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What We Learned from a Decade at the Movies

By Richard Corliss / TIME

1. Superheroes Get Serious
Once upon a time, kiddies, superheroes not only came from comic books, they were comic, intentionally or otherwise — in hackwork Saturday-matinee serials or in the facetious 1960s emanation of Batman. (POW! KRRRACK! Giggle.) But comic books matured into graphic novels; the superhero's world grew darker, his adversaries more frightening, his own soul scarred with psychic wounds. The movie superhero, whether spawned by comics or kid lit, followed that template. Harry Potter, Frodo and Batman as reimagined by Christopher Nolan had missions grand enough and personalities complex enough to carry them through multifilm sagas; there was nothing comic about them. Same with the Marvel heroes, those mutant supercreatures of the Spider-Man and X-Men series.

These characters were at the heart of the decade's killer franchises; worldwide, they accounted for seven of the 10 top-grossing films. (The other three — two installments of Pirates of the Caribbean and the second Shrek cartoon — had a giddier action-comedy tone.) Beyond box-office considerations, the Lord of the Rings and Potter films were damn fine works by any standard, filling the vacuum left by Hollywood's reluctance to make big dramatic films about visionary adventurers. Superhero movies are the epics of our time. Lawrence of Arabia has relocated to Gotham, and his name is Bruce Wayne.

2. Fantasy Is the New Reality
During the Great Depression, Hollywood served up plenty of comedies and musicals about wacky heiresses with too much money but also movies about hard-luck folks whose meager means forced them to take desperate measures. The '70s gave us Jaws and Star Wars but also a slew of gritty dramas about urban society in crisis. (Think Pacino, De Niro.) Come the millennium, Hollywood put its contemporary social conscience in mothballs. Never have a decade's movies been so unconnected to what actually happened. And lots happened, if you think about it. But the industry didn't want to: it took refuge in fantasy, in domestic or apocalyptic dream scenarios, hardly addressing issues of terrorism, war, systemic corruption and a worldwide bank collapse. If movies got serious about a social issue, it was usually at a safe remove. Consider last year's Oscar contenders Milk, Frost/Nixon and Doubt. They dealt with gay rights, political corruption and race relations and pedophilia, but they were set in the '60s and '70s, allowing troubling questions of conscience to be wrapped in nostalgia.

And when a few movies tried to explain the impact of America's wars on its citizens, audiences stayed away. The only film about the Iraq war to find public appeal was Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a must-see polemic during the 2004 presidential campaign. (Milk, Frost/Nixon and Doubt all flopped too.) Then, at the very end of the decade, two movies that connected with modern American reality made some noise: the bombs-in-Baghdad thriller The Hurt Locker and the job-loss comedy-drama Up in the Air. At the moment, they are favorites for the top Oscar in March, but neither so far has exactly wowed a mass audience.

3. We'll Take Bromance
Hollywood had a problem: both its big young audience and its big young stars were male; but to make a romantic comedy, you needed girls, right? Wrong. The trick was to stir up a sense of intimacy between two guys — without, heaven forfend, more than a jokey hint of homosexuality. Enter Judd Apatow, the writer, producer and sometime director who concocted a movie environment that mirrored the tone and makeup of the writing team on a comedy show: raucous, competitive, endearing and virtually all-male. The female characters in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up were incidental to the bonds established by the stars Apatow created: Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and the rest. Bromance became the comedy subgenre, with or without its übermensch. The surprise comedy hit of 2009: the non-Apatow (but very Apatow) The Hangover.

4. Girls Go Too
For something like 60 years, the Hollywood wisdom was that, on a date, the girl picks the movie. That changed in the past decade or so, in part because there were so few films aimed at women, or even couples; the romantic drama, a leading staple of movies, virtually disappeared, even with the evidence that Titanic, the all-time top-grossing picture, got most of its repeat business from females touched by a star-crossed romance. Not until the waning years of the decade did gal-oriented movies break through, and then they were based on phenomenal hits from TV (Sex and the City), the musical stage (Mamma Mia!) or pop lit (The Twilight Saga). One 2009 smash, The Blind Side, found a canny mix of testosterone and estrogen: have a strong woman turn a lost young man into a football star. That concoction gave Sandra Bullock the biggest hit of her career and suggested there was just a little hope for women onscreen — and actresses of a certain age.

