The movies returned at something close to full force this year. COVID masks all but vanished from multiplex crowds, and from the audiences at the press screenings I attended (though I kept mine handy). Sundance did cancel its in-person screenings for the second January in a row, thanks to the early omicron surge, but other major film festivals continued on unimpeded. The Oscars made headlines (if scarcely the ones they wanted), as did box office returns. Companies like Netflix, Warner Bros. and Disney all saw their plans for streaming domination hit an iceberg, and reshuffled those plans accordingly.
So why did cinema's apparent resurgence so often feel like a retreat? Maybe it was the sense, even more pronounced than usual, that the audience at large couldn't be bothered to care about movies other than "Top Gun: Maverick," "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" or anything else without a franchise-designating colon in the title. Not that those movies offered nothing to care about; Tom Cruise's irrepressible last-movie-star energy was a boon to the summer movie season, just as Chadwick Boseman's haunting absence was its own poignant reminder of the bonds we forge with actors we love. As even the curiously touching if hugely divisive "Avatar: The Way of Water" bears out, blockbusters haven't crowded out personal filmmaking so much as subsumed it.
That's not a terrible thing. But it'd be a better thing in the hands of an industry, and an audience, that didn't increasingly equate the big screen with outsized spectacle, to the exclusion of all else. The learned viewing habits of the pandemic, which prioritize convenience over curiosity, now seem to suspend themselves only when a big event picture — or a Marvel movie, which at this point can scarcely be considered an event — comes along. Romantic comedies and grown-up dramas have been on the commercial decline for years, but there seemed a particularly harsh finality to the mass-audience rejection of "Bros" and "She Said." Some industry finger-waggers gleefully blamed these flops on Hollywood's allegedly progressive agenda, which doesn't quite explain the success of a racially inclusive, politically conscious thriller like "Nope," one of the few original hits released by a major studio this year. But then, Jordan Peele is in the business of avoiding — and defying — easily digestible narratives, which is very much to his credit.
