American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder

"AMERICAN BLOCKBUSTER takes up the blockbuster film as a locus for understanding the relationship between popular entertainment and industry. Audiences, critics, and producers may take for granted what constitutes a blockbuster--entertainment, spectacle,technological innovation, high commercial success, and low artistic value. Yet, as Charles Acland demonstrates, the ubiquity of the term belies this genre's cultural importance. Acland shows how the material conditions that produce what we consider a blockbuster are intimately related to commercial, cultural, and technological trends, as movie franchises with extensive lines of branded merchandise have replaced box-office returns as a main revenue model for the film industry. Blockbusters simultaneously propel an integrated global media economy-as they drive the adoption of new viewing technologies into homes and theaters across the world-and celebrate dominant ideologies of technological progress. The book is divided into three parts, the first of whichexamines the role of big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas within the global film industry. Here, Acland shows that blockbuster films, by displaying economic, technological, and aesthetic excesses, have become technological tentpoles that prop up a global narrative of technological wonder. In Part II, Acland traces the history of the blockbuster. Although popular narratives sometimes suggest that the first American blockbuster was the 1975 film Jaws, Acland pinpoints the first usage of the term "blockbuster" to its military origins, referring to huge bombs the Allies employed in the Second World War. He maps how the term migrated to the film industry in the 40s and 50s, when film production companies began to capitalize on the new film form. The blockbusterconsolidated as a recognizable film type in the late 1950s, as producers connected spectacle, investment rationale, and ambiguous cultural value to create a genre Acland argues is characterized by "cosmopolitan artlessness." Part III considers the place of the blockbuster within the current film industry, in a world of huge media conglomerates and multi-media, digital industries. Acland traces James Cameron's career from his 1997 blockbuster Titanic to the 2009 Avatar, showing how each film capitalized on Cameron's persona as a champion of science, an explorer, and a technological wizard to push a narrative of continuous innovation and to drive sales of new home entertainment technologies. AMERICAN BLOCKBUSTER will be of interest to scholars of film studies, media technology, and popular culture"--
Charles R. Acland charts the origins, impact, and dynamics of the blockbuster, showing how it became a complex economic and cultural machine designed to advance popular support for technological advances.
Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades. In American Blockbuster Charles R. Acland charts the origins, impact, and dynamics of this most visible, entertaining, and disparaged cultural form. Acland narrates how blockbusters emerged from Hollywood's turn to a hit-driven focus during the industry's business crisis in the 1950s. Movies became bigger, louder, and more spectacular. They also became prototypes for ideas and commodities associated with the future of technology and culture, accelerating the prominence of technological innovation in modern American life. Acland shows that blockbusters continue to be more than just movies; they are industrial strategies and complex cultural machines designed to normalize the ideologies of our technological age.