After a Tumultuous Election, What Is Hollywood’s Next Move?

Marvel Studios

Okay. So, now what?

It’s been almost a week, and there have been a lot of reactions out of Hollywood, just about all of them with a decidedly political bent. People concerned about economics and what will happen with the unions and how the very idea of celebrity endorsements have no real effect on the electorate and on and on. And all of that is relevant in its way, but it misses a larger question here. It’s the one I just asked.

When it comes to the way Hollywood reacts to this election, the stories it’s going to tell now and the movies it’s going to make, now what?

There is precedent here, of course. There have been seismic events over the 100 years of the industry, and each time, there was a definitive reaction. The Great Depression was one of the most successful decades in the history of the business, and it was filled with musicals and glitzy showcases and gritty gangster pics, all of which glamorized a world not necessarily available to the masses. Then, during World War II, the first year or two of the war saw a glut of war-related pictures, until the audiences decided they’d had their fill of them and there was a definitive shift away from the genre.

More recently, reactions to the combination of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon helped to launch the New Hollywood, a movement that began with Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate in 1966 and carried through the ‘70s, as a new generation of filmmakers arrived on the scene and filled theaters with darker, more thoughtful fare, character studies and insightful think pieces that varied from the esoteric — like Five Easy Pieces and Taxi Driver — to the crowd-pleasing — The Godfather movies — to noir and conspiracy thrillers — Chinatown, The Conversation, and The Parallax View — to somewhere in between — Harold and Maude and Shampoo — among many, many others. It was a defining period that has directly affected the business in the decades since, not least of which because of a single film, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, that launched the Blockbuster Era.

Warner Bros.-Seven Arts

While there was no immediate cinematic response to the attacks of 9/11, it did eventually lead to the rise of the tentpole strategy that has carried through to the present. Bigger, louder, more expensive movies that provide even more escapism than the standard fare, bringing more and more people to the movie theaters while also, to some extent, allowing moviegoers to think even less than they already did.

Additionally, and not insignificantly, there was an industry-wide decision to not vilify Muslims. Just as Hollywood has traditionally been liberal in its bent, so has it attempted to be tolerant and not wantonly or recklessly put a specific people in the proverbial crosshairs. Sure, the Soviets were a popular villain throughout the Cold War, but that’s because they were our natural rival. After the Cold War ended, various groups and countries took their turn as villains of the moment, but go back and look at the movies that came out in the final quarter of 2002 (a year after 9/11) and through the ensuing four or five years. Push it further and you’ll see not even the spy movies that could have gone in that direction, your James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises, for instance, chose not to do so.

Now, regardless of your politics, there is no denying that what happened on Tuesday came as a great surprise to a great many people, and reinforced the notion that there is a real divide in this country. Generally speaking (and “general” is the key word here, because in no way am I claiming to speak for everyone who works in the entertainment industry), Hollywood is on one side of that divide and now has to make the same kind of decision it has made in the past, knowing that there is a very large audience out there that might be ideological opposites.

What kind of stories are we going to tell now?

United Artists

The easy answer is that there won’t be any kind of change at all, as the studios continue to crank out their tentpoles and expect audiences to continue to flock to the multiplexes as they have been doing. Except, and this is sort of a big point, they weren’t going to the movies quite so much this year. Box office grosses and ticket sales have both fallen from the year before, and are on pace for about a five percent drop for the calendar year. Already, there was a need to look at what they were doing and how to course correct. Suddenly, there is a seismic event that changes the direction of the country — indeed, conceivably the world — and that has to play into whatever plan comes next.

That leads us to the more complex possibilities of what we have in store. We just saw a national electorate react to their growing fear not by looking to the future, but rather by embracing its past. With that in mind, will Hollywood tell different stories in response? Who are our villains? Will there be a return to the fare of the 1970s? Conspiracy thrillers and noir tales of crime and punishment? Or will there instead be a move toward happier, lighter stories? A sort of Kumbaya holding of hands as filmmakers give us bright, happy tales of triumph and redemption?

I think the one thing we won’t see is inaction. While we have no real idea what is going to happen next on the national stage — and, since that is not remotely in my purview, I won’t bother speculating — we can be sure that Hollywood will make its decisions based as much on financial reasons as any other. That has been proven over and over again through the years, sometimes to the point of over-saturation. Case in point, the rise of the superhero movie, something that even a lover of the genre like me will admit is getting close to a glut.

Marvel Studios

One could argue that the rise of that genre came about in response to 9/11 and the increasing threats to our safety, both internal and external, and I don’t see the current situation being all that different. Regardless of your politics, it is impossible to deny that we are a nation divided. To that end, in my mind, Hollywood has only one possible solution to the problem: Try to bring everyone back together, in one form or another.

That’s why I think we’ll be seeing movies that show how we can be better as a people. How we can rise above the pettiness, bigotry, and trivialities that keep us apart, and that we can get further by working together than by standing alone. It will show up as a theme in action films, adventure movies, sci-fi, comedy and drama, all of it, because this is how we heal. This is how we move forward. This is how we get better, by understanding that we’re not on our own.

People go to the movies to get away from their lives. Or to experience something they haven’t done. Or to have their notions challenged and thoughts provoked. Or simply to be entertained. Ultimately, they want to be reached. They want to be spoken to and made to feel something.

That fact hasn’t changed and it never will. We just have to remember that.

Neil Turitz is a filmmaker and journalist who has spent close to two decades working in and writing about Hollywood. Feel free to send him a tweet at @neilturitz. He’ll more than likely respond.