5. Foreign Movies: Remember Them?
In 2000-01, a Mandarin-language movie with Asian stars and lots of aerial kung fu became a North American box-office sensation ($128 million, back when that was real money) and a legitimate contender for Oscar glory. But Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's similar martial-arts epic Hero ($53 million) were just glorious flukes. The impact of non–English-language films from outside the U.S. was almost nil in the past decade, even in their home countries; Hollywood product dominated the world. And the all-time top-grossing foreign-language film, with $371 million in the U.S. and Canada and an additional $241 million abroad, was in a dead language, Aramaic: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004). Another fluke: no one else was able to tap the Evangelical market and produce a runaway Christian hit.

6. Billion-Dollar Babies
Before 2000, only one movie, Titanic, had earned more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office. This past decade, that magic mark was crossed by three films, all sequels: the third Lord of the Rings, the second Pirates of the Caribbean and The Dark Knight, second in the latest Batman series. That proved what everyone knew: audiences like familiar properties. Worldwide, of the decade's 20 top-grossing films, only four were not sequels: Finding Nemo and the first installments of the Harry Potter, Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings franchises. In the domestic market, just one film in the top 20 was not part of a franchise: The Passion of the Christ. The astronomical sums the biggest movies earned helped the industry break box-office records. In 2009, for the first time, the annual take at domestic theaters topped $10 billion.

To make more, Hollywood spends more. The average movie budget, not including hefty surcharges for prints and advertising, doubled in 10 years, from $53 million in 1998 to $106 million in 2008. (In the same period, inflation was up 32%, and the average ticket price rose 53%.) Eleven films this decade had budgets of $200 million or more; of movies made before 2000, only Titanic cost that much. If you believe the numbers supplied by studios, the most expensive movie of all time is the 2007 Spider-Man 3, at $258 million, followed by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at $250 million and Avatar at $237 million. These films' makers weren't shot at sunrise; most megapricey movies end up firmly in the black. Of the 11 most expensive pictures, only four — Superman Returns, The Golden Compass, the second Narnia film and Terminator Salvation — failed to earn at least twice their production costs in theatrical revenue. And once in a while, a movie made for peanut shells becomes a big hit. In 2009 it was Paranormal Activity, which was made for $15,000 and has earned, worldwide, nearly $150 million, or about 10,000 times its budget.

Of course, inflation makes a mockery of these ginormous totals. So we end with a spot quiz: In real dollars, how many of the 25 all-time top-grossing movies came out in the past decade? None! The Dark Knight, the decade's top film in real-dollar earnings, is 27th on Box Office Mojo's all-time list. The Potter, Pirate and Shrek films did fine, but they still made less than half a dozen Disney cartoon features. In the real-dollar top 15, the only movie made in the past 25 years is Titanic. And the most expensive movie of all time? The Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, in 1963. As for that year-end $10 billion domestic-box-office record, consider that it came from selling about 1.4 billion tickets. In 1946, when the U.S. population was less than half what it is now, Americans went to the movies 4 billion times.

7. Docufakery
While TV shows like Big Brother and semiscripted comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office were blurring the line between real life and fiction, filmmakers plunged into the fake documentary. (The early movie models: Peter Watkins' 1965 The War Game for drama and Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run for comedy.) Some of this decade's fakeumentaries sprang from TV — Sacha Baron Cohen's characters Borat and Brüno — and others reworked the video-camera premise of 1999's no-budget hit The Blair Witch Project, as in the rampaging-monster thriller Cloverfield. In 2009 the tactic was used to lend naturalism to alien landings (District 9), ghostly emanations (Paranormal Activity and The Fourth Kind) and, scariest of all, the inner workings of the American and British governments (In the Loop). Any second now, the fakeumentary or mock-doc could die from exhaustion or overuse, but at the moment, it's keeping the imperiled indie movement alive.

