Was 2019 ‘The last f*cking year of movies?’

once upon a time in hollywood leonardo dicaprio pointing
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Quentin Tarantino’s been talking about Hollywood again – and he’s not been saying nice things. Was 2019 really the last year of movies?


Quentin Tarantino wasn’t his usual cheery self when he spoke to a crowd at the Sundance Film Festival this week.

Discussing his decision to start work on a new play, rather than film Samuel L Jackson shooting/being shot in the head, he gave a few subtle hints that he might be finding the live experience a touch more rewarding than his old day job.

“Well, what the fuck is a movie now?” he said. “What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television.

“I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns. I mean, it was bad enough in ’97. It was bad enough in 2019, and that was the last fucking year of movies. That was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned, the fact that it’s gotten drastically worse? And that it’s just a show pony exercise… Okay. Theater? You can’t do that. It’s the final frontier.”

As a tirade touching on many of the industry’s biggest talking points, it’s certainly efficient. Throw in a section written by AI and an executive complaining about the 2023 strikes and you can swap that bingo card for a new dishwasher. 2019 – usually the year thrown around in this sort of conversation – must be feeling pretty pleased with itself.

It’s not difficult to see why. In the halcyon days before the film industry (and, probably more importantly, the rest of the world) took a hard right into its ‘apocalyptic’ era, 2019 looks like a shining example of cinema culture at its best. What other year could give us Knives Out and Fast & Furious: Hobbs And Shaw within the space of a few months?

Two types of gold

Looking back on the 92nd Academy Awards ceremony in February 2020, it’s difficult not to get a little misty-eyed. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite winning best picture was, for many, the last good news story we’d hear for some time. The first top prize to go to a film not in the English language had gone to a deliciously entertaining, thematically complex thriller; buoyed by Oscars buzz, the Palme d’Or winner had shot to a global box office cume of $262.1m.

Other winners on the night ranged from blockbuster WWI dramas to adaptations of beloved 19th century classics and a film about a big car race. All went home with one or more well-deserved little statues, and all made back their budgets in the cinema multiple times over. The year’s biggest hits – a record nine films had globally earned more than $1bn – were nowhere to be seen, but that hardly mattered. With good, popular and profitable films like these, who needed Avengers: Endgame to feel relevant?

In the UK, cinema attendance remained just a whisker below the record set the previous year, with 176.1m tickets sold throughout 2019 – the second time that milestone had been reached since 1970. The cinema was still the first and only place to see new releases, and duly the public forked out for the likes of Le Mans ’66 ($226m globally), Knives Out ($313m) and Tarantino’s own Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood ($377m).

Superhero and Disney flicks, meanwhile, made an absolute killing for the studios, and brought more bums on seats than almost ever before. There was room in this cinematic Elysium for drama and spectacle both. Even now, 2019 is used as the benchmark box office target for the industry – ‘Box office remains below 2019’ is a headline we seem likely to see every year for the foreseeable future. Things were looking rosy.

A pandemic, and Best Picture inflation

The years since, in more ways than one, have not looked rosy. The performance of films nominated for Best Picture has changed dramatically, comprehensively tearing out those films performing at the $200m-$400m level. While more truly gargantuan hits than ever have been nominated for the Academy’s biggest prize – Dune, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way Of Water, Barbie and Oppenheimer, to name just a few – the average box office performance of Best Picture nominees has, generously, fallen off a cliff.

chart visualization

In 2021 and 2022, as the world recovered from the pandemic and the Academy lifted its requirement that films undertake a minimum theatrical run to be eligible for a nomination, this was understandable. But as that curve begins to show all the signs of flatlining, it becomes more of a concern. The awards industry’s trend away from the box office top ten (or, I suppose, the reverse) had been ongoing for years by the time 2019 came around. But, looking back, it’s hard not think the movie ecosystem of the pre-Covid years is a hell of a lot healthier looking than the one we’re living through right now.

And while it may seem nonsensical to combine two of the most notoriously changeable metrics of a film’s success (box office and awards voters), at the very least this feels like the industry isn’t working as a cohesive whole anymore. It looks more like, since 2019, Hollywood’s been shorn in two.

Does that make it “the last fucking year of movies”? Maybe not. But it feels like the last fucking year of something, that’s for sure.  

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