10 Ways That Movies Will Change In The 2020s
More resurrected actors...? GREAT!
A lot can change in a decade. Ten years ago Avatar had just become the biggest movie of all time, promising a future where everything was in immersive 3D, young adult fantasies Harry Potter and Twilight were the biggest ongoing franchises, the MCU's shared universe was no more than an Iron Man cameo in an underwhelming Incredible Hulk film, and Netflix was a company that sent you DVDs in the post.
Over the next ten years, then, we're likely to see shifts just as dramatic in our viewing habits and the sort of content that gets released to us. Watching a movie in 2030 won't be the same as doing so in 2020 in ways that we can only partially predict right now.
Some things are fairly certain as we can already see them happening.
Streaming will become an ever more accepted form of producing and distributing film, leading inevitably to the first Netflix Best Picture Oscar winner (probably not The Irishman or Marriage Story this year, but it will happen soon).
Disney will continue to be the dominant media empire for the foreseeable future, possibly buying up even more intellectual properties in the coming years, while the shared universe model of their Marvel universe will continue to be the one that other studios desperately try to emulate.
Those things are fairly certain and widely accepted, but here are ten more ways that the way film is made and viewed might change over the coming ten years.
10. Any Genre As Long As It's Superhero
"Have we reached peak superhero?" was a question that started doing the rounds in hot take thinkpieces around the start of the 2010s. Clearly we hadn't. The same question kept rearing its head every couple of years since and still proved no more true.
2019 saw a superhero movie become the highest grossing film of all time and a supervillain pick up the Golden Globe for Best Actor. So it's probably fair to say that superheroes are here to stay for the time being.
That is not to say that the popularity of superhero movies peaking and then going into decline isn't a distinct possibility at some point in the 2020s. At the very least, Marvel must be aware that they will inevitably produce their first genuine flop sooner or later, especially if people begin to tire of their so far winning formula.
The response to the potential for superhero fatigue, however, is unlikely to be fewer superhero movies, but rather remembering that "superhero" isn't actually a genre.
In 2019, DC showed that the supposedly dying mid-budget movie in relatively old fashioned genres could be revived via superheroes in the form of Joker's 70s-style antihero character piece or Shazam!'s 80s-style family fantasy adventure.
Expect the 2020s to offer more directors the chance at making the genre movie of their choice as long as it's clad in spandex. Meanwhile, studios will take advantage of the flexibility of superhero comics as a source to bring us the likes of Marvel-does-horror in the finally released New Mutants or the reboot of Blade. Disney+'s WandaVision even promises to toy with the concept of superheroes in a domestic sitcom.
Going forward through the decade, then, you might see superheroes in genres from romcoms to gritty crime thrillers and maybe the odd period drama.