Death of the blockbuster? its about time.

Chris Anderson seems to know what he's talking about. In fact, that's the first thing he lets us know about; he casually mentions that the reason he hasn't been posting lately is due to his jet setting in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum followed by a trip to L.A. for the Entertainment Gathering. After plugging his own book for awhile, he tells us that we are indeed lucky because our humble internationally known Chris Anderson will in fact, never forget about us little people and continue his fervent work on his blog!

The first thing that struck me when reading his article was A) to me the death of the blockbuster movie is a good thing (which he dances around but never says outright) and B) i'm not so sure blockbuster's are dead at all.

Take for example that Spiderman 3, while being lambasted by critics and viewers alike as waste of time, broke box office records grossing $151.1 million domestically and $382 million worldwide in its first few days. While Spiderman 3 was released long after Anderson made this post, my feeling is it proves his prediction somewhat wrong.

What weakens my conviction in Anderson's bold statements even more, is that the previous holder of the opening weekend box office revenue was a 2006 movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is also currently the 6th highest grossing movie of all time.

My question is, might it be a stretch to proclaim blockbuster's dead when six of the top ten all time grossing movies in America are within the last few years?
As far as the whole internet piracy angle goes, it just so happens i have a whole feature on media piracy dealing entirely with the impact downloading music and movies coming out in the link's technology issue in a few weeks, so i won't even get started on that or this post will get longer than it already is. I feel the same way as Anderson does on this one, which is that internet media piracy as it stands now, benefits the music and movie industry more than it does harm it. The reason why, as Chris says, is because the public have access to movies from anywhere in the world and filmmakers who want to stray from the pack and do some interesting niche, but less marketable films, can now do so and still find a decent audience.