Can you really call Star Wars science fiction, though? It's really a Monomyth-inspired high fantasy, or at least aspires to be. I think if you call Star Wars science fiction, you have to call Lord of the Rings science fiction, too. Both have aliens, mysterious magical forces, play heavily on the concept of fate, etc. The only main difference, in my mind, is the aesthetic.
I didn't. I said it killed science fiction. I can tell you want to have this argument, but you won't have it with me.
Ok, I see. That's a really interesting statement. With the recently successful SciFi movies, what do you define as death of a genre? What specific effect do you feel Star Wars had on science fiction? And do you think the effect is permanent or temporary?
Right. So we'll start with the observation that I'm hardly alone in this opinion. David Brin wrote what is probably the most famous takedown of Star Wars and later expanded it into a 400-page anthology of critical essays. I'm not going to give you 400 pages (I'm not sure why anyone would), but Jayson Bailey over at Flavorwire provides a good overview: Because here's the thing: Science fiction is the genre of "what if." Fables, going back to Aesop, are "what if" stories. The Sci Fi Channel, back before it sucked, even used "what if?" as its tagline. What if a friendly alien came to Earth and was attacked by the Army? What if someone invented a serum that made morons geniuses... but only for a month? What if eugenics and mass media were used to dominate society? The useful thing about "what if" scenarios is you can use them as a funhouse mirror to reflect your culture back at itself, highlighting certain things and diminishing others. Science Fiction is useful as social inquiry. Science fiction is useful in exploring ideas. Science fiction is exploring new worlds and seeking out new civilizations, boldly going where no man has gone before. Jules Verne was out there for the time. HG Wells? Morlocks and Eloi were all about class discussion. The invisible Man is a riff on Faust. Even Jack London's Big Red One is an exploration of class. And this is what sci fi was doing... up until 1977. Ever seen Logan's Run? You should; it's pretty much the quintessential sci fi up to Star Wars. How 'bout The Man Who Fell to Earth? One is disco as fuck but poses the question "What if everyone were killed when they turned 30?" The other is brooding and dark and poses the question "what if an idealistic alien were exposed to our consumer society?" Logan's Run came out 11 months before Star Wars; Man who Fell to Earth was 14. But after Star Wars... Whelp, Close Encounters came out about five months after. It basically established the Spielbergian paradigm of "fuzzy special effects that love us." But there's no "what if?" to it. Alien and Black Hole managed to get out; they were shooting while Star Wars was in wide release. But after that, sci fi was "B movies" and "gigantic blockbusters by George Lucas." A lot of those b movies were ripoffs of gigantic blockbusters by George Lucas. There was no point in making something unless it was a cheap-ass movie or a summer blockbuster and there are only so many summer blockbusters. I've been in these meetings, with these producers, having these discussions, and ten years ago, the rule of thumb was that sci fi needed to be $2m or less or $100m or more. You'll notice that those two budgets basically eliminate anything of quality. Hollywood learned that you could take a samurai film and put lasers in it and sell it for a billion dollars, so that's all they did from that point forth. It might be worth it to you, at some point, to check out Harlan Ellison's I, Robot screenplay. It was a big budget adaptation of the book, by Asimov and Ellison, that died an ignoble death as soon as it became clear that science fiction was gonna be 100% a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And all those "what if" questions were now going to be "who cares." We got our I, Robot eventually. But it was a spec script by Jeff Vintar called "Hardwired" that had the three laws of robotics welded onto it. Our tastes for "science fiction", you see, have been so shaped by Star Wars that nobody figured the actual I, Robot could make any money. After all, they made Patch Adams into a robot and it lost a shit-ton of money.But that’s the trouble with mainstream science fiction filmmaking these days: there’s no expectation that an audience is capable of putting things together or waiting for a payoff, and there certainly aren’t many filmmakers or executives willing to take the risk. The problem, it seems, is the desire of those who greenlight movies to lump science fiction in with action, and it’s easy to guess why: Star Wars. Before 1977, there were occasional crossovers, but for the most part, science fiction was a genre purely unto itself, concerned with alien invasions and post-apocalyptic scenarios and subtextual parallels. After Lucas mashed up spaceships and swashbucklers, sci-fi was never the same.
This is a compelling argument for how Star Wars damaged science fiction as a movie genre, but not for how Star Wars killed it. What about all the science fiction movies that have come out since then that are not B-movies or summer blockbusters? Children of Men, Her, Blade Runner, District 9, Moon, Contact, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Minority Report, Super 8, The Iron Giant, etc. Some of those movies are really high quality, and they all ask "what if", in my opinion. So I agree that making a science fiction film is an uphill battle, but clearly there is still interest from both audiences and filmmakers.
You probably don't even realize how annoying you're being. I doubt you've internalized that you started this discussion by misquoting me, continued it by asking a broad and internet-wide question, and now sit here triumphant by arguing "you're wrong because semantics." Here's the reality - I made a flippant comment that you misunderstood. I corrected you and humored you. And now, after that tome above, you're here misunderstanding "b-movies" and "blockbusters." I have demonstrably more knowledge about this subject than you do. I have demonstrated my willingness to share it. But my patience with your conversational style is at an end. You list ten films. Eight of them were commercial failures. One of them was the most expensive movie the year it was made. Two of them bankrupted studios. And I could write a couple paragraphs about each, but I'm not going to, because you're making this unpleasant and insulting. Deliberately or not.
