No year I've been alive has probably been easier to summarize, as distinct from the years around it, than 2020. There is only one way people will remember this year when they look back on it in the future, which is COVID-19. That's the dominant headline, and most of us will probably also remember that there was a crazy presidential election and terrible racial strife throughout the world. Twenty twenty had it all, and none of it good.
In fact, the only way it could possibly be confused with another year is if 2021 somehow ends up being just as bad or worse, even with the start of the Biden presidency, even with a vaccine expected to make its way around the world in the first few months of the year, even with little violence in the streets greeting Biden's win. Even still, 2020 will hold a special place in our hearts -- or more likely, the pits of our stomachs -- for having been the year when the virus first took hold, and at the same time, we realized something close to half the U.S. population believes that slavery should still be legal. (Sorry, that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe only a third.)
So why, then, am I not just entitling this post "The year of COVID"?
Well I've been writing about COVID all year. Every fourth or fifth post, the whole year, has been a consideration of some change wrought by the pandemic. And frankly, I'm tired of it. On the level of opinion pieces, which blog posts essentially are, it's gotten too obvious by half.
So instead, I'm looking at a more personal change that was also, sort of, a result of COVID, but which I haven't talked about yet. It's a change that was already underway as a result of industry changes, and COVID just multiplied it by ten.
Every year in the northern hemisphere autumn -- which is the southern hemisphere spring -- I start to really focus on collecting up the movies from that release year that I haven't seen yet. It's not just gathering together specific must-see titles, but boosting the sheer quantity of movies I see in a given year, to bring my total into the 140s or 150s by mid-January, when I close off my list and post my year-end rankings.
In the past, it's a time that has been characterized by "good gets." Like "Ooh, this movie I heard about back in March is now available on Netflix." Or, "Ooh, the library has a current year title in stock." Or, "Ooh, let me grasp as large an armful of new releases as I can while this plane is still in the air."
That never happened this year.
October came, November came, December came, and I never once felt that slight thrill tinged with panic, when I suddenly became aware of how little time was left and how many more movies I still needed to see. In short, nothing felt like a "good get" because I didn't care about "getting" anything this year.
As suggested earlier, this can be explained by a number of factors:
1) The pandemic. Obviously. With, I don't know, 50? 60? movies that were scheduled for 2020 not even getting released this year, there were a lot fewer movies that had a "theatrical stamp of approval" that I felt I needed to check off my list as the year was winding down. Getting a theatrical release or not has always been a line of demarcation between must-see movies and those that were barely above straight-to-video level, and I'm talking about the kind of straight-to-video movies that star John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage. I saw what was released on VOD, more or less when it was released, and I didn't have a bunch of titles collected up that I'd missed while they were in theaters, due to having to prioritize what I could see in any given week and what I couldn't.
2) Changes in the way things are being done, even without the pandemic. As more and more Important Movies -- like Mank, I'm Thinking of Ending Things or The Trial of the Chicago 7 -- are planned from the start to debut on Netflix or the other streamers, that's considerably more movies each year that you don't have to choose to see or not see in the theater. I mean, you actually can see some of these in the theater, and I recently bemoaned that I had never yet availed myself of that option. But when you see as many movies as I do, you have to have a system that allows you to maximize your opportunities. And that means streaming when the option exists.
3) Screeners. The other big that happened this year, which had nothing to do with the pandemic, was that I started running ReelGood, the website I had previously only been writing for. As my editor stepped away from those responsibilities, he also stopped writing reviews, which might have happened anyway, but the pandemic made it certain. (He has actually written three reviews for me, but only within the past two months.) Coincidentally, our handover of responsibilities occurred in March, right when everything started shutting down. So I started getting all the emails for screeners from publicists and the like that he used to get, and I saw 15 to 20 movies that way. (Most of them not great, unfortunately.)
4) Priorities. It's hard to obsess about what movies you have or have not seen when people are dying of COVID all over the world, including some people I know. (Including my own mother, but she was already doing very poorly and might have died this year anyway.) I could still throw myself into my usual pastimes -- baseball and movies most passionately -- during the pandemic. But I couldn't get bogged down on which of an increasingly oddball selection of 2020 releases I had not yet seen when there was just so much going on of such greater import. This is the perfect time for that hashtag #firstworldproblems.
So even though I figure to see about my usual number of current year releases -- I won't challenge my record of 151, but will almost certainly be in the 140s -- it was largely out of professional obligation and habit, rather than the intense burning passion that can only come from eccentric obsessiveness.
That does not mean I look back on 2020 as a bad year, film-wise. I think my top ten is going to look just about as credible as it usually does. Or it could just be that I'm subconsciously grading things on a curve and not consciously aware that the overall quality level has gone down. Then again, the various Black Widows and Dunes and Fast and Furious 17s that got postponed aren't usually contenders for my top ten anyway.
What remains to be seen is how much of this will carry over into the new year -- and how much that year will feel like its own year, or just the stinky remnants of this one. As far as I understand it, most if not all of the delayed movies are indeed set to debut in 2021. But we'll have to see, as we get closer to their expected release dates, just how many studios stick to their guns on having theatrical releases, or whether they start going the way of Warner Brothers and selling them off to streamers that they may or may not already own. Plus there's the fact that 2020 is, in a sense, still going on until late February, when the last of the movies eligible for this year's Oscars will be released.
So 2021 figures to have its own unique issues and questions to address about the future of cinema. What I hope is that, a year from now, I'm not reflecting on 2021 as the year we watched most of the cinemas close their doors for good, either due to lingering concerns of contagion from the pandemic, or because even vaccinated audiences have moved on.
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