It's always tempting to view the future of movies through a doomsday filter. As humanity approaches the fulfillment of dystopian science fiction predictions about robots invading the planet, hurtling towards its own self-predicted demise like a moth to a flame, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. However, 2023 also gave us many reasons to be optimistic, especially the historic strikes launched by film industry writers and actors, who refused to allow their work to be devalued in favor of relying on artificial intelligence to cut costs.
In a year that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Walt Disney Company, it was dispiriting to witness how the studio's creativity-suffocating output was a far cry from the innovative magic it generated a century earlier. Last month, Rebecca and I attended the traveling Disney100 show in Chicago, and were impressed by the humble origins of Walt, who had signed a contract in October 1923 to produce a dazzling series of Lewis Carroll-inspired “Alice comedies” that mixed live action. performers with animatronics, a technique later perfected in Disney's greatest film, the 1964 masterpiece Mary Poppins.
It's the kind of unorthodox ingenuity that no computer algorithm can replicate. All this year, I've been heartened to see audiences voting with their tickets by causing Disney blockbusters to underperform, while leading the summer's unexpected double bill of two bold, risk-taking masterpieces — Greta Gerwig's “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan's “Oppenheimer” — to rule the box office. It remains to be seen whether studios will learn the right lessons from this phenomenon. Mattel's proposed list of upcoming doll-related features reeks of disaster, because it wasn't the product that made “Barbie” a hit, but the smart, cinematic mind of Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with partner Noah Baumbach, that did. . The exact treatment many moviegoers need in the post-Roe v. Wade era.
