The Birth of the Blockbuster

As we saw in the previous chapter, from the 1960s into the early 1970s Hollywood entered an age of young auteurs. The studios’ grip had loosened, and directors found room to pursue their own visions. But freedom had another face. From the side of management, a run of films whose success was hard to predict could shake the very foundations of a company. The adventure of art and the stability of an industry—between these two, Hollywood was searching for an answer.

One of those answers arrived in an unexpected form: from a single shark, and a story set in a distant galaxy. It was an event that would change the very shape of popular cinema.

A Summer That Came from the Deep

In the summer of 1975, a single film surged into America’s movie theaters. It was Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’.

The story portrayed a giant man-eating shark terrorizing a seaside town, and the people who stood against it. The shoot was famously troubled: the mechanical shark would not move as intended, and both budget and schedule are said to have swelled enormously. Yet the finished film pinned audiences to their seats. The terror of a shark that never showed itself, the creeping music, and a threat lurking right beside the everyday world of the sea—people held their breath, and returned to the theater again and again.

What deserves attention is how the film was released. At the time, summer was not regarded as a profitable season for the box office. It was thought of as a period when people went outdoors and drifted away from theaters. Yet the distributor defied that conventional wisdom. In June 1975, ‘Jaws’ opened simultaneously in several hundred theaters across the country, backed by a large television advertising campaign. Until then, major films had typically premiered in a single theater in one city, building their reputation before gradually widening their release. ‘Jaws’ leapt over that procedure, offered up to a broad audience all at once from the very start.

The result was dramatic. Within a short span of its release, ‘Jaws’ rewrote the box-office records that had stood before it. It ultimately became one of the highest-grossing films in history, and it impressed upon the industry, powerfully, that summer could be a major commercial opportunity for cinema.

Still, it would not be accurate to credit this success to ‘Jaws’ alone. For the mold of the summer tentpole to become decisive, the force of one more film, appearing two years later, was needed.

A Shock from a Distant Galaxy

In May 1977, George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’ was released—an adventure spectacle set in distant space.

This film, too, was distinctive in how it appeared. It is said to have opened in a relatively small number of theaters at first, but word of mouth and fervor spread in an instant, and the number of theaters expanded rapidly. Audiences formed long lines, returning to the theater to see the same film many times over. In the end, ‘Star Wars’ recorded box-office takings greater than those of ‘Jaws’, setting the highest record of its day.

But the deepest mark that ‘Star Wars’ left on the film industry to come lay beyond the box office itself. It lay in product development—that is, merchandising.

When he signed his contract, Lucas is said to have secured for himself the rights to make sequels and the rights to tie-in products, in exchange for accepting a reduced portion of his director’s fee. At the time, it was not widely believed that a film’s ancillary products could generate large profits, and this judgment was unusual. Yet when the results came in, ‘Star Wars’ merchandise beginning with toys sold explosively, generating revenue on a scale that could rival the box-office gross of the film itself. Cinema broadened its form—from something that ended within the screen to something that entered people’s daily lives as toys, clothing, and goods of every kind.

The Hit-Film Model as a Formula

‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars’. What these two films demonstrated within a span of two years would soon coalesce into a single formula. It is often called the blockbuster. Originally a word for a powerful bomb, in the world of cinema it came to mean an outsized smash hit.

The elements of that formula can be sorted into several parts. A subject that anyone can readily grasp and find thrilling. A release timed to a commercial opportunity such as summer. A nationwide simultaneous opening, drawing in audiences all at once with a flood of advertising. And, through sequels and tie-in products, the raising of a single film into a mechanism that can earn long and wide. Studios found a path of concentrating resources on a single film that, if it hit, would be hit on an extraordinary scale—and of extending the recovery of that investment beyond the film itself.

That said, it would not be fair to see this change as a one-sided retreat. Neither Spielberg nor Lucas made their films out of commercial calculation alone. They were also creators with a deep love of cinema and a sincere wish to delight their audiences. Being excellent as entertainment and being valuable as art do not necessarily stand in opposition. Though opinions divide on certain points, there is no doubt that their works also pushed forward the expression and technique of cinema.

And so, in the late 1970s, Hollywood steered from the age of the auteur back toward the age of a giant entertainment industry. Audiences the world over sharing the same big film in the same summer—that sight was an achievement cinema had built.

But the world’s cinema was not Hollywood alone. Around the same time—indeed, even earlier—works made on an island country across the sea had been capturing the hearts of people around the world, quietly but surely. Next time, I would like to turn our eyes to the achievement of Japanese cinema, which the world greeted with astonishment.