When Bruce Willis predicted cinema’s future six years before it happened: “There’s gonna be hundreds of them”
Clairvoyancy wasn’t known as one of the many talents Bruce Willis utilised to become one of the biggest movie stars of his generation, but based on his almost unnervingly accurate prediction for where cinema was heading, it might well have been.
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe he knew Die Hard was going to be the springboard towards A-list status. After all, almost every high-profile leading man in Hollywood had turned down the leading role, and audiences were so unconvinced by the guy from Moonlighting playing an action hero that his presence in the marketing was minimised because audiences couldn’t stop laughing.
Again, perhaps his sixth sense (pun obviously intended) was behind his starring role in M Night Shyamalan’s smash hit of the same name, which Willis only headlined because Disney had him backed into a corner after he sabotaged Broadway Brawler out of existence and was left at the mercy of the Mouse House, lest he face a multi-million dollar lawsuit for torpedoing an entire film.
While that’s connecting dots that aren’t necessarily there, the evidence is clear that the actor had a knack for being ahead of the curve. Not only did he take a significant pay cut to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction because he knew it would be special, a move that ensured the crime thriller was profitable before a single frame had been shot, but he guessed exactly what the industry’s next big craze would be.
In a behind-the-scenes video filmed on the set of Tarantino’s masterpiece, the director finds Willis so enamoured by the handheld camcorder that he took a wild swing that ultimately became a prophecy. “Some day in the next five years,” he said. “Someone’s gonna take one of these and make a feature film with it.”
That might scan as broad, but Willis drilled down into specifics and showed himself to be a 1993 version of Nostradamus: “Some kid is gonna make this killer, drop-dead, poorly-lit video movie that is gonna be the hippest fucking thing,” he declared. “And then there’s gonna be hundreds of them everywhere. And they’re gonna cost about $60,000.”
Six years after sharing his thoughts, what became the most profitable release in cinema history? Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project. Shot entirely on handheld camcorders at a cost of around $60,000, Willis had hit the nail squarely on the head, and that was just the beginning.
Following the unprecedented success of Blair Witch, found footage became the hottest fad in town. It wasn’t just amateur filmmakers hoping to capitalise on the game-changing horror flick either, but studios intentionally opting for a lo-fi aesthetic to launch a new subgenre that treated fictional features as being cobbled together from images captured by an unfortunate band of souls who met their grisly demise.
Within years, found footage had oversaturated the market, with Willis once again bang on the money when he predicted there was “gonna be hundreds of them everywhere.” It was only a behind-the-scenes featurette, but it became a prognostication of everything that was to come at the turn of the millennium.
