jeffkjoe

Sorry for the nerdiness of this thread, but I was just wondering....

Star Wars / THe Empire Strikes Back / Return of the Jedi - Will there ever be a phenomenon again like this saga that:

- revolutionized special effects
- music, concept art, design creativity was at the top of their game
- an entire universe was created from scratch
- created an explosion of merchandise
- influenced an entire generation of 70's kids to turn to moviemaking (Kevin Smith, John Singelton, Bryan Singer)


The closest series that was like this is maybe...MAYBE - Harry Potter? But that was a book series before the movie series.

Not Lord of the Rings. Not Hunger Games. Not Twilight.

Why So Blu?

Avatar 2-4.

Indy Jones Fan

^^^My first thought was Avatar as well.

Rockmjd23

Probably not, but why would you consider Harry Potter closest? It doesn't really meet any of the criteria you laid out.

jeffkjoe

I'm trying to think of its influence on American pop culture....

Harry Potter (can't say if I mean the BOOK series or the FILM series) -

is popular, has longevity, and has spawned countless merchandise.

But it HASN'T broken any new grounds in filmmaking.

Rockmjd23

I'd give more of its credit to the book series. Film-wise, they fall short of LOTR imo.

Paul_SD

it did in the sense of following the same lead actors as they grew up across seven(eight) separate films. It also kept it's production values up to a consistently high standard for that same amount of films. That's a pretty remarkable achievement, that likely won't be bested again.

Starting about 2000 we entered into a new golden age for fantasy films.
There has never been this long a run of so many big budget and high quality films of this type.

As far as a one film series phenomenon ... the world is a lot different than in 1977-83. Too many sources of stimulas competing for peoples attention. There were only 3 major networks in '77 and no 24 hour cable news channel. The phenoms of the future will look more like Titanic and Avatar and TDK- Avatar really kicked into a high gear a new business model (the higher ticket 3D release) that's going to be around a little while longer. TDK has had a big influence (imo, a mostly negative one) on how comic properties at least on the DC side are approached as far as tone. That's going to be around for a while to, unfortunately.

thinking about it a little further- the Marvel produced shared universe films are probably the closest to a new star wars phenom. This is new uncharted territory and you already have another big player (Warner DC) trying to copy it and more like Fox and Sony to follow in their own fashion.
Not all the Marvel series films will click- but when they do converge, the response is going to continue to be epic (just like it was for the first Avengers movie...which in terms of story/dramatic/action potential, could easily be bettered in the future).

hanshotfirst1138

The film is only part of it too, there was a whole series of cultural things going on at the time which I'm sure had something to do with it. Star Wars completely changed the world, and certainly the film industry. In the post-Internet age, will we ever see anything like it again now that everyone has access to everything? Doubt it. Hell, at this point, I'd settle for seeing those films again, since it looks like the original versions of them aren't likely to ever see a proper restoration. There will be other pop culture phenomenons, but I don't know if there'll ever be anything like that again. I wasn't even alive when it came out, and the echoes of it are still felt today.

Paul_SD

Planet of the Apes was SW before SW. A sprawling serial film franchise, tons of marketing (I had shirts, dolls...er sorry- action figures, books, models, etc) and even crossed into TV.
SW did it on a more massive scale, but it had some precedent so it wasn't something that , early on, was totally out of the realm of the ordinary.

jeffkjoe

Awww, man. If you had been a child of 7 or 8 right when Star Wars hit, that was the good stuff.

I remember seeing the original Star Wars in 1977 at a birthday movie screening and just sitting with all my friends in stunned silence after the final credits rolled.

Then the Kenner Toys series slowly came out year after year....

....and we didn't even have VCR's really back then. The best you could do was wait for it to hit HBO in 1982 and CBS in 1984.


Ahhhhh, the good old days before all this visual stimulation.

jeffkjoe

You're darned right about the TIMING in which Star Wars hit.

The world WAS a lot different back then. We weren't USED to seeing special effects done on the scale that Star Wars brought to us back then.

The novelty of all this helped.

Unless Avatar II - IV changes the way we watch movies, I'm afraid we won't ever get to experience movies the way we did SW back in '77.

Paul_SD

Just look at the difference between the special effects seen in Logan's Run in 1976 and the opening Star Destroyer attack in SW in '77.
It's like Night And Day.

Paul_SD

This can not be over emphasized.

