Photo: Far Out / Nathan Congleton
Sun 28 Jun 2026 18:45, UK
Objectively, it’s not true that cinema is dying, because there are still great films everywhere you look. However, there’s no denying that the pattern has changed, potentially irrevocably, and Tom Hanks has a pretty good idea of when that happened.
Feel free to agree with Quentin Tarantino’s opinion that we’re currently in the worst era for cinema that he can remember, but that doesn’t mean he’s right. Filmmakers still often produce great work; it’s just that the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen.
Obsession And Utility rooms These are the latest two examples of what can happen when an untested director with minimal resources makes something that captures the zeitgeist and captivates audiences, but these two pictures cost more than $150 million less to produce than Masters of the Universea reboot of a four-decade-old box office bomb based on a toy line, and that’s about it.
Big-budget blockbusters are costing more and more money, and while they still bring in the lion’s share of ticket sales, the mid-budget, adult-oriented genre films that have been commonplace for decades are now being collected for a fraction of what they used to cost, or are being made for streaming instead. We’ve been living in the age of intellectual property for a long time now, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, if ever.
Even Paul Thomas Anderson One battle after anotherwhich won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, cost an estimated $130 million and failed to break even during its theatrical run, and for all its acclaim and success, it may yet make studios think twice about giving generational directors the type of budget typically reserved for comic book adaptations.
Hanks doesn’t actually star in blockbusters outside of Da Vinci codes And Toy Story franchise, and since four of his last ten films completely bypassed theaters and none of them were what could be called unqualified hits, he was left to mourn a bygone era when movie stars and famous directors could make expensive films that, even if they weren’t original, were at least broad and ambitious.
“The ’90s may have been the last big turn in this direction, although commerce certainly helped,” laments the two-time Oscar winner. “Money defined everything. The beginning of sequels and franchises and what happened in those eras, but I just felt like the last movie I made in the 1900s, starting in 2000, was Throw away“
Additional information: Floor in the cutting room
He described Robert Zemeckis’ survival thriller as “about as bold a step in every way, creatively, financially and cinematically, as anyone could take,” and he doesn’t think they’d be given the same leeway today. “We all felt it,” Hanks added. “Hey, we can get away with it.” It was still a money-driven business, but at least the bean counters were more open to risk.
This is the model that Forrest Gump the headliner admitted, “I don’t think the same thing exists” today, and he’s probably right. There are exceptions, and there always will be, but in his opinion, the ’90s were the last hurray for what was in danger of becoming known as true classic Hollywood filmmaking.
ADD AS PREFERRED SOURCE IN GOOGLE 