A Life Through Film #000: An Introduction to the Column
New here? Start here!
TL;DR: I’m starting a substack (and calling it a column) where I review every movie to ever hit the top of the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order! I’m doing this as a way to track the arc of American culture over the course of my life by researching and analyzing what made these movies connect so much with audiences.
When I was in school, history was one of my favorite subjects. Keeping track of dates and important laws wasn’t exactly my bag, but learning about real people who existed dozens, hundreds, even thousands of years ago always fascinated me. By considering the events of their lives, I could put myself in the shoes of prominent figures through time and consider how I might have chosen to live in their era.
One facet of history, though, which felt glossed over in your average classroom is what life was like for people who weren’t kings, queens, emperors, or generals. The farmers of medieval Europe, the craftsmen of Rome, your regular folks trying to make it from one day to the next. Some of this is intentional; history is written by the winners, and the powerful win far more than the common man does.
What I yearned to learn most were the intricacies of mass entertainment throughout the ages. Granted, there have only been a few times in history when a sizeable portion of a civilization’s population were able to routinely enjoy leisure time, so often the answer to the question of “What did people do for fun?” is a resounding “They didn’t.”
But still, songs and rhymes persisted through the most dreary stretches in human history. Stories were passed down from generation to generation. We kept ourselves occupied with ephemera, despite the fall of empires and the revolutions of high courts. People entertained, and were entertained in return.
What can we glean about those people from that entertainment? A lot, I hope to prove.
I was lucky enough to be born in a relatively stable time and part of the world (fingers crossed it stays one!), and to an era where more is known about our amusements than ever before. As I continue into my late twenties and stare down the barrel of 30 years of age, I’ve become more reflective not only of my life but of my cultural environment as well. Sometimes it feels like the tastes of today are the same as they were ten years ago until some new pop culture phenomena reveals you might actually be stuck in your own static bubble.
That’s where we come to this column, which I’ll be calling “A Life Through Film.” The goal: review every movie which has ever topped the US Weekend Box Office1 since the day I was born in chronological order. Through this insane task, I am aiming to track both the cultural contexts that allowed for these movies to succeed as well as the arc of American society as reflected through our motion pictures of choice.
The main reason for this exercise is to hold myself to a deadline for writing. If you’ve spent any time with me in person, you know how much I love talking about movies, whether I love them or hate them. Every movie that gets released is a miracle, and I find their making to be fascinating, whether I enjoy the final product or not. This way, I have an avenue to research and explore movies in a way to also connect me to my own history as well.
In each weekly review, I’ll give some background on each film’s production, review it from a modern perspective, and try to ascertain the reason why it struck a chord. Fair warning: there will be more than a few movies which achieve the number one spot for a single weekend where the reason why can be boiled down to “Good Marketing.” I hope you find those reviews as interesting as the big cultural touchpoints.
I’ll be reviewing each movie on a scale from 1 to 5, allowing half ratings like my beloved Letterboxd. My rating logic here will work as it does on that site: a 2.5/5 is a movie I walk away from not feeling much of anything at all. Anything above that is positive to varying levels, and anything below it is negative to varying levels. As a few examples, Whiplash is a 5/5, The Amazing-Spider-Man is a 2.5/5, and Independence Day: Resurgence is a 1/5.
As I write about a film, other movies will come up. If I’ve seen it, I’ll include my ratings for it in a bracket nearby. Example: maybe I’ll randomly bring up Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium [2/5]!
Each column will come with a works cited page which will link to all of my sources. If a movie’s production story sounds interesting to you, I hope you use them as a starting point for your own deep dive!
This Substack is heavily inspired by the work of the brilliant Tom Breihan, especially his Popcorn Champs series for The A.V. Club and his The Number Ones column on Stereogum. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the inspiration of my parents, both brilliant reporters for years. They taught me the crucial importance of research and critical thinking, as well the important lesson that the only films worth watching are 5 star movies and 1 star movies (well, my dad taught me that one, anyway).
Thanks for reading all of this. I hope you enjoy the column and consider subscribing if you haven’t already! The first edition will drop on Friday, June 14th, and will cover a movie that was entirely new to me before watching: To Wong Foo: Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar.
See you there!
-Will
Quick aside about how Box Office totals are calculated at the start of our timeline in 1995: movie theaters report sales data directly to film studios, which then go on to publicize that data. By the time I was born, we were a few years into the practice of all US studios reporting their ticket sales data fully with Entertainment Data, Inc. (EDI), a company that was centered around tracking the financial success of movies. They would be acquired by Nielsen later in that decade but it won’t affect the process of how box office success is measured. The metric of gross sales doesn’t account for profit at all, so a movie can top the charts for a week and still be considered a flop if it doesn’t make a big dent in its production costs. I’m not too interested in gauging the profitability of a movie, but I may bring it up in a general sense if it’s an interesting facet of the story. The means of tracking box office numbers will also change over the course of the column, but I’ll write about it when we get there.