James Cameron-Wilson Looks Back at the Year of 2024
Photo by Dean Rogers, Image courtesy of Focus Features
For a brief moment it looked as if the cinema had grown up. Of course, 2023 was a glitch and the phenomenon dubbed ‘Barbenheimer’ was just the anomaly that we feared it was. In 2024, the top ten highest grossing films were all sequels – save for Wicked, which is really a prequel. In the top twenty highest-grossing movies at the global box-office, only two were true originals, Justin Baldoni's contrived adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s literary romance It Ends With Us and DreamWorks’ touching, gloriously animated The Wild Robot. Otherwise, it was the same old same old, although several of the sequels on offer were not half bad (Alien: Romulus, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Twisters). If one was hoping for pure originality, the best bet was to check out what was showing at the nearest Curzon, Everyman or Picturehouse and to keep a beady eye on these pages. There was, however, one exception.
At a government-sponsored Inquiry, Tim Richards, CEO of the Vue cinema chain, stated in May that he had a plan “to take the very best of local films from our markets, the best Polish and German, Dutch, and Italian films and show them to all of our customers across our markets.” He kicked off his promise with the release of There’s Still Tomorrow, a black-and-white Italian drama with subtitles from a first-time female director (Paola Cortellesi). It looked like commercial suicide, yet anecdotally it did really well and in its native Italy it outperformed both Barbie and Oppenheimer. One can but hope there is a trickle-down effect that can benefit audiences starved of challenging, humanistic cinema.
As it was, 2024 proved to be a bumper year for cheap and nasty horror films, with a new slasher scything its way through the multiplex on an almost weekly basis, many examples of which disappeared without trace. There were exceptions, such as the Hugh Grant vehicle Heretic, which garnered the actor a Golden Globe nomination, and the critically cherished Longlegs, which clocked up over £8 million and steered its way into the UK’s top 35 highest-grossers (Heretic made under £6m and landed at No. 41). The top dog at the UK box-office was Inside Out 2, which might have engendered a few nightmares but was actually aimed at children, as well as their parents. Although it was a sequel, it was at least a highly original one.
On the production side, business was booming, with new studios sprouting like the common stinkhorn. It is estimated that in the past three years, available studio space in Britain has almost doubled, with facilities like the 18-stage Shinfield Studios in Berkshire, an additional ten sound stages at Warners’ Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire and Liverpool’s upcoming Littlewoods venture mopping up international production. With the lure of tax breaks and world-class technicians and artists, the UK is fast becoming the busiest film location on the planet. Another imminent amenity, Marlow Film Studios in Buckinghamshire, was blocked by the local council but government plans to ease restrictions against development on ‘green belt’ land could help fast-track the Marlow project and the promised £3.2bn investment in the area. After all, there are a lot of sequels out there that need to be completed.
On a personal note, the titles below are my favourites of 2024, films of wide appeal that were released both online and in the cinema and that have actually grown in my estimation since I saw them. I look forward to revisiting all of them, even the two sequels that I have dared to include on my list. And, for the record, Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 is not a sequel.
James Cameron-Wilson’s Favourites:
