AMERICA 2000s

The end of the decade was punctuated by James Cameron’s revolutionary and major blockbuster film Avatar (2009), the highest grossing (domestic) film of 2009 – and of the decade. [It became only the fifth film in movie history to exceed $1 billion in worldwide grosses and did so in less than 3 weeks.] The film soon surpassed the highest-grossing (worldwide) film of all-time – Cameron’s own Titanic (1997).

INDUSTRY Evolution in the 2000s:

Ascendency of Online ‘library’ services – Google, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix

Television moved from analog to digital broadcasting – and new flat-screens replaced bulky cathode-ray tubes,

• video rental stores converted to DVDs,
• TiVo digital video recorder (DVR) shipped in early 1999— allowing for ‘time-shifting’ of viewing, and for fast-forwarding through commercials. Now installed in cable or satellite set-top boxes

2003

Social networking website Myspace began.

2005

More and more, consumers were viewing video content from online sources, such as YouTube, and relative newcomers Hulu.com, Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes – all examples of new-media revenue streams

• The action sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), the first feature film to be released on Blu-Ray Disc, a next generation, high-definition optical disc format.
• The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 was introduced to Congress, designed to make technology available (legal filtering devices, such as DVD players provided by the ClearPlay company) to parents that will help shield children from unwanted violence, sex, and profanity in movies. This bill made it legal to alter (or sanitize) a motion picture to edit out audio and video content that may not suit minors (ex. CleanFlicks renting out edited DVDs). As a result, the debate over censorship vs. artistic freedom intensified.
• The Hollywood film industry, film studios, and the Directors Guild say that “private content filtering” — editing out foul language and objectionable scenes — is unabashed censorship.
• There was a significant commercial trend in the film industry to release ‘unrated’ versions of R-rated and PG 13-rated films on DVD and videocassette, often with additional racy content that would have undoubtedly changed the original MPAA ratings of these films.
• After an intense publicity campaign, Brokeback Mountain was regarded as a groundbreaking ‘gay’ love story of two cowboys that was reaching mainstream audiences and changing the way Hollywood would forever portray gay characters – it also raised consciousness about gay rights. Before the Oscar awards, it also had more Best Picture and Director wins than previous Oscar winners Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997) combined. Just to name a few, the heavily favored Brokeback won various awards at the Golden Globes, the British Academy (BAFTA), the Producers, Directors and Screen Actors Guilds, the Writers Guild of America, the NY Film Critic’s Circle, the LA Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, and the Independent Spirit Awards. Its eight Academy Award nominations resulted in three Oscar wins: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Director. In a major upset, it lost the Best Picture race to the racial drama underdog Crash. It was theorized that Academy voters (mostly older and urban-dwelling) were uncomfortable with its gay themes and did not match the film’s demographics (Crash’s multi-charactered story was set in Los Angeles during a 36-hour period).

2006

Wedding Crashers (2005), which earned over $209 million, surpassed There’s Something About Mary (1998) as the top R-rated comedy in two decades. However, 2005 was predominantly characterized by PG-13 films, which placed 14 of their type in the top 25 moneymakers. PG-13 films accounted for 85% of movie theatre attendance in 2005. There were only two G-rated films and three R-rated films in the top 25 of 2005. The number of PG-13 films has outnumbered the number of PG films ever since the mid-1990s. Many of these PG-13 films would have been rated R in as little as five years earlier, due to what has been termed ‘ratings creep.’

The MPAA, formed in 1922, had long warred with filmmakers and studios over the content of films and its voluntary ratings system. Everything came to head with director/producer Kirby Dick’s documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), which demonstrated how difficult it was to learn who served on the MPAA board and how it made ratings decisions. A film’s rating could often seriously impact a film’s success, and often dictated that a filmmaker’s vision had to be edited or revised in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. The MPAA met with independent filmmakers and studio executives at the Sundance Film Festival and discussed changes and revisions that the organization intended to make – for example, make ratings rules and regulations public, describe the standards for each rating and the appeals process, reveal more about the board’s members, and allow a filmmaker to cite scenes in another film when appealing a harsh rating.

WATCH: trailer for This Film is Not Yet Rated

https://youtu.be/UTL3XMDwY0c

This Film is Not Yet Rated trailer – CC

2006

the last major Hollywood motion picture to be released in VHS videotape cassette format was David Cronenberg’s crime-thriller A History of Violence (2005).

2009

For the first time since 2002, domestic movie ticket sales surpassed revenue from the purchase of DVDs. Due to recessionary economy/transition from DVDs to Blu-Ray and to video-on-demand digital downloads through Internet-enabled televisions, were partially accountable for the reversal.