Contemporary Cinema

The 2000s were a decade defined largely by franchise filmmaking and digital transformation. Following the success of The Matrix (1999) and the debut of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, studios doubled down on effects-driven, franchise-oriented productions. The superhero genre began its ascent with X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002), planting the seeds for what would become the dominant force in cinema for decades to come. Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, and The Dark Knight further demonstrated that serialized, brand-driven cinema was where the money was.

Digitally, everything was changing. CGI had matured to the point where almost anything was possible on screen, for better and worse. Meanwhile, the rise of DVD, and then digital streaming in the latter half of the decade, was beginning to erode traditional theatrical attendance in ways the industry would be slow to fully reckon with.

Yet the decade also produced genuinely vital work. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007), and Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) proved that serious, uncompromising filmmaking still had a home in mainstream cinema. World cinema was equally rich. Wong Kar-wai, Michael Haneke, and Park Chan-wook were each producing work of extraordinary depth and style. It was a decade of tension between the commercial and the artistic, between the traditional and the digital, and that tension produced some genuinely remarkable films.