8. 3-D Is Here to Stay
O.K., we give up. We thought that 3-D movies, a brief fad in the giddy '50s, would come and go just as quickly this time. The goggles and the gimmicks, we sighed. Meanwhile, Hollywood was thinking, The higher ticket prices we can charge! If Robert Zemeckis didn't quite close the 3-D deal with his cartoon-real Disney's A Christmas Carol, then James Cameron did it with the gorgeous alternate world of Avatar, which in its early weeks was earning about 70% of its money from theaters showing it in 3-D. In an era when special visual effects are the highest form of pop-movie art, the movies may as well pop out at you. The possibilities of the format are intoxicating. The problem for Hollywood, though, is the same as in the '50s: a process that offers a unique experience in theaters can't be duplicated in the home market, where the big profits are. Next barrier to hurdle: seeing 3-D movies, with their full impact, in the rec room. And, please, without glasses.

9. A New Generation of "Stars"
Who were the top-billed players in the 20 highest-grossing movies of the decade? Elijah Wood, Daniel Radcliffe, Tobey Maguire, Christian Bale, Shia LaBeouf, Ewan McGregor and the voices of Mike Myers, Ray Romano and Albert Brooks. Also, we grant, Johnny Depp. None of the first nine actors is exactly a box-office magnet, though LaBeouf may get there. And even Depp, People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive for 2009, is identified more with ornery art films than with the Pirates blockbusters. You have to go way down the list of the decade's top hits, to No. 25 to be exact, before you find a movie (The Da Vinci Code) with a traditional star (Tom Hanks). Will Smith's Hancock and I Am Legend are even further down.

This was the decade when big stars got small. Smith aside, no dramatic actor can be assured to lure the masses. George Clooney hasn't had a $100 million movie, except for the Ocean's capers he made with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, since the summer of 2000 (The Perfect Storm). The only reliable names have been in comedies; and this past year, movies with Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Jack Black all flopped, while The Hangover, with no stars, cleaned up. Maybe that film's leading man, Bradley Cooper, is a star in the making? Not if you consider All About Steve, the September romantic comedy that coupled him with Sandra Bullock, her star wattage reignited by The Proposal. Their pairing went quickly into the commode. And though Bullock's next picture, The Blind Side, became a smash, its success had as much to do with the expert plucking of heartstrings than with the name above the title. It's enough to make you wonder why Hollywood still pays actors in the $20 million range when it can spend less than a tenth of that on a lesser-known and still have a hit.

10. The Death of the Indie Drama, or: Why TV Is Better
In a year when Avatar, District 9, Zombieland and Paranormal Activity were plausible candidates for a 10-best list and the small, sensitive dramas that used to get critics' awards and Oscar nominations felt repetitive or sluggish, even a moviegoer who prefers caviar to beef jerky has to admit that action films are smarter than ever while indie films are close to kaput. Looking at a worthy picture like Brothers or The Messenger, I wonder why every political and emotional point has to be hammered home, and at such a poky pace. Can movies show real people getting into interesting trouble, providing nuance and astonishment? Since the Sundance-style drama is basically a TV movie, why can't it be as good as the best TV shows? Instead of, say, Two Lovers, the James Gray movie that finished in the top 10 of the 2009 Village Voice critics' poll, I'll take any episode of Mad Men or Big Love. And I'm not alone; there are many film critics who are, in their spare time, TV appreciators. Serial drama TV gives creators more freedom than films do, and it gets more impressive results. That may be the movie message of this first decade of the 21st century: If you want to see amazing spectacles, go to the multiplex. If you want to see some heightened, smarter, more dangerous version of your actual life, stay home.