“We all felt that way”: the decade Tom Hanks called real Hollywood’s “last great swing”
Objectively, it’s not true that cinema is dying, because there are still great movies everywhere you look. However, what can’t be denied is that the model has changed, potentially irrevocably, and Tom Hanks has a pretty good idea of when it happened.
Feel free to agree with Quentin Tarantino’s opinion that we’re currently in the worst era for cinema that he can remember, but that doesn’t mean he’s right. Filmmakers are still delivering great work on a frequent basis; it’s just that the chasm between the haves and the have-nots continues growing wider.
Obsession and Backrooms are two of the most recent examples of what can happen when an unproven director with minimal resources makes something that seizes the zeitgeist and captures an audience, but those two pictures put together cost over $150 million less to produce than Masters of the Universe, the reboot of a four-decade-old box office bomb that was based on a toy line, which says it all.
Big-budget blockbusters are costing more and more money, and while they still bring in the lion’s share of the ticket sales, the mid-budget, adult-oriented genre films that were commonplace for decades are now being cobbled together on a fraction of what they used to cost, or being made for streaming instead. We’ve been living in the age of IP for a long time, and that won’t be changing anytime soon, if ever.
Even Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which won six Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, cost an estimated $130 million and failed to break even during its theatrical run, and for all of its acclaim and success, it might still make studios think twice about handing a generational auteur the type of budget that’s usually reserved for a comic book adaptation.
Hanks doesn’t really do blockbusters outside of the Da Vinci Code and Toy Story franchises, and with four of his last ten movies bypassing theatres entirely and none of them being what you’d call unqualified hits, he was left to lament a bygone era where movie stars and big-name directors could make expensive films that, even if they weren’t original, would at least be expansive and ambitious.
“The ’90s might have been the last great swing of that, even though the commerce of it certainly drove it,” the two-time Oscar winner mourned. “The money numbers drove everything. The beginning of sequels and franchises and what have you came about during those eras, but I just felt the last movie I made in the 1900s, going into 2000, was Cast Away.”
He described Robert Zemeckis’ survival thriller as “about as daring a swing in every way; creatively, financially, cinematically, that anybody could take,” and he doesn’t think they’d get the same leeway today. “We all felt that,” Hanks added. “‘Hey, we’re getting away with this.'” It was still a money-driven business, but at least the bean-counters were more open to taking risks.
It’s a model that the Forrest Gump headliner admitted, “I don’t think exists in the same way” today, and he’s probably right. There are exceptions, and there always will be, but as far as he’s concerned, the ’90s were the last hurrah for what’s in danger of becoming known as real, classic Hollywood filmmaking.
