 |
The 2010s Major Changes in the Film-Making Industry Part 5 Film History of the 2010s Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Film History by Decade Index | Pre-1920s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s |
|
|
Highest Paid Actors and Actresses, And A Decline in the Cult of Major Film Celebrities and Stars: Controversy still surrounded the existence of an ongoing wage disparity in Hollywood, in which men made much more money than women in the industry. For the most part, men tended to star in big-budget action or superhero movies that earned tremendous sums at the box office, while women were not allowed to compete at the same level (without the opportunity for the same roles), except for a few exceptions such as Angelina Jolie, Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lawrence. And it had always been true that aging women's salaries would precipitously decline.
Many of the best film openings were not for a big-name major Hollywood star, but for a well-directed solid story. The fast-action comedy Knight and Day (2010) counted on Tom Cruise's bankability (with another aging headliner Cameron Diaz), but it ended up having Cruise's lowest-attended opening weekend since Far and Away (1992). The poorly-received pretentious summer film The A-Team (2010), capitalizing only on its brand name, was a real low for a repeat of a major action TV series. The star power of the romantic thriller The Tourist (2010), touting the pairing of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, fell flat, as did Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett in Ridley Scott's Gladiator-like Robin Hood (2010), Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler mismatched in The Bounty Hunter (2010), or George Clooney in the slow-moving The American (2010). Over-privileged Julia Roberts in the heavily-merchandized Eat Pray Love (2010) exhibited the narcissistic star's shallow soul-searching. Joaquin Phoenix's appearance in the experimental mockumentary I'm Still Here (2010) made fun of 'celebrity' itself. For example, flops with big names in 2015 included: George Clooney in Tomorrowland (2015) (at $93 million, with a budget of $190 million), Channing Tatum in Jupiter Ascending (2015) (at $47 million, with a budget of $176 million), Adam Sandler in Pixels (2015) (at $79 million, with a budget of $88 million), Sandra Bullock in Our Brand is Crisis (2015) (at only $7 million), Meryl Streep in Ricki and the Flash (2015) (at $27 million) and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in By the Sea (2015) (at only $538,000). It was a sign of the times that three of the biggest films of 2015 bypassed established movie stars and fronted their casts with TV stars. Jurassic World (2015): Park And Recreation’s Chris Pratt, Terminator Genysis (2015): Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke, and Fantastic Four (2015): House Of Cards’ Kate Mara. The Horror Film Boom:
The Saw series of eight horror films (from 2004-2017) briefly took prominence as the highest-grossing horror film series in the decade (and of all-time), with the release of the 7th and 8th films in the gory-torture series, Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) and Jigsaw (2017). The Saw films saw a domestic grand total of $454.8 million by the close of the decade. This exceeded the total domestic gross ($401.4 million) of the Paranormal Activity series (2007-2015) of six films. However, their main competitors were two up-and-coming horror series:
Other classic horror film series (from the last three decades) with lesser revenues (although if adjusted for inflation, their box-office numbers increased considerably) included:
Some Great Examples of Remarkable Horror Films in the Decade of the 2010s: 2017 was one of the biggest years ever for the horror genre, at approximately $865 million total, although some very original and memorable horror films extended throughout the entire decade.
The Strength of Feature-Length Documentaries: Movie audiences had a more positive attitude toward screen entertainment of all kinds, thanks to growing familiarity with reality TV and YouTube. There were a number of film distributors who took chances on self-produced, low-budget projects independent of the studios (and financed through a phenomenon known as "crowdfunding"), during a time when the number of studio films was declining. Documentaries could be made cheaply, with widely-available and affordable, low-cost digital film equipment. Many docs of feature-length made a strong showing as unexpected hits during the summer months of 2010.
Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act Of Killing (2012) provided
re-enactments of genocidal mass killings by former Indonesian death-squad
leaders. Malik Bendjelloul and Simon Chinn's Oscar-winning Searching
For Sugar Man (2012) followed two Cape Town fans - Stephen "Sugar"
Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom - to find out whether the rumored
death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true or not. Also, Morgan
Neville's Oscar-winning Twenty
Feet Documentaries made a modest comeback in mid-decade, especially Asif Kapadia's Oscar-winner Amy (2015) followed the tragic rise and fall of British singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse. Michal Marczak's All These Sleepless Nights (2016) was a mesmerizing documentary that followed the lives of two Polish twenty-somethings. Ezra Edelman’s and ESPN's O.J.: Made in America (2016) won the Best Documentary Oscar Academy Award, becoming the longest Oscar winner ever (at 467 minutes) - it was released as an episodic 5-part serial on ESPN. Other praised documentaries included Weiner (2016) - the examination of a scandalous NY political figure running for NYC Mayor, and director Ava DuVernay's 13th (2016) - about racial inequality in the US criminal justice and prison systems. Netflix's Oscar-winner Icarus (2017) revealed a major international doping scandal within the sport of amateur cycling racing, and another Oscar winner Free Solo (2018) documented the first free solo climb of Yosemite's El Capitan. Two documentaries that also made a significant impact were biopics: Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) about children's TV show host Fred Rogers, and RBG (2018) about the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Passing of Older Stars and Notables in the Decade:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 
 
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Low-budget
horror films were on the rise in the decade of the 2010s. They were found
to be more lucrative (with larger profit margins and lower production
costs) than most other kinds of genre productions. After the growing
trend of torture-porn in the earlier decade (with films such as Saw
(2004) and
Hostel (2005)), horror films began to branch off and emphasize
suspense and thriller aspects instead of the gore. Halloween's 11
franchise films (from 1978-2018) were in strong contention, especially
after the release of Halloween (2018) (with domestic revenue of
$159.3 million), the number one film of the franchise. 
The Babadook (2014) - from director/writer Jennifer
Kent, a chilling tale about the villainous, monstrous title character
('Mister Babadook'), and the deteriorating mental state of grieving
widowed single mother Amelia (Essie Davis) plagued by the violent death
of her husband (who died in a car accident while they were on their
way to the hospital to give birth); she was raising their only son
Samuel (Noah Wiseman) - a disturbed and outcast boy who was haunted
by an invisible force/monster in the house 
Split (2017), a psychological thriller from writer/director
M. Night Shyamalan as an entry in his so-called "Unbreakable" trilogy,
about a disturbed abductor-kidnapper (James McAvoy) with 23 distinct
'split-personalities' (and a 24th one about to emerge); with domestic
revenue of $138.3 million - it was the 23rd highest-grossing (domestic)
film of the year 
A Quiet Place (2018), a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi
thriller from director/co-writer/star John Krasinski, about a near-future
world where human survivors (including Emily Blunt, Krasinski and their
three children) had to remain quiet in order to avoid detection by
blind creatures with ultra-sensitive hearing
Some
felt there was a glut of documentaries critical of various social issues,
such as the two environmentally-themed documentaries which were Oscar
nominees in the year of the Gulf oil spill: Waste Land (2010) and GasLand
(2010). They were joined by National Geographic's Afghanistan
war-themed Restrepo (2010), Inside Job (2010) -
an accounting of the 2008 global financial meltdown, and the mysterious
UK graffiti artist Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010).
Others that showed promise included the highest-grossing documentary
of the year - Disney's ecological nature drama Oceans (2010);
also Babies
(2010), Guggenheim's un-nominated polemic on US education woes in Waiting
For Superman (2010), the intriguing and plot-twisting Catfish
(2010) revealing a surprising Facebook family relationship, Joan
Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010), Countdown to Zero (2010) (the
follow-up film about the nuclear arms race from the makers of An Inconvenient
Truth), and The Tillman Story (2010) about a NFL star turned
soldier. 
From
Stardom (2013) followed
the life of back-up singers, and Alex Gibney's controversial Going Clear:
Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015) was an expose of the Church
of Scientology and its alleged human-rights
violations and instances of psychological abuse. The sensationalizing,
passionate news-documentary feature Blackfish (2013) from director
Gabriela Cowperthwaite was an expose about the harmful treatment of captive
orca whales at SeaWorld (San Diego, CA).