James writes about why The Avengers just kind of makes him think about Independence Day.<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019t have much of a concept of the process of creating and marketing a big budget movie (although I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n I have a particularly clear memory of an ominous poster of an alien spacecraft hovering above the White House, hanging on my brother\u2019s bedroom wall. What confused me as a nine year old about this poster is not why I didn\u2019t 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 \u2018hype.\u2019 My brother hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n