Killer dolls, cocaine bears and dinosaur time travel: how the B-movie became big business

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As a string of serious dramas underperform at the box office, silliness has instead taken over Hollywood from M3gan to Cocaine Bear

) was also a win for B-movies, taking the kind of progressively nuttier plot that would traditionally be relegated to a horror streamer like Shudder and transplanting it to the big screen, a test for just how wild mainstream films can get without alienating the masses. Its revolting reveals inspired audible audience interaction while also setting Twitter abuzz, both on release and when it landed on HBO Max soon after.

A social media stranglehold has been vital for these B-movies to prosper, following on from the groundwork laid by showrunners like Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes, who were instrumental in the Twitter-ing of television, updating the water-cooler moment into something more gif-able.

The bloat of TV, which allowed for a record 599 scripted shows to air in the US in 2022, has also provided consumers with an unprecedented and intimidating host of options that don’t require them to leave their living room. Showrunners have tried to tackle all available genres from comedy to horror to action, but B-movies succeed in ways that small screen versions wouldn’t.

It’s not that these films haven’t been consistently made ever since the term B-movie became less industry definition and more loose descriptor, it’s just that they’ve not always been quite as popular at a time when so many other films are struggling.

While the pandemic might not be the big preventer it once was in getting audiences back in seats, its effect on what, how and when we consume will probably forever linger. Whether absurdist escapism will always sell quite this well, at a time of such unrelenting grimness worldwide, is unknowable, but let’s hope the future doesn’t demand that we need it quite this much.

 

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