James writes about why The Avengers just kind of makes him think about Independence Day.
Recently, while watching The Avengers get on track to break pretty much every box-office record short of, the idea of the massive summer blockbuster upping the ante is one that has come to be accepted as normal. As someone who contributes to this movie website and its companion podcast, someone who has also taken film classes, and studied the origin and structure of summer blockbuster, it has become clear how they work and why. There was a time, however, when I didn’t understand much at all about how the business worked, and why some movies seemed like more of an event than others. As a child, most of us don’t have much of a concept of the process of creating and marketing a big budget movie (although I’ll be sure to teach my kids about horizontal integration when I buy them a Happy Meal with a toy from Iron Man 7). While thinking about the explosive popcorn cinema we come to expect every year, I realized where my understanding of this varying scale of movies started to develop, and that was with the film Independence Day.
I have a particularly clear memory of an ominous poster of an alien spacecraft hovering above the White House, hanging on my brother’s bedroom wall. What confused me as a nine year old about this poster is not why I didn’t see what appeared to be a particularly newsworthy moment of the White House exploding not being a very big deal to other people, but the fact that my brother had this poster before he had even seen the movie. It was here that I started to develop an understanding of something called ‘hype.’ My brother hadn’t seen this movie, as it had not yet been released, but he proudly displayed its poster anyway. This confused the young version of me, who thought wall space was to be used for posters of things you know you love, like Brett Hull’s glowing endorsement of GT Snow Racers. After talking to my brother, I started to piece together the idea of someone printing this poster for free so my brother would hang it up and he and others could be excited for it and draw more attention to the film. Now we are bombarded by all kinds of ads, promotions and tie-ins before any massive release and even expect it, but I find it interesting to look back at the moment those ad campaigns started making sense to me.
WHO WANTS SOME MEN IN BLACK CHEESECAKE ICE CREAM?!!?
As I learned in the weeks after its release, and was reminded when I rewatched Independence Day recently, the campaign was successful and the movie was a massive hit. At one point it was the second highest grossing movie of all time, and is currently ranked 32nd, with almost all of the movies above it on the list being released afterward. Many of those later movies took a page from Independence Day’s playbook, starting their ad campaigns with a spot during the Super Bowl. The commercial for Independence Day, which aired during Super Bowl XXX (at a cost of $1.3 million to the studio Fox), was credited with much of the film’s massive success, and now most potential blockbusters use that massive platform as a launching point, which is what has lead to the upswing in people at Super Bowl parties who are prone to yelling things like “SHUT UP! The Men in Black III trailer is on!”
While ID4 set a modern precedent for Super Bowl trailers and marketing with abbreviation, there are many things that make it seem like a bit of a relic. Its special effects were one of the major talking points about the movie, as a then-record 3,000-plus special effects shots were used for the film. However, most of the effects were achieved in-camera. Similar to Jurassic Park, which was also looked at as a landmark for computer generated imagery, ID4 still put massive efforts into doing things the analog way.
The production’s model-making department built more than twice as many miniatures for the film than had ever been built for any one film before. Also reminiscent of Jurassic Park, this movie feels like a product of its time if only because it exists within the blissful period where film studios accepted Jeff Goldblum as an action movie star. While Independence Day shares, and pioneered, many features of the modern blockbuster, the things I list above make it feel right at home in the mid-90s. To think back of me as a nine year old beginning to understand how the movie business worked, it reminds me how much one movie poster on the wall can change your perception of things. The more we move on to the world-melting climaxes in movies like The Avengers and Battleship, the further we get from a world where action movies existed in the same version of Earth we live on. Maybe Will Smith should have rewritten his lines and yelled “WELCOME TO MODERN BLOCKBUSTER CULTURE!” before he punched that alien in the face back in 1996. It certainly would have been closer to the truth.
Or perhaps, "I AM SURPRISINGLY UNAFFECTED BY HARRY CONNICK JR'S DEATH."
