Films and Feelings

In the wake of 9/11, America was left limping after a devastating blow to its sense of invincibility and power. Film custodians frequently attribute the modern superhero craze in which ultra-righteous individuals thwart the bad guy to this injured sense of pride from a country desperately trying to tell itself that it's still on top. Because film is a product born from and made for the popular consciousnesses, films are natural reflections of the hopes and anxieties of their day. When traumatic events suddenly bend those hopes and anxieties in very large, very specific ways, film takes on recognizable traits in response. There are books full of examples of themes, genres, and styles of film surfacing or even disappearing in response to societal events.  So what's film going to do with a worldwide pandemic? When friends have brought up this question to me over the last year, they've been mostly wondering if we're going to get more films about disease and lockdowns a la S

  Anyone else remember the year we spent wondering if we would ever again see a movie that wasn't coming out in 3D?      T hat surge in 3D films in the early months of 2010 led to a number of questionable executive decisions. We saw a lot of films envisioned as standard film experiences refitted into the 3D format at the eleventh hour. In the ten years since, 3D stopped being profitable because audiences quickly learned the difference between a film that was designed with the 3D experience in mind and the brazen imitators . Perhaps the most notorious victim of this trend was the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans .        Why am I suddenly so obsessed with the fallout of a film gone from the public consciousness ten years now? Maybe it's me recently finishing the first season of  Blood of Zeus  on Netflix and seeing so clearly what  Clash of the Titans  very nearly was. Maybe it's my  evolving thoughts on the Percy Jackson movies  and the forthcoming Disney+ series inevit