SCREENWRITER:The total US box-office takings this year are up a significant 14.4 per cent on the same point in 2008, writes DONALD CLARKE
This is surprising for any number of reasons. Before the fabulous Star Trekhit movie houses, the spring blockbusters were hardly of vintage quality. Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Fast and Furious, Knowing, Watchmenand X-Men Origins: Wolverineare all, to strain an analogy, closer to screw-top Cumbrian Liebfraumilch than well-preserved 1953 Margaux.
Maybe the healthy figures are the result of millions flocking to off-centre gems such as Let the Right One Inand Synecdoche, New York. Maybe my bottom smells like lemongrass.
Industry Cassandras have, over the past 12 months, been keening ever louder about the advance of internet piracy. The most outrageous instance occurred with the distribution of a near- complete version of Wolverinea month before its release. Yet, despite this leak (and the fact that the film wasn't awfully good) the X-Menprequel still went on to garner $85 million on its opening weekend.
It is customary in such discussions to drag out the old guff about downtrodden millions flocking to the cinema in times of economic depression. You know the argument. After the Wall Street crash, men in floppy caps kept warm by huddling together in front of Busby Berkeley musicals and Edward G Robinson thrillers. During the troubled 1970s, while looters roamed the streets, decent people sought escape from their troubles in Star Wars.
The facts don't quite support this simplistic thesis. Yes, cinema was at its healthiest in the 1930s and 1940s, but the fact that this era stretched from the arrival of sound to the birth of TV is at least as significant as economic factors. For all the brilliance of Hollywood's Easy Ridergeneration, it was their less cerebral successors – Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis – who developed a populist cinema that appealed across all demographics.
Cinema attendance has had its peaks and troughs. We will never again see the attendance figures of the pre-second World War era. But the story has been one of an extraordinary resilience to technological advance and economic instability. The arrival of internet piracy has had only a marginally greater effect on movie receipts than the arrival of the hula hoop.
So, why do we keep going to the cinema? Well, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, let us acknowledge that the experience of squatting over a flickering laptop is not the same as being assaulted by booming stereo and an image the size of the Isle of Man. Courting teenagers need somewhere to snuggle and they’re not going to fork out for the ballet.
More than anything else, though, the survival of cinema speaks of the human animal’s stubborn need to partake of a communal experience. Today’s chattering, scoffing, telephoning cinemagoers do behave little better than drunken Visigoths, but even barbarians, for all their cruelty to the invaded, savoured one another’s awful company.
Cinema. It’s the medium that won’t stay dead.
