We began 2016 contending with #OscarSoWhite and cinema’s gender imbalance, and if we haven’t fixed either, there’s evidence we’re working on it, especially the latter. The year started, and will almost certainly end, with a heroine-led Star Wars movie atop the box office chart, and we’ve been spoiled for female roles and role models: Sasha Lane’s drifter in American Honey; Brie Larson’s resilient mother in Room; Kate Beckinsale’s social-climber in Love & Friendship; an all-female Ghostbusters reboot; and, let’s not forget, the second-biggest UK movie of the year was Bridget Jones’s Baby.
As for #OscarSoWhite, it’s clearly still a work in progress. 2016 did give us Creed, starring Michael B Jordan – such a great movie by and about young black Americans, you forgot it was supposed to be a Rocky sequel. Beyoncé’s radical, full-length Lemonade film put mainstream cinema to shame, and forthcoming black coming-of-ager Moonlight is this awards season’s frontrunner. Clearly more needs to be done, but it looks like Hollywood might have got the memo.
This could also go down as the year we hit Peak Franchise. Studios lazily rolled out sequels, assuming we’d obediently lap them up: Alice Through The Looking Glass, Independence Day, Inferno, Zoolander, Teenage Sodding Mutant Ninja Turtles. We didn’t. Nor did the likes of Suicide Squad or Batman v Superman live up to the overhype. So many tentpoles collapsed this year, Hollywood might have to consider more permanent structures. Even the smash-hit Captain America: Civil War felt like a last-gasp doubling down, cramming all Marvel’s superheroes into one basket.
The new comic book batch were far more interesting. Particularly Deadpool, the year’s best comedy, which was bracingly straight-up and grown-up about the superhero rules it was messing with. Doctor Strange was the most psychedelic blockbuster we’ve ever had, and in animation terms, Zootopia, Kubo And The Two Strings, Sausage Party and Anomalisa all won out by giving us something new to chew on.
It was the one-offs that shone through in arthouse cinema, too: the amazing one-take German thriller Victoria; transporting Amazonian epic Embrace Of The Serpent; and intensely focused Holocaust drama Son Of Saul. Ken Loach’s powerful I, Daniel Blake must also go into this category, being the only serious take on modern-day, benefits-broken Britain we got. So, if 2016 had a lesson for the movies, it was: be original, be brave, be inclusive. Or be Star Wars.