I didn't mean to be antagonistic. I'm interested in what you say because you seem knowledgeable on the subject. I acknowledge that I started the discussion by misquoting you, and I apologize for that. I genuinely misunderstood you. When I asked my broad question, the kind of long and interesting response you responded with is actually what I was hoping for, so thanks for the information. You're annoyed that I had a critical response to your long answer, probably stemming from my own ignorance. I don't really see what's wrong with that one. Maybe I'm coming across as less casual than I mean to, because I didn't mean to say anything I wouldn't have said in a casual conversation with someone in real life who was passionate about some subject. I probably should have stressed my own ignorance more in my response, because I meant my response as a question: "How can I reconcile your assertion with X?" Who knows, maybe you would find me annoying in real life. Anyway, I was not triumphant, and I was not trying to prove you wrong. I was curious. Clearly I'm misunderstanding what a B-movie and a blockbuster are, and I must have also misunderstood what constitutes a commercial failure in film. Looking at Wikipedia, several of the movies made a box office revenue of more than twice their budget (Her, District 9, Eternal Sunshine, Minority Report, Super 8), and three more were profitable. I naively assumed this would constitute a commercial success, but looking at profits of the IMDB top-rated movies, I see that most have grossed much higher than a multiple of 2. So that is definitely eye opening to me. I'd previously assumed that most of the movies I listed were a success, since they were popular and made money. I'm surrounded by nerds 99% of the time in my life, and among the ones who like movies, they've always considered movies like Children of Men and Blade Runner as if they were equally as successful as movies like The Dark Knight and Pulp Fiction. It makes me a bit sad that this turns out not to be true. How do you think the movie landscape would look different if Star Wars never existed (assuming we still kept all of its special effects and technical production advances)? More SciFi dramas like The Man From Earth? That would be nice...
Okay, I appreciate that. Thanks. So here's a fundamental fact about movies: "making money" does not mean making money. I recognize how insane that sounds but the perception of the opening weekend pretty much dominates Hollywood now. It does this, in no small part, because of the invention of the blockbuster, the first two examples of which are Star Wars and Jaws. Wanna see an amazing graphic? Check this sucka out. It's unfortunate that it only goes back to '86 and forward only to 2008, but it demonstrates the point better than anything else - sweep the timeline slowly from 1986 to 2008 and watch the peaks build. Summer blockbusters have a few things in common. Look at anything brown on that NYT graph and see if you can spot the trend. While not every film that made a gajillion dollars is chockablock with action and special effects, it's certainly the most prevalent common thread. And here's another problem with sci fi - it's probably going to have some special effects in it no matter what. Might as well be explosions. And it's clear you haven't really considered the expense of big movies. Star Wars was a $7m movie, the most expensive production of 1976. By way of contrast, Blade Runner was a $12m movie, the most expensive production of 1982... and it got dusted by ET. And what environment did it get dusted in? That was an era when you could see - Blade Runner - Wrath of Khan - The Road Warrior - Poltergeist - The Thing - and Conan All at the theater, all the same weekend. Empire had come out, Jedi was still on the horizon. It hadn't gotten truly dire yet. But compare and contrast: Lucas made bank with Star Wars, Empire and Jedi. Ridley Scott lost money on Blade Runner and more on Legend and then had to go hide in the Black Rain/Thelma & Louise price range as penance. He didn't make another sci fi until Prometheus. James Cameron made a mint on Terminator, another mint on Aliens, but when The Abyss tanked he had to fight tooth and claw for the money for Terminator II. And that's where we've been - Chris Nolan, hot off the heels of f'n Batman, had to underwrite most of Inception on his own dime. Nobody wanted to fund it 'cuz there weren't enough explosions. Star Wars created, then cemented the idea that successful science fiction movies are the ones with explosions, lasers, and jive-talkin' robots. You point to Super 8, JJ Abrams out slummin' because he wanted to work on something small while sucking down both Star Trek and Star Wars. That's like Spielberg making Schindler's List on the side while directing Jurassic Park. Certainly, there are outliers, and certainly there have been decent sci fi movies made in the past 30 years... but they have been oh so much harder to make because they've been cultivated in the shadow of a gigantic, bombastic space opera. I don't know how old you are, but there were a number of published sighs of relief after Revenge of the Sith that now, oh holy shit, we might actually be able to return to science fiction after more than 30 years. All of the films you list above - except one - happened between Revenge of the Sith and Force Awakens. How do I think things would be different? Up above I linked to the David Brin essay "Star Wars Despots. Vs. Star Trek Populists." I suggest you read it. The fact of the matter is, a culture of ideas was forced to defend itself against a culture of feudalist determinism. Prior to star wars, the "what if?" was about our society and culture. After star wars, the "what if" was about gods and monsters. Take Star Trek the Motion Picture. Recognize that it was directed by Robert Wise, with special effects by Douglas Trumbull and visual design by Syd Mead. Now imagine this hadn't happened to it: $46m. In 1979. On a TV pilot. Because " science fiction films other than Star Wars could do well at the box office". Now recognize that in this, our modern era, you can't have a Star Trek film without having Sulu fence someone on an antigravity frisbee as it re-enters the atmosphere. Compare and contrast: Rollerball (1975), about a sports conspiracy designed to keep the people placid and unaware: vs Rollerball (2002), about chase scenes. That's how I think it'd be different. I think it'd matter.When the original television series was cancelled in 1969, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry lobbied Paramount to continue the franchise through a film. The success of the series in syndication convinced the studio to begin work on a feature film in 1975. A series of writers attempted to craft a suitably epic script, but the attempts did not satisfy Paramount, so the studio scrapped the project in 1977. Paramount instead planned on returning the franchise to its roots with a new television series, Star Trek: Phase II. The box office success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind convinced Paramount that science fiction films other than Star Wars could do well at the box office, so the studio cancelled production of Phase II and resumed its attempts at making a Star Trek film.