The Hollywood of 2025 is obsessed with the 60s in more ways than one. Can it get out of it?
“The end of history” was such a lovely idea, it’s no surprise it’s turned out to be bollocks. Equally inaccurate, it turns out, is the idea the 2020s would turn back the clock to what Agent Smith called “the peak of [our] civilisation”. Though the 30-year nostalgia pendulum duly gave us Stranger Things and legacy sequels to every film from the 1980s over the last decade, the idea that the coming years would reinvigorate our penchant for raves, wraparound shades and world peace has, so far, been for the birds. We’ve not entered our 90s era – we’ve leapfrogged it.
Welcome, then, to the new 60s. Everyone is wearing wide-hemmed trousers; Musk and Bezos are competing to launch themselves into space; and the Doomsday Clock says we’ve never been closer to Armageddon. Oops.
But while the political sphere is apparently taking its inspiration from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hollywood is looking at a decade of cinematic decline with rose-tinted glasses. Black Bag, in cinemas this week, is a classic, star-studded love letter to the themes and fashions of a Cold War thriller. Oscar-nominated A Complete Unknown stuck Timothée Chalamet in jeans and handed him a politically charged guitar. Even what’s likely to become Marvel’s biggest film of 2025 (sorry Thunderbolts*) is turning the clock back to the decade which gave us the lava lamp.
The similarities are far from skin-deep, either. The industry of 60 years ago was a creaking institution floundering against a new entertainment format people could enjoy from their homes. Television ownership soared; cinema attendance fell. Today, streaming, social media and a pandemic have seen the number of tickets sold in the UK plateau in the region of 130-140m per year.
The studio formula of production was showing its age. Ageing studio bosses, desperate to connect to a post-war generation they didn’t understand, pumped cash into alarmingly expensive epics and glossy adaptations of Broadway musicals. Fast forward to 2025, and this week also sees the streaming release of the $320m The Electric State, while the biggest film in the UK last year was Jon M Chu’s Wicked.
More than anything else though, the story of Hollywood in the 1960s was one of change and transition. European influence was relaxing attitudes around film censorship even as studios struggled to turn big budgets into big profits. It was a unique set of circumstances which lead Jack Warner to throw some pocket change at Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, kicking the ‘New Hollywood’ movement off with a bang (or, in the case of the film’s final moments, several). The combination of a lean budget with an artist’s attitude to risk-taking proved irresistible.
Of course, the movie industry of 2025 faces problems once confined to the less-plausible episodes of The Twilight Zone. Late-stage Capitalism has funnelled resources into the paws of people with the artistic appreciation of an Inkjet. A completely broken media ecosystem has made advertising more expensive and much more difficult. There’s a sense that the kind of mass culture made possible by the 20th century may not even be possible by the middle of the 21st. But Hollywood’s rebirth from the ashes of the 60s proves regeneration could still be on the cards. If the industry is going to mine one element of the decade for inspiration, let it be that one.
