A couple of years ago, I did a post here talking about the wide swath of populist-skewing Oscar pictures; winner The King's Speech, Black Swan, The Social Network, The Fighter, as well as "second tier" movies like True Grit and Inception. (Although to some degree, Inception wasn't so much an "Oscar movie" that was popular as a summer blockbuster with prestige.) It looked like perhaps a new trend in so-called adult movies gaining traction in the ticket sales. However, the next year seemed almost a complete reversal in that direction. In contrast, the only movie to cross the 100 million mark amongst the 2012 nominees was The Help. Scorcese's Hugo was much admired but couldn't quite appeal to the masses, Speilberg's War Horse was considered obligatory, Terrece Malick's Tree of Life made no pretense of appealing to the masses, and the Best Picture was French, silent movie The Artist. It was almost as if unto a rebuke on the Hollywood for its especially egregious year of sequels, remakes, reboots, whatever you want to call them.
2012 seems to have, for now, found a balance between the populist and the pretigous. The highest grossing film of the year, The Avengers, was of course, yet another comic book movie, and a sequel to four of them at that. But it was generally considered, at the very least, an exercise in how to execute the blockbuster in a comprehensible, crowd-pleasing manner. Skyfall was looked at as one the best James Bond movies ever made (and saw a recognition in many of the techs). And there seemed to be a strong trend of decent-sized hits in Argo, Lincoln, Les Miserables, Silver Linings Playbook, even the very hard sell in Life of Pie and Zero Dark Thirty.
Is there a trend here? Hard to say. It's possible that the success of non-franchise pictures gave the studios more confidence to do more of the same. (After all the Hollywood cycle takes a couple years to really take effect.) Maybe the large hits seen in the spring of 2012 gave much of fall movies a lot of publicity. Perhaps what happened was, after Aurora Colorado incident, which caused moviegoing to be lacklustre for a couple of months, there was room for Argo to break out. Argo in turn, advertised many future Oscar hopefuls, and its signaling that the race was on served as an incentive to see its competition. Maybe one solid film just drums up excitement about moviegoing, I remember 2005 got a lot ink as "the summer of the slump", and in turn, may Oscar hopefuls had a weak box-office. Maybe the relationship between summer movies and Oscar bait works at a kind of symbiosis. Lack of enthusiasm about on will hurt the other. Studios should make sure its meat and potatoes are in equal portions, and both the best at what they could be. But who knows?
