For much of the past year, movie theatres were closed nationwide; now they’re open again in most states, and films are being shown in them, but studios are keeping their biggest releases on hold for now, and audiences are staying away. The Regal Cinemas chain closed its doors altogether, nationwide (but reopened a handful of theatres in New York State last week); AMC is threatened with bankruptcy. With American movie theatres teetering on the edge of extinction and, in any case, shunted into irrelevance, a strange and tragicomic side effect is afflicting the art of film: the end of buzz. It’s odd to think that it matters. As buzz proliferated in recent decades, it seemed like mere noise—the distracting clamor of advertising and its amplification, publicity and its reprocessing, the substitution of celebrity adulation for critical perspective, the prioritizing of commercial success over artistic achievement. I’ve complained often of such things. But, with the disappearance of massive blockbuster publicity campaigns, the cutting off of star-studded film festivals, and the near-total shutdown of the production of new movies, the absence of buzz is eerie. The movie world now reminds me of New York City in the early days of the pandemic, when the traffic was nearly stilled and the sidewalks nearly empty and one set of footsteps echoed with a disturbing prominence. The world of movies, more than any time in recent memory, is a ghost town.
This current crisis isn’t a crisis of the art of movies—it has been a superb year for new releases, despite, or quite possibly because of, the lack of major studio fare. With the reduced impact of theatrical releases, many movies have been rushed into online distribution—whether on major streaming platforms, “virtual cinemas” on the Web sites of art-house theatres, or on less prominent, independent sites. What’s more, many of these movies came along during the summer, when in ordinary times they’d have been competing with studio behemoths and Hollywood-adjacent releases. Yet, far from benefitting from the otherwise bare cinemascape, these virtual art-house releases have been delivered into what seems like a void.
This muffled attention suggests that prominence isn’t a zero-sum game. Instead, it points to an odd, perhaps dismaying view of the world of movies, and of the connection between the art and the business: the rising tide of publicity and its echoes seems to lift all boats. More than serving only the fortunes of individual films (and sometimes not serving them at all—big movies do flop), the buzz of advertising and advertorials turns out to serve the medium and the art form at large. Without the buzz, it’s not just the media environment that seems quiet, too quiet—it’s the world of movies as well.
What we think of as “buzz” is a historically determined development. Box-office reporting became a major phenomenon only in the nineteen-eighties, and it soon became part of the mainstream press coverage of Hollywood, amplified by the hectic blare of cable news and entertainment TV. (By contrast, in today’s age of streaming, there’s very little reported data regarding viewership and revenue from digital releases—even with supposed successes, such as the “Borat” sequel.) Around the same time, pop-movie culture got another kind of buzz, from within—from the infra-referential cinephilia of a new generation of directors, such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Joe Dante (followed by Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and others). Viewers became accustomed to watching movies that referenced other movies and to reading the inside scoop on the business—and the technique and personalities—involved in making them. This engagement, along with the rise of home video (which took the obsessive viewing of classics and personal favorites out of the cinephilic cloister and made it an ordinary part of daily life), opened new dimensions of experience for audiences, allowing viewers to identify with the behind-the-scenes world of moviemaking along with whatever was taking place onscreen, and fostering a new kind of amped-up movie mania.
Developments of recent decades—the rise of blockbusters, the din of the Internet—have sent this movie madness into warp speed, while also clarifying the odd connection between the business of movies and the heights of the art. Learning the backstory behind franchise plotting, casting, and special effects, gauging fan reaction (even far ahead of time), tracking a film’s level of commercial success and failure: for Hollywood movies, all of this has become as much a part of the movie-viewing experience as the viewing itself. And the corpspeak and engineered hype that goes into the making of movie buzz, impersonal and numbing as it may be, is a large part of what enables this sense of connection to the filmmaking process and to the films themselves.
Just as the rustles and whispers (and popcorn-chomping and soda-slurping) in a movie-theatre audience is the sonic mark of moviegoing, so buzz conjures the rustlings behind the screen—buzz is the sound of people working on movies, whether on the set or the editing suite or the boardroom, in publicity offices and newsrooms and television stations, and even at the keyboards of critics. And although many people in the industry are, despite dire circumstances, devotedly and imaginatively bringing out and calling attention to wonderful new movies—and even online film festivals, special series, and great revivals—the thinning of theatrical releases has made this often heroic activity seem quiet, even confidential. Although viewing movies alone at home, often on a small laptop screen, has its aesthetic benefits (as I wrote earlier this year), its downside goes beyond the lack of revenue from ticket sales in a theatre-dependent industry; in the absence of a scene, of a sense of spectacle, it’s hard to even conceive of what’s happening behind the scenes.
The age of blockbusters has coincided with a new generation of independent filmmakers, many of whom have launched careers more rapidly than their elders. These independents have advanced in the same ecosystem that has brought billions to the studios; many of the same publications and Web sites cover both kinds of movies, amplifying studio films as well as independent ones. I share Martin Scorsese’s dismay at the artistic results of many (or most) of the franchise films that get made and at the anti-creative, corporatized process by which they are created. Yet we’re being reminded, now, that they inhabit the same environment as independent filmmaking. Some of the same people work in both (Adam Driver, for instance, appears in “Star Wars” as well as in Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die”), and the success of franchises effectively launders the money from their corporate overlords into independent filmmaking, allowing actors and crew to take on ambitious low-budget projects that they know won’t lead to enormous paydays.
The sudden primacy of streaming these past months may well have pushed many wonderful movies into wide availability online, movies that might otherwise have remained in extremely limited local theatrical release (or might never have been released theatrically at all). But what does it matter, if they are being released into an ecosystem that is parched? The immediate splash a film makes is not necessarily related to its ultimate place in the annals of the art form: to take just one recent example, Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled,” from 2000 and newly canonized in the Criterion Collection, has a mere fifty-two per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating and was scantly viewed at the time of its release. But the deadening of buzz will reverberate in other ways, with potentially grave consequences. If a film proves a commercial failure (or, for that matter, if the markers of success remain vague or undisclosed), its director, actors, and other participants may face hurdles finding work again when the world of moviemaking comes back to life. I worry that the lack of buzz in movies right now will prove to be the sound of stifled careers.
