Why schools are like summer blockbusters

What keeps audiences coming back to the theater?

Roy Scheider as Brody in Jaws (1975) coming face to face with his fears.

This month is the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Stephen Spielberg’s rambling film about a man obsessed with killing a shark that wreaked havoc on his little New England town. The film (and Star Wars two years later) put the concept of the summer blockbuster on the map–a movie that  strikes a chord so deeply with audiences that it becomes wildly popular and a financial cash cow, maybe even becoming a cultural touchstone that stays with you for your entire life (can you hear the John Williams shark attack music in your head right now?). But with theater attendance down and schools facing chronic absenteeism, have we forgotten what makes an experience engaging and, yes, fun?

Blockbusters are storytelling projects that are successful because they hit the sweet spot of idle audiences with plenty of time on their hands (attention) and an exciting, fresh story (originality and imagination). But we seem to have forgotten this winning formula, and instead rely upon nostalgia and familiarity to green light our work and design metrics for success.

Franchises like Mission Impossible have been in production for nearly 30 years. And the uninspiring Marvel Universe movies have been milked so much their plots run clear. One movie critic joked that The last Indiana Jones movie seemed to have been made with ChatGPT since it was only a mashup of the greatest hits from past films, and even featured an AI-generated Harrison Ford during extensive flashbacks. Is it really streaming services and social media that are driving audiences away from films, or is it our inability to inspire audiences with fresh ideas?

When we forget what makes an experience exciting, memorable, and worthy of supporting with our attention and money, the result is that we not only get predictable, uninspired stories, but our perception of an entire industry–and those who work in it–sours with it. The downward spiral becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But there are clues for future success. The Ryan Coogler vampire film, Sinners, has been surprisingly popular and financially successful despite the fact that it wasn’t based on a TV show, novel, comic book, or broadway musical. And it goes against everything we’ve been told won’t work by Hollywood: it was written and directed by a Black man, featuring Black characters, and is a story about racism set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Even more scandalous is that writer/director Coogler had creative control over the project, getting “final cut” decisions about how the story turned out, instead of Hollywood executives who usually interfere with creative decisions based on marketing data and business formulas. In a rare agreement,  ownership of the film reverts from the studio to Coogler in 25 years.

In other words, the success of this film stems largely from the unique creative vision of an auteur whose story taps into the current zeitgeist, not the adherence to a standardized formula or rubric developed from past precedent.  

As I’ve said before, artificial intelligence is scary because it has highlighted artificial education–the standardized tests and learning models that drain the excitement and wonder from learning. AI has given us the gift not only of efficiency, but as a very clear reminder of what matters most: our humanity, originality, and creativity.

Technology, social media, and AI alone aren’t ruining things for Hollywood and schools because they’re just tools. It's not that audiences don’t like movies or that students don’t like learning, it's that everyone is looking for inspiring, surprising, and identifiable stories that resonate with our lived experience, and help us imagine a better future. If they can’t find it in a theater or classroom, they’ll look elsewhere.