The “beautiful” movie Steven Spielberg called the last of its kind: “Things are going to change”
Having been at the forefront of several seismic shifts in the cinematic landscape, few filmmakers have a better handle on predicting where the industry is heading than Steven Spielberg, and he wasn’t too far off when he suggested that one movie was among the last of a dying breed.
He single-handedly ushered in the age of the blockbuster when Jaws became the highest-grossing release of all time in 1975, with Hollywood realising that its biggest films could make more money if they debuted in as many theatres as possible at the same time, backed by a massive marketing blitz.
A decade and a half later, he picked up the baton from James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day and laid down a new marker for visual effects when Jurassic Park left jaws on the floor in cinemas around the world, and that’s without mentioning how he was hovering over George Lucas’ shoulder when he’d changed the game with the original Star Wars in 1977.
Spielberg had also produced or executive produced Back to the Future, Young Sherlock Holmes, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Casper, all of which either pioneered or innovated techniques that would quickly become commonplace, and continue dragging the moving image into new forms of modernity.
On the surface, an old-fashioned blockbuster wouldn’t stand out as something that would draw a definitive line under an entire era, but the three-time Academy Award winner was nonetheless fairly prophetic when he suggested that Antonio Banderas enjoy making movies like The Mask of Zorro while he still could.
“Steven Spielberg said to me once when we were shooting, ‘This is probably going to be one of the last westerns shot in the way the westerns were shot in the old days, with real scenes with real horses, where everything is real, real sword fighting, no CGI,'” the actor recalled to Yahoo. “Everything was practical.”
It was already on the way out by the time the swashbuckling adventure started shooting in January 1997, and Spielberg wanted Banderas to know that it wouldn’t be this way for long. “He said, ‘But things are going to change, they’re going to change, and they’re going to change fast, and so you should be proud of this movie.'”
The Mask of Zorro earned a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office and still holds up today, and to underline Spielberg’s point that Banderas was staring the end of an era in the face, when the sequel arrived seven years later, it significantly upped the CGI ante and was a pale shadow of its predecessor as a result, with the leading man accurately reflecting on the original as “a very beautiful adventure movie with a lot of ingredients that made it shine in a very beautiful way.”
To add the exclamation point, what was the last big-budget western backed by a major studio that aimed for all-conquering box office glory? Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger, which cost upwards of $250 million, was lost in a sea of pixelated nothingness and lost enough money to rank as one of the most infamous flops in Hollywood history. They don’t make ’em like they used to, and Spielberg saw it coming.
