#ANACONDA FILMLERI MOVIE#

By 2005, Tyler Perry’s melodramas were (for example) overperforming in theaters and getting stacked casts (Angela Bassett, Michael Ealy, Anika Noni Rose, Idris Elba, etc.) partially because they were the only game in town. The pursuit of the next Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings, along with the mid-2000s decline in DVD sales, meant less money available for the kind of $35-$55 million studio programmer that could afford to be explicitly inclusive and/or LGBTQIA-friendly. That became a metaphor for the industry.Īs Hollywood’s global aspirations got bigger and the budgets got larger, the conventional wisdom about women and minorities harming overseas box office potential became an overwhelming consideration. By 2003, Michael Clarke Duncan was considered lucky to play a race-swapped Kingpin in Ben Affleck’s Daredevil. In 1998, Antonio Banderas could be Zorro and Wesley Snipes could be Blade.

#ANACONDA FILMLERI MOVIE#

Black Panther may have been heralded as an overdue example of a big-budget comic book superhero movie in early 2018, but that was partially because the sub-genre essentially got gentrified by heroic white dudes (Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, Thomas Jane’s Punisher, Christian Bale’s Batman, Eric Bana’s Hulk, etc.) right when Hollywood started taking it seriously. It also, sadly, marked the near-total end of “not a white guy” flicks like Mask of Zorro, Spawn or Black Mask. Hollywood’s pursuit of the next global blockbuster franchise swallowed up everything else.Īlso, Spider-Man affirmed the comic book superhero movie as a potential A-level tentpole, after 13 years of post- Batman false starts. Never mind that Rush Hour 2 had earned $344 million worldwide and The Fast & The Furious had earned $207 million (on a $40 million budget) in the summer of 2001, both partially because of their comparative inclusivity.Ĭolin Farrell, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck (Photo by Gregg DeGuire/WireImage) WireImage Spider-Man opened in May of 2002 and grossed $821 million worldwide. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone earned $975 million worldwide in late 2001, behind only Titanic ($1.8 billion) while The Fellowship of the Ring earned $897 million a month later. However, their global reception as “the good-versus-evil epic adventure movies we need right now” were viewed under the prism of righteous heroism struggling against absolute evil and traumatized victims doing their best in terrifying times. Quite obviously, those three franchise-starters were in production well before the 9/11 attacks, and all three would have been successes even in comparative peacetime. Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Spider-Man were coming to save us. By coincidence, design or maybe a little of both, the 9/11 attacks (and the outcry over the Columbine school shooting in April of 1999) would be followed by a slew of big-budget, franchise-friendly, globally-targeted “white guy discovers he’s the special” action fantasies. Concurrently, the artistic/commercial success of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in the summer of 1998 and the commercial success of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor in the summer of 2001 reawakened a generational nostalgia for the pre-Vietnam American military righteousness which was exploited by those wishing to wage war after the terrorist attacks. Part of America’s reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in September of 2001 was an attempted reversion to conventional gender roles and an alleged desire for conventional forms of escapism. Both films also represent the kind of small-scale, original and inclusive (the former starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube with the latter starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker) studio programmers that might well have come to dominate the industry had Hollywood not been sucked into the post-9/11 global blockbuster mentality. Both films were R-rated in spirit but constructed just so to sneak by with a PG-13, which in the late 1990’s made them unique and made kids feel like they were snacking on forbidden fruit.

In retrospect, Anaconda, along with Rush Hour in late 1998, invented the so-called R-13. This past Monday was the 25th anniversary of Anaconda, which means today is the 25th anniversary of the day we found out (in the pre-daily box office reporting era) that the $45 million snake thriller had topped the domestic box office with $16.6 million. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images) Getty Images Jennifer Lopez reaching for Ice Cube as he's attacked in scene from the film 'Anaconda', 1997.

Anaconda filmleri