Tuesday, June 11, 2013

The box office legacy of Jurassic Park, 20 years later...

It would be all too easy to detail the ways in which Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park was a game changer in the realm of summer blockbusters and major-studio releases in general.  Its June 1993 release shattered a number of box office records and kicked off the glorious second act of Steven Spielberg's illustrious career.  But the story is more complicated than that.  Jurassic Park was a movie precisely of its time.  In some ways it did lead the charge in terms of how films were made and released.  In other ways, quite frankly, it was one of the last of its kind.  Jurassic Park is perhaps a defining example of the perfect combination of newfangled and old-school blockbuster film-making.  It represented both a preview of what was to come and the last gasp of traditional mainstream movie-making in one glorious concoction.