Will the spawn of 2004's hit movies be showing over the next couple of summers, asks Donald Clarke
Last week in these pages we mused upon the stuttering, almost certainly temporary, revival that the musical is enjoying following the twin successes of Chicago and Moulin Rouge. In passing we touched upon the brave punts that studios, dazzled by the many ducats generated by Gladiator, were taking on ancient epics.
So what has 2004 spawned? What sort of films will the summer of the Athens Olympics inflict on the summer of the German World Cup? Well, at time of writing, three of the films in the US box-office top 5 are episodes in series which began some time ago and which will continue to run for years to come. Shrek 3, Spider-Man 3 and Whatever the Fourth Harry Potter Book Is Called will come our way, but we could easily have predicted that this time last year.
Mention of Ms Rowling's juvenile wizard reminds us that a new phenomenon, encouraged by the recent Star Wars, Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies, has emerged in which studios commit themselves in advance to telling a story through more than one episode. If this continues we may, in a year or so, be able to map out the summer blockbuster schedule for decades to come. Chris Weitz, the man behind American Pie, of all things, is currently preparing the opening part of his adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
Meanwhile, Andrew Adamson,who directed Shrek, is hard at work on the first of, we assume, seven films based on C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. Sooner or later a studio is going to take a bath on one of these multi-volume projects, but it hasn't happened yet.
Looking elsewhere among this year's box-office champs, what do we find? The Incredibles? A quite brilliant variation on familiar themes. The Day After Tomorrow? A passable return to a genre - the disaster film - that never quite went away. Shark Tale? DreamWorks, whether by coincidence or design, once again unconvincingly apes the superior Pixar. Fahrenheit 9/11? Continues a trend established by the same director's Bowling for Columbine. Troy? See comments about Gladiator above.
Weirdly, the only serious money-maker to map out new territory was Mel Gibson's grim, blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ. Hollywood could respond by putting a series of adaptations of the gospels into production, but it seems unlikely that any director with flair would wish to become involved.
Anyway, it should be clear to even the most knuckle-headed producer that, unlike the harmless biblical epics of the 1950s, The Passion was intended as an act of rebellion against everything latte-guzzling, croissant-scoffing, Vanity Fair-reading Hollywood stands for. Attending a screening of the wretched thing - The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre as one critic brilliantly dubbed it - is, in the US at least, a way of demonstrating at which end of the political divide you squat. A visit to the Church of Saint Mel is also an act of devotion and, considering the dismal nature of the experience, quite possibly a gesture of atonement.
None of this sounds particularly inviting as a foundation on which to base next year's blockbuster season. So, though quite a good year for quality movies, 2004 may not cast much of a shadow.
