This Blockbuster Is Coming to a Living Room Near You

THE NEXT GENERATION OF EVENT VIEWING IS LIKELY TO LOOK MORE LIKE ‘GAME OF THRONES’ AND LESS LIKE ‘TENET.’

In the 1970s, movies like “Jaws” and “Star Wars” proved that audiences would turn out in droves for event films. In the decades since, Hollywood has lived and died by the blockbuster, and so has American pop culture.Studios were defined by their blockbusters, giant investments in search of even bigger returns: “Star Wars” (again) and the Marvel Comics superhero films, “Harry Potter” and “The Fast and the Furious.”

You may not have seen them, but you have almost certainly heard of them. Blockbusters were business propositions, but they also created common cultural language. Many were mediocre or worse, but every now and then one was pretty good — and a few were even great. You went to the theater because, every once in a while, one actually lived up to the hype.

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At least, that’s how it worked until 2020 and Covid-19, the first year in decades with no big-screen blockbusters to speak of, or at least none as we’ve long known them.

Yes, “Tenet,” a time-bending tent pole from Christopher Nolan, briefly appeared in theaters, but it flopped domestically. And yes, “Wonder Woman 1984” will finally arrive on Christmas Day. But it will appear on both the big screen and the HBO Max streaming service. And it won’t be the last to do so: Warner Bros., the studio behind the Wonder Woman sequel, recently announced that it would release its entire 2021 slate of movies simultaneously to streaming and theaters — including the blockbusters “Dune” and “The Matrix 4.”

Americans can’t go out to see blockbusters, so blockbusters are coming into their homes, direct from Hollywood to the living room couch. The transition was a long time coming, a slow-moving process with the growth of streaming services that the pandemic supercharged into an overnight revolution. It will transform both how we experience blockbusters and how they are made in a multitude of ways, both good and bad — and even, with the advance of ambitious video games, what they are.

The negative aesthetic consequences will fall hardest on those who work in and around the industry and those who are the most voracious consumers of its wares. The business ramifications are less clear. Studios have relied on blockbusters for revenue as well as downstream businesses like theme parks and merchandising. Warner Bros. reportedly gave its partners — filmmakers, actors, producers, agents — little notice about the shift, and the move has already been cast as a betrayal of both business responsibility and artistic principle.

Mr. Nolan, one of the studio’s most successful directors and perhaps the industry’s foremost advocate of theatrical viewing, complained that “some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”

Theaters, especially, will bear the brunt of the decision’s impact. The major chains were in dicey financial shape even before months of Covid-19 lockdowns decimated domestic box office revenues.

The move by Warner Bros. means that even if anxiety about Covid-19 diminishes, some of the biggest movies of 2021 will no longer be exclusive theatrical engagements. Some viewers who might have ventured out to a multiplex will undoubtedly choose to stay home. And that, in turn, is another reason for those of us who love seeing movies in theaters to worry that when the pandemic ends, the theatrical experience of yesteryear will be gone.

Theaters won’t disappear completely, but they are more likely to become rare first-class events rather than everyday experiences for the masses. To some extent, this was already happening, with comfier seating and more upscale concessions, and ticket prices rising in tandem. In the aftermath of the pandemic, moviegoing, once a Saturday-afternoon time waster and the go-to option for an inexpensive date, could become a comparatively rarefied luxury.

But as theatrical viewing becomes a luxury, movies will become more accessible than ever. The shift to subscription-based home viewing will expand choice and access by reducing the time commitment and cost of watching a movie. Just as Blockbuster Video educated a generation of VHS-obsessed cinephiles in the 1990s, the next generation will grow up with streaming libraries of studio back catalogs.

And as the blockbuster moves from the theater to the couch, it will inevitably reshape itself to the contours of that format. On-demand viewing is likely to result in studios putting greater emphasis on intricately plotted serialized stories that play out over the course of years.

These kinds of stories were almost impossible in the era of network television, when viewers had to catch shows precisely at the moment they aired. But at home, when you can watch at your leisure, filmed narratives can play out over multiple seasons and dozens of hours. Theatrical blockbusters were already sliding in this direction — witness the interconnected, workplace-comedy-like structure of Marvel’s superhero films, or the eight-film sprawl of the “Harry Potter” movies — but there are limits to what can be accomplished in a two- or three-hour time frame, where viewers expect a clear resolution and can’t pause when they to go to the bathroom. Streaming dissolves those limits.

To some extent, the shift is already happening. The Disney+ streaming service recently announced an ambitious new slate of content — 10 new “Star Wars” TV series as well as a new film, and at least another 10 superhero series from Marvel. Arguably, this year’s biggest blockbuster wasn’t a movie at all but a TV show airing on Disney+: “The Mandalorian,” a delightful and occasionally profound adventure series set in American pop culture’s most enduring fictional universe that manages to improve on the recent movies in nearly every possible way. Big-name directors like Ridley Scott and David Fincher have transitioned to streaming services, bringing their grim signature obsessions (despair, robots, serial killers, despair) with them and further blurring the lines between movies and television.

That’s because blockbusters aren’t just big, expensive movies that involve superheroes, magic wands or laser swords: They are also social flash points, touchstones in cultural conversation, common references for how America thinks, perceives and talks about itself. From the original “Star Wars” to “Jurassic Park” to “The Avengers,” each blockbuster is a sign of its times, a shorthand for an era and its obsessions, a way of remembering and reflecting what caught our attention way back when.

The biggest and most successful of these films achieve a virtually unmatched kind of cultural penetration. It can seem as if everyone has seen them, and even those who haven’t have somehow developed an osmotic sense of what they were about. “Game of Thrones” was a couch-era blockbuster — you could see it in your living room. Like all great blockbusters, it gave us more than just something to watch. It gave us something to talk about, a platform for argument and exploration, a mirror onto our own life and politics — and, OK, some pretty incredible twists.

For better and for worse, the next generation of blockbusters is likely to look more like “Game of Thrones” and less like “Tenet.” It will give us sprawling worlds, fictional sandboxes and interwoven stories and systems that demand time and attention to understand, or at least explain.

And the next era of blockbusters is likely to include works that aren’t even, strictly speaking, movies or TV shows, like Cyberpunk 2077, the year’s most anticipated video game, which stars Keanu Reeves. It, too, has been surrounded by great hope and greater hype.

But for those of us still stuck at home, both Cyberpunk 2077 and “Wonder Woman 1984,” in their own disparate ways, offer the same tantalizing promise as all blockbusters: They’re communal experiences, even from the couch. And who knows? They might even live up to their hype.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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