The (relatively near instant ) gratification that came with the introduction of the VCR and three- six month windows before a theatrical film was available for home consumption, really devalued the experience.
Even with HBO, there was a lag time before you could see a big feature again (a year for most common movies, and two years or more for the really big films). And then you only had a few specific showings in which to catch it.
No pausing to do some other activity- just like life, if you missed it, you missed it. Having total control over the broadcast as you do with VCRs/DVDs/DVRs, means it no longer has that immediacy of a 'big' event.
The craving, the anticipation of seeing something again, the frustration of not being able to...all that elevates stuff in your imagination.
If VCRs and home theater was as ubiquitous in 1977 as it is today, maybe SW would not have reached the heights it did.

Abob Teff

It is near impossible to answer this question. My gut reaction is "no, we will never see a phenomenon like Star Wars again." However, to become a phenomenon like Star Wars, the "new thing" will be so groundbreaking and revolutionary that we won't see it coming.

I tend to lean towards "no" because studios have tried too hard for years to duplicate SW's success. They aren't trying to create something new; they just want to run everything through a photocopier.

I actually thought John Carter had a chance at capturing some of that lightning in a bottle. While not original material, it produced characters accessible to all ages, a fresh mythos, and fantastic escapism. I still don't understand how Disney botched a marketing campaign ...

The closest thing I can recall was The Matrix. It may be because I did not know anything about it when I went to see it. Unfortunately the Wachowskis decided to make it into an incomprehensible mess. No, it never would have reached the heights of Star Wars (mainly due to the R rating), but it certainly tapped into some of the successful elements (groundbreaking special effects, sprawling epic story, fantastic new worlds, etc.).

The Infidel

They would have to do something like project the movie straight into our brains and allow our thoughts to cast the movie however we choose for it to come anywhere close to how Star Wars impacted our lives and our culture.

jeffkjoe

The Matrix - at least the first one - is actually a darn good answer. I think The Matrix achieved the same type of groundbreaking status that SW: A New Hope did.

I almost want to say - STAR TREK - has the same type of influence that STAR WARS does - but does that mean, STAR TREK 1960's-present or STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE-present?

It's like which came first, the chicken on the egg? Which one was pop-culturally influential first? TREK or WARS?

Why So Blu?

Hipsters hadn't been born yet.

Alan Smithee

Well, thankfully SOME people had VCRs back then, and recorded this!
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EtgSBAZWnbU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Paul_SD

I never think of The Matrix because I was never a big fan of it- but I agree that's had about as huge a cultural, and artistic, impact as any film can have in this day and age.
Way more than any of the films I listed.
Hell, movies like MoS are still ripping it off 14 years later...

mcnabb

The thing about Star Wars (The Original) that's different then today's blockbusters is that it appealed to everyone.

Today summer blockbusters are geared to teenagers, and once in a while you get movies like 'The Dark Knight', 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Avatar' that branch out to other demographics, but nothing like Star Wars did in 1977.

I remember EVERYONE seeing and liking Star Wars in 1977, whether it was myself as a 5 year old kid, or my older brothers, or my parents, or my neighbors. It appealed to everyone on some level, and it wasn't targeted just to nerds like movies today (including the Star Wars Prequels).

Now it was a different time: no home video release 6 months later, no cable tv release a year later, no internet for fans to snipe and pick apart the movie, etc. It became popular simply by word of mouth (since it opened in only 43 theaters on May 25th), and it was one of those movies 'you had to see.'

Jaws was really the first blockbuster that pre-dated Star Wars, but the difference with that was you couldn't take young children like you could with Star Wars, so the audience was more limited.

Mr. Cinema

So Avatar, with its $2.7 BILLION worldwide gross, wasn't a movie phenomenon? Released during a time where everyone has a BD/DVD player, HDTV and access to VOD?

Michael Corvin

The Matrix and Avatar are probably the two that best fit most of the OPs requirement. The problem is the merchandising and impact on future filmmakers. Everything is merchandised to death now thanks to Star Wars. So there's no real way to measure that kind of impact these days unless the film's merchandise hits a "Tickle Me Elmo" type fervor.

As for the impact on future filmmakers, with the Matrix being R and released in 1999, we would have already seen filmmakers citing it as their calling card by now, but we haven't. A younger crowd would have seen Avatar but we won't see it's possible impact for a few years.

I'd toss Avengers into the mix, but it still doesn't fit all the criteria either. It might have more of an influence on future filmmakers than Matrix or Avatar though just because of how immensely successful it was.

Jaymole

And yet they still can't compare to 2001: A Space Odyssey

mcnabb

Actually, I think the phenomenon movies that are close to SW since 1977:

-E.T.

-Titanic

-Avatar

Those were movies that were universally accepted and didn't cater to any specific market.

jeffkjoe

Actually - you're right about Titanic - Talk about a movie that appealed to DEMOGRAPHICS across the board!

Old people, teenage beenyboppers, James Cameron nerds, etc.