The UK release of Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood comes at a poignant moment. It evokes a summer 50 years ago when studios bankrolled films without superheroes and franchises were exceptional.
In 1969 there was no such thing as “reboot culture”, typified by Disney’s new version of the same studio’s 1994 hit The Lion King. Then, too, there was no The Fast and the Furious franchise, still less a ninth instalment. There was nothing like Toy Story 4 or Spider-Man: Far From Home. And yet this summer these are the leading cinema releases.
Creative verve and business acumen have shifted from Tinseltown to Silicon Valley. While Hollywood squeezes its franchises until their pips squeak, Netflix does business differently, ruthlessly cancelling TV series after two or three seasons, the better to fulfil their remit of maximising subscribers. If – as we are often told – we live in TV’s new golden age, where the big screen has been eclipsed creatively and financially by the small screen, Netflix and Amazon are largely responsible for it.
When Netflix decided to make its own content in 2011, it issued a challenge from which Hollywood has never recovered, provoking a talent drain from southern to northern California. It is striking that The Irishman, the latest movie from America’s greatest living director, Martin Scorsese, premieres on Netflix next month.
It is unfair, though, to damn an industry on one summer’s dismal output. Strikingly, Hollywood last year bucked its slide, if briefly, thanks to high-grossing Hollywood movies including Black Panther (and, admittedly, Avengers: Infinity War – the 19th in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise).
Better films than this summer’s dross will appear in the autumn. They include an adaptation of Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch, with Nicole Kidman; Amy Adams and Julianne Moore in The Woman in the Window, also taken from a novel; and Renée Zellweger in a Judy Garland biopic. But the franchise fixation will continue with Frozen 2, Terminator: Dark Fate, another Star Wars movie, a Charlie’s Angels reboot and the big-screen transfer of the ITV series Downton Abbey. Strikingly, Tarantino, Hollywood’s last auteur, says he’s ready to quit film-making.
His new film is a love letter to another time, when the movie industry battled oblivion. In the late 60s, Doctor Dolittle and Paint Your Wagon were expensive flops, indicative that the golden age of Hollywood was over. But a new wave of movies featuring sex, drugs and violence – Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy and Rosemary’s Baby – subsequently pointed to its creative renewal. Without this new wave, America’s dream factory might not now exist and Tarantino’s career would certainly not have been possible. Whether the dream factory can reinvent itself again is uncertain, but it’s hard to believe that in 50 years’ time anyone will make a love letter to today’s Hollywood.
