Although epic war films and big-budget musicals continued to be made in the 1970s and early 1980s, the road shown superspecial and the prestige epic were increasingly displaced by what has come to be known as the New Hollywood blockbuster. As exemplified by Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), New Hollywood block-busters drew their inspiration from the B film, the serial, comic books, and action-adventure pulps rather than from the culturally prestigious traditions of the Hollywood epic. Wide-released rather than road shown, they were designed to appeal to teenagers and families with young children and to garner profits as rapidly as possible. However, productions in the prestige epic tradition such as Dances with Wolves (1990), The English Patient (1996), and Schindler's List were still occasionally made. Some of them received a relatively exclusive "platform" release. And the New Hollywood blockbuster, like the old Hollywood epic, functioned as a special vehicle for spectacle, large-scale stories and new technologies. Indeed, the advent of CGI (computer-generated imagery) seems to have been a major factor in the recent revival of the epic not just in its traditional forms, as exemplified by Gladiator , Troy , King Arthur (2004), and Alexander , but in the guise of the Lord of the Rings trilogy as well. In all these films the themes of heroism, justice and the uses and abuses of power, representational prowess, large-scale spectacle, and large-scale stories and settings remain among the epic's principal ingredients.
SEE ALSO Action and Adventure Films ; Genre ; Historical Films ; Religion
Babington, Bruce, and Peter William Evans. Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.
Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 . New York: Scribner, 1993.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915 . New York: Scribner, 1990.
Cohan, Steve, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema . London: Routledge, 1993.
Elley, Derek. The Epic Film: Myth and History . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Forshey, Gerald E. American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars . London: Praeger, 1992.
Hall, Sheldon. "Tall Revenue Features: The Genealogy of the Modern Blockbuster." In Genre and Contemporary Hollywood , edited by Steve Neale, 11–26. London: British Film Institute, 2002.
King, Geoff. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster . London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.
Sobchack, Vivian. "'Surge and Splendor': A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Epic." Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 24–49. Reprinted in Film Genre Reader III , edited by Brian Keith Grant, 296–323. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Wyke, Maria. Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History . New York: Routledge, 1997.
Steve Neale
Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: