- January 20, 2023
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- 9 minutes read
What's With All the Maximalist Movies These Days? – Collider
Maximalism had a golden age in 2022 cinema, but why was this form of storytelling suddenly so popular in movies?
Looking over all the movies that are garnering lots of attention this awards season, a pattern begins to emerge between these titles. We’ve got a lot of maximalist movies competing for the most prestigious awards in the cinematic landscape. From RRR to Babylon to Avatar: The Way of Water to Elvis to Everything Everywhere All at Once, there’s no shortage of over-the-top cinematic storytelling that’s garnering lots of award buzz this year. This trend has also caught on with audiences, as seen by Water, Elvis, and All at Once becoming box office sensations. These combined traits can’t help but make one inquire why in 2022, audiences have suddenly embraced maximalist cinema. Why is the new favored mode for big-screen entertainment anything drenched in preposterousness?
Of course, 2022 cinema didn’t suddenly create maximalist movies. Popular cinema has often enjoyed bombarding audiences with lots of wackiness, from surreal vintage musical numbers like “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” to the deluge of ludicrous imagery and action beats present in John Woo features like Hard Target. Maximalist tendencies in art have always been present, but their prominence in mainstream cinema has waxed and waned over the years depending on the entertainment proclivities of the moviegoing public in certain eras.
In the 2000s, notably, there was a craving from audiences for more realistic projects steeped in reality. Previously kitschy characters like Batman and James Bond got rebooted in a somber fashion that adhered heavily to the constraints of reality, with the success of those reboots inspiring further grim n’ gritty movies. Titles like Battle: Los Angeles were very conscious of keeping even the most conceptually preposterous plots tethered to a discernible version of reality. While this began to get chipped away by the late 2010s, 2022 seems like an especially massive departure from the gritty realism that constrained much of high-concept American cinema in the 21st century so far.
The ubiquity of maximalism in 2022 American cinema, not to mention the global movie scene, can be partially chalked up to some very practical factors. For starters, some of these directors were just building on their long-standing affection for absurd material with their 2022 features. Most notably, RRR helmer S.S. Rajamouli has been a master of combining unforgettably over-the-top material with moving pathos for years now, as seen by his 2012 feature Eega. Similarly, Everything Everywhere All at Once directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert were already engaging in wacky mayhem as feature-length filmmakers with Swiss Army Man in 2016. For these and other notable 2022 purveyors of maximalist filmmaking, some of the most outlandish films of the year were just business as usual.
Having all these titles come out in 2022 was also a coincidence spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, titles like Elvis, Babylon, and Avatar: The Way of Water were all set originally for 2021 releases. That’s an especially interesting thing to note because none of these movies were written or conceived to necessarily be reflections of a cinematic landscape influenced by a global pandemic. Everything Everywhere All at Once even finished shooting just before the worldwide health crisis began!
Just because these films weren’t intended to comment on the state of cinema in the wake of COVID-19’s existence, though, doesn’t mean the ubiquity of maximalist cinema in 2022 doesn’t speak to the current ambitions of big-screen entertainment. Specifically, the prominence of this style of filmmaking has become something akin to CinemaScope in the 1950s: a way to get people off their couches and into movie theaters. Whereas big-budget Netflix movies like The Grey Man are criticized for being visually flat, theatrical features in 2022 such as Elvis or RRR begged to be experienced on a massive canvas. Watching these stories in a theater with a crowd was an optimal way to see these projects while something like Everything Everywhere all at Once offering so much to moviegoers ensured that they would get plenty of spectacle bang for their buck.
These titles also inadvertently became incredibly relevant to modern moviegoers with their anything-goes atmosphere. The age of COVID-19 has upended everybody’s perspective on what constitutes “normal,” the unexpected is now something we all expect to see popping up as notifications on our phones. That’s terrifying to consider but features like Elvis and Everything Everywhere All at Once provide a quasi-comforting cinematic parallel to that lack of stability. Watching these movies is akin to being reassured you’re not the only one who feels like things are out of whack, that the planet has gone off its axis.
That’s likely why Babylon was the rare maximalist 2022 film to bomb. Its grim tone, complete with a third act where so many prominent characters died, wasn’t how people want to see chaos reflected in cinema. They want uplifting and hopeful takes on unbridled mayhem, like Everything Everywhere All at Once eventually using its unpredictability to deliver a treatise on the importance of kindness. Similarly, RRR being a 100% earnest film about the power of friendship made it catnip for moviegoers who had gone through years of isolation from other people during the age of COVID-19. Within all the maximalism in the most absurd 2022 movies, one can see deeply human themes that would be incredibly relevant to audience members.
Maximalist cinema had a great year in 2022, especially in how North American audiences showed up in droves for projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once and RRR that were likely deemed by American studio executives as “too niche.” But can it last? Certainly, maximalism isn’t going to vanish from cinematic storytelling (you’ll have to pry bombastic filmmaking away from Rajamouli’s cold dead hands!), but the tastes of moviegoers are always swinging like a pendulum. Just like the colorful excesses of the 1990s eventually led to the grim n’ gritty 2000s, so too is it easy to imagine a future era of mainstream cinema influenced more by Jonathan Liebesman than Baz Luhrmann.
Wherever movies go next, though, it’s clear that several incidental factors collided to make maximalist cinema the perfect vehicle for audiences to navigate complicated emotions and rediscover the joys of theatrical moviegoing in 2022. Nobody could’ve imagined a couple of rocks talking to each other would be emblematic of so many 2022 cinema trends, but that’s what happens when maximalist cinema gets to have the spotlight.
Douglas Laman is a life-long movie fan, writer and Rotten Tomatoes approved critic whose writing has been published in outlets like The Mary Sue, Fangoria, The Spool, and ScarleTeen. Residing both on the Autism spectrum and in Texas, Doug adores pugs, showtunes, the Wes Anderson movie Fantastic Mr. Fox, and any music by Carly Rae Jepsen.