Peter Bart: Desperate Times Often Led To Groundbreaking Movies – Will They Do So Again?

deadline.com:

With festivals beckoning and box office wobbling, this obnoxious question looms ever larger: What’s next? The strikes will end and a new season will begin but where’s that next cycle of movies and streaming content that represent groundbreaking ideas?

Where will they come from? A quick survey of past groundbreakers poses some answers, all of them disturbing. Breakthrough movies of years past have represented the unpredictable product of corporate guile (The Avengers), artistic monomania (Avatar) or accidents of history (Barbie).

Some hits invaded the zeitgeist because they were relentlessly defiant (Midnight Cowboy) or simply inevitable (Harry Potter).

Ironically, some of Hollywood’s most culturally ambitious movies were distributed at moments when films were being largely ignored by the filmgoing public – Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962).