp on the theatrical experience will continue to wane and, with it, the influence it has on American cinema and American and international culture. The global theatrical experience everywhere will diminish, in turn. And the possibility of this keeps me up at night…

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