Alex Funke I have been thinking recently about the way visual effects have moved from a tool to advance a filmic story, to a point where they have as much significance as the actors themselves. I wondered how this came about. What is contained in that buzzword, visual effects? For this discussion, let’s say that…

Liam Burke Following the record-breaking success of X-Men (Singer) in 2000 comic-book heroes began filling the cinematic skies. These films appealed to a wide audience by deftly blending cinematic conventions including the Western’s vigilante archetype, the crime movie’s milieu, and the heightened flourishes of the action film. One of the most potent elements in this…

Stacey Abbott   In their announcement about their three-month retrospective and celebration Science Fiction: Days of Fear and Wonder, the British Film Institute declared: ‘The BFI unveils a major celebration of film and television’s original blockbuster genre’ (2014). Through this statement, the BFI suggests an indelible association between the genre and the notion of a…

Tanya Krzywinska and Douglas Brown Through a convergence of technology, brand marketing and aesthetics, we are close to a point of singularity within the entertainment industry. This is evident in the increasingly transmedial nature of contemporary SF blockbuster economics. Diversity is still somewhat in evidence but fading with the increasingly common implementation of transmedial franchises.…

Sean Cubitt Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, Marvel/Disney, 2014), based on a less well known Marvel comic, outperformed instalments of Marvel’s Captain America and X-men franchises in the year’s rankings, grossing USD333m (IMDb) at the domestic box office and USD774m worldwide (Wikipedia). An ensemble crew built around the ostensibly human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt)…

Editorial We are just coming to the end of the season of the cinema blockbuster, dominated by American product and the science fiction spectacle. These science fictions are big pictures in almost every way: big budgets, big special effects, big stars, big cross-overs, distributed in big cinemas to big audiences. However, these bejewelled behemoths to size and…

 Mark Jancovich It is now commonplace to see the generation of Speilberg and Lucas as transforming science fiction from a genre associated with low-budget filmmaking into the stuff of blockbuster cinema. For example, J Hoberman has claimed that this generation raised the ‘most vital and disreputable genres of their youth … to cosmic heights’,[1] a…