10 Reasons Why 2016's Blockbuster Season Sucked
No, not because the Ghostbusters were women.
The dust has officially settled on the 2016 blockbuster season, with Hollywood's big-budget output taking a backseat to award-baiting prestige pictures over the next few months. So what better time to look back on this year's crop of big-budget crowd-pleasers?
Disney relentlessly continued their quest for total and utter world domination, with the year's four highest-grossing movies all coming from the Mouse House, leaving the competition in the dust. And to think, the studio still as Doctor Strange, Moana and Rogue One to come by the end of the year. Good luck, everyone else!
Elsewhere, it has been a frustratingly familiar year for audiences at the multiplex. The annual deluge of sequels, comic book movies, animated features and reboots delivered disappointingly little in the way of surprises, with an alarmingly large number of big-budget releases being greeted by a shrug of the shoulders as opposed to a round of applause.
Fine, let's just say it; this year's blockbuster season was pretty awful. Not the worst ever, but not great by any means. Don't believe me? Then read on and decide for yourself...
10. Studio Interference
1255786The clue is right there in the phrase 'movie business'. As an industry with billions of dollars at stake, Hollywood tends to keep a closer eye on the production of their $100m-plus blockbusters than a micro-budget genre flick that can fly under the radar. While it sounds like a sensible business strategy for a company to follow the development of one of its biggest yearly investments, too much meddling can leave the grubby fingerprints of studio interference all over the final product, often compromising the director's vision.
Enough has been written about the post-production issues on both Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad that there is no need to get into that again here, while Duncan Jones has also been vocal about the role of the studio during production on Warcraft, describing the process as 'death by 1000 cuts'.
With blockbuster movies becoming more and more expensive and thus becoming riskier investments for the studio, the difference between a director working from a studio-mandated brief and filmmaking by committee is becoming less pronounced, which could go some way to explaining just how bland and generic much of this year's big-budget output has been.