A
work of entertainment that is highly
popular and financially successful. This trope is mainly applied to feature films, but it can also
work for other media.
Blockbuster movies can be traced back to 1975, when Universal Pictures released the big-budget film Jaws. You know the one, where the giant
shark eats innocent people at a summer resort town and they have to hunt it. But nevertheless it was a ginormous success and launched Steven Spielberg into the mainstream.
Two years later George Lucas unveiled one of his best-known creations:
Star Wars. Released by 20th Century
Fox, the space opera had an equally huge budget, and guess what happened next? That's right, the film became a success and spawned a franchise that is still going strong to this day.
Soon all the major studios would have a go at the blockbuster: Enormous budgets, huge amounts of
hype and lots of hope that it will smash box office records. Examples of this then-new trend included Alien(1979), E.T.(1982), Ghostbusters(1984), Top
Gun(1986), Die
Hard(1988), Batman(1989) and The Hunt For Red October(1990).
Today blockbuster movies are still big business at Hollywood, despite the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Some studios even take this trope one step further and create big-budget cinematic universes. Examples include the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe and Legendary Pictures'
Monster-Verse.
Person 1:
Gee, another blockbuster movie from (Insert film studio here)? I'm so tired of these...
Person 2:
Wow, another blockbuster movie from (Insert film studio here)? I'm so
hyped!!!
