 |
| Loki fan art by Alice Rovai |
The death of cinema started in 1999. Ironically, this was also one of the very best years for film, but the seeds that led to our eventual destruction were planted on May 19 of that year.
Picture it! You could go to an airport and keep your shoes on the whole time. The Sopranos had just started airing. The Columbine school shooting was in the news. Quietly, the code for Napster is launched. John F. Kennedy Jr. dies and Slobodan Milosevic is indicted. A Big Mac costs $2.59. The Twin Towers stand, Bill Clinton is president, and I am fifteen years old.
It is one of greatest years ever for cinema. Banger after banger is making its way onto the silver screen: the obvious box-office hits like Runaway Bride and The Sixth Sense. The future cult classics like Office Space, Election and The Big Lebowski. The bumper crop of teen flicks, which includes Cruel Intentions and Varsity Blues, Jawbreaker and 10 Things I Hate About You, Idle Hands and American Pie. You could see weird-ish movies like Run Lola Run or Dogma, or actually experimental stuff like Being John Malkovitch or The Blair Witch Project. Hell, you want kids movies? Have Toy Story 2 or The Iron Giant.
That list seems exhaustive, but it's not—we also have The Matrix and Fight Club and Galaxy Quest and Three Kings, all from 1999. It was a gangbusters year, and it absolutely spoiled me for movies, possibly for the rest of my life. These movies felt like art as much as they felt like business ventures. They played with form, genre, and narrative. The comedies were actually funny; the dramas were actually dramatic. There were also a ton of movies that were designed explicitly for teens, which I was. I admit that the larger cultural legacy of these movies is not uncomplicated, with The Matrix and Fight Club being especially warped. But across the board, movies often felt loose, fun, and weird. Cinemaphile rejoice.
But we can't ignore the tauntaun in the room. 1999 was also the year that Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace was released. This was the biggest hit of the year, hands down. Made for $113M, it eventually brought in over a billion in box office revenue, relaunched the Star Wars franchise and ultimately brought "nerd culture" into the mainstream. Is The Phantom Menace a good movie? Meh....it's mid. But the hype, the dazzle, the merchandising tie-ins, the promised return to a nostalgia force of nature—that was show biz.
Here's my real beef: in 1999, there were three movies in the top-grossing ten that had sprung from previous properties (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, The Phantom Menace, and Toy Story 2). In 2025, nine out of the ten top-grossing films were sequels, remakes, live-action adaptations, or based on video games. The lone exception was Sinners, which is probably art (it did win the Oscar for Best Picture), but seems scary (vampires!). Cruising down the list of other 2025 releases, I am baffled: I know so few of them! Did they play in theatres? Theatres near me? Were they streaming-first? There so many black, dark, and horror comedies! Am I simply old and out of touch? Or are we in a cautious new world?
My working theory, informed by plenty of entertainment-media articles over the past 20 years, is that film producers are conservative by nature. Nobody wants to sink millions of dollars into movies that will flop; better to invest in proven concepts, familiar characters, and narratives that can be repackaged. Hell, they've been making James Bond movies since 1962, and nobody is mad about that. Familiar equals safe, and safe equals audiences.
Which brings me to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The MCU is the popcorn kernel in my teeth, the spilled soda on my shoes, the seven-dollar chocolate bar at concession. It is, for me, the most irritating thing about modern movies.
They have been making Marvel Cinematic Universe movies basically nonstop since 2008, when I saw Iron Man at the Owen Sound Twin Cinemas Drive-In. I was on a date, and the movie turned out to be surprisingly boring. Robert Downey Jr.'s version of Tony Stark leaned heavily on his sarcastic charm, and the film had an awful lot of set pieces in the beige-brown Afghani desert, battles that seemed to be just for their own sake, and relationships of every type—friendships, romantic blossoms and colleagues—that felt hollow.
Of course, what I think about Iron Man matters not a whit, because that movie was the first in the highest-grossing film franchise of all time. The MCU includes thirty-seven theatrical releases (so far), as well as an evolving number of television shows, specials, stage productions, and theme parks. The MCU is a multi-phase, multi-pronged narrative that encompasses everything from mixed tapes to paranoid delusions. Is it art? Well, that's sort of beside the point, maybe. It is total, it is global, and it is here for us all. The MCU has brought in more than $35 billion-with-a-b in revenue for its creators; that puts it slightly above Lebanon, but behind Bosnia and Herzegovina, in terms of GDP.
I could say a lot about the MCU, but my basic thesis is: I don't think these movies are good for us. They are flash-bang entertainment, in which personal relationships are flattened to serve the next explosion, the default human is a chiselled white man, and the franchise has few discernible themes; those that do exist tend to be vague through-lines like "duty" or "protection." When the films vary even slightly from their formula—say, by centring Black characters, or including retro soundtracks—the sense of audience relief is palpable. The stories are both too big (37 movies is a lot!) and too small (what is the central narrative of the MCU, and is it more than "I hope aliens don't blow up the planet!"?). Their primary point is to make money. They don't comment on the modern condition, and they don't expand our view of humanity. Are they fun? Sometimes. Are they cinema? Be so for real.
We would not have the MCU if Star Wars hadn't functioned as proof-of-concept. The idea that people will go to the movies to see the next instalment of whatever has proven true, and extremely lucrative. No matter, then, that the story of any single MCU movie is forgettable, as long as we're converging ever onward towards the next big Avengers movie, or the next phase, or the next generation. The MCU is a cinematic black hole: it sucks audiences and money and industry expectations in, and gives back fleeting pleasure...and not much else. Say what you want about Star Wars—and fans have said plenty—but those films do have overall meaningful themes of chosen and blood-tie families, destiny and fate, good and evil. It's probably not art, but it's also not craven.
I could just say "They don't make 'em like they used to!" and leave it at that. But it's been such a long time since I've seen like what used to be called "a film," which is wild, because I came of age in an era where they made almost nothing but.
And maybe things are quietly starting to change? Are we starting to droop from the decades-long MCU-ish onslaught? The biggish prestige movies this year, like The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, Klara and the Sun, and Project Hail Mary, are drawing from classic and contemporary literature; Backrooms is a horror movie that seeped out of the terminally online's obsession with liminal spaces; movies like Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Love Boosters are re-imaginings of classic genre movies (slasher and heist, respectively), but run through loose and loopy post-modern filters. Meanwhile, franchise movies like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Supergirl are underperforming, and remakes like Moana are being panned by critics and ignored by audiences.
The MCU currently makes too much money to pump the brakes, but even it is starting to recognize its own oversaturation. There will probably always be an audience for superhero movies, but I look forward to the day when things are less constricted—when filmmakers get weird, once again, and audiences find them, once again. Each generation deserves its own 1999. I hope we all get one.
