In an age where
one comes across countless memes a day, a few tend to get more than a chuckle. The one about how
people born in the year 2000 would be 18 in 2018 was one of them.
In the last 18 years,
the film and television industry has seen a massive sea change in the way
content is consumed and the trends change rapidly each year. The emergence of
streaming sites such as Netflix, Amazon and the viewing patterns followed by
millennials has had a lot to do with this.
Simply put, with the
number of high profile flops seen in 2017, producers have a tough time
predicting how the market and audiences world over will react to big money
projects anymore.
The top-grossing film
in 1996 was ‘Independence Day’, and yet, like many sequels recently, that much
anticipated ‘Independence Day: Resurgence’ was a dud. 2017 saw planned sequels
like ‘Tron’ and ‘Hellboy’ scrapped and rebooted while there has a been a
growing preference to watch a long drawn out TV series as opposed to a
three-hour movie.
So while ‘Game of
Thrones’ was one of the most watched TV series last year, 2017 saw the wind
being knocked out of major movie series such as Guy Ritchie’s ‘King Arthur:
Legend of the Sword’, which was meant to be the first of a six part series; Tom
Cruise’s ‘The Mummy’ that was designed to kick off the ‘Dark Universe’ of
monster movies; or the case of the ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ where its box
office returns were less than ‘Jumanji’, despite the Dwayne Johnson, Kevin
Hart, Jack Black starrer being released later.
This doesn’t
necessarily reflect the quality of the movies/TV shows as there have been
latest studies that have revealed how millennials have hated some of the
all-time classics like the American television sitcom ‘Friends’ or the British
spy movie series ‘James Bond’.
For many, ‘Friends’
will always be our all-time favourite and it was quite satisfying to see how
Netflix trolled millennials this January 2018 with an episode of ‘Friends’,
mocking the recent absurd millenial fad, by showing the episode where Joey ends
up in the hospital after accidentally eating ‘tide pods’.
More than
millennials, Netflix and Amazon have truly been the disruptive force in 2017
and taken the sheen of Hollywood. The Amazon Studios-funded ‘Manchester By The
Sea’ brought a brace of Oscars and a Golden Globe win in 2017 while ’The Crown’
got two Golden Globes for Netflix. Then there’s the 91 Emmy nominations it
garnered. Four years ago, Netflix found itself with just 14.
Where once Netflix
and Amazon were seen as the plucky underdogs with limited ambition, they are
now beating the rest with their mighty billion subscriber reach and over 100
original films in production.
They’re not too
bothered with budget constraints either. Take Amazon for instance – it bet $1
billion on the rights to the ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV franchise in 2017,
outbidding HBO. Similarly, Netflix won the bid for Martin Scorsese’s Al
Pacino-Robert De Niro-Joe Pesci-starrer ‘The Irishman’, that’s set to cost over
$100 million.
And 2018 won’t just
be a two horse race, with Disney threatening to further disrupt the scene as it
plans to make its own streaming service. After having picked up Fox and its $52
billion assets (including a new portion of Marvel characters to sustain the
‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ for years to come), Disney also became a majority
shareholder in Hulu – another streaming service that has served up fantastic
fare, including ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.
This doesn’t mean
Hollywood will have a lukewarm year, as there is already promise of a host of
movies that can make the kind of impact it’s expected to. The fact that there
is no ‘Game of Thrones’ in 2018 should help.
For starters, there’s
‘Phantom Thread’, which brings back the dynamic director-actor combination of
Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis of Oscar winning ‘There Will be
Blood’ Fame. The movie starts 2018 off with a high-art triumph.
Then there’s one of
the most accomplished, daring filmmakers around, Ava DuVernay, who made history
when she signed on for the adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel, ‘A
Wrinkle in Time’, becoming the first woman of colour to direct a movie with a
$100m budget.
Hollywood millennial
and Golden Globe winner Saoirse Ronan plays the titular role as the young,
powerful, confident ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’, who tries to wrestle the English
throne away from her cousin, Elizabeth I, played by Margot Robbie, complete
with the famous Queen’s plucked hairline.
‘Whiplash’s’ Damien
Chazelle’s new film ‘First Man’ couldn’t be more different from ‘La La Land’,
except for Ryan Gosling, who stars as Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on
the moon.
Three years before
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, there was ‘Mary Poppins’, and now, 54 years
after Julie Andrews and her parrot-head umbrella floated down to Cherry Tree
Lane, one of the most beloved family movies of all time gets a sequel with
Emily Blunt starrer-‘Mary Poppins Returns’.
The
list for movies to look out for in 2018 goes on and gives cause for optimism,
with the likes of Spielberg’s sci fi adventure ‘Ready Player One’, ‘Widows’ by
Steve McQueen and ‘Red Sparrow’ starring Jennifer Lawrence.
