Back in late June, at the beginning of Hollywood's summer slump, I wrote:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with any of the post-9/11 films, if there was some balance. Nobody begrudged Hollywood producing anti-war films like Paths of Glory or All Quiet On The Western Front (both superb pictures of course, especially the former), as long as we were also getting Casablanca and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Even as late as the 1980s, Hollywood could gave its audiences both Platoon and Cruise's own Top Gun.

Let’s fire up the Flux Capaciter, program our DeLorean time machine for 1985, and go in search of lessons to bring back to the future.

Like the bizarre series of similarities found in the Lincoln/Kennedy assassinations, the box office “assassinations” of 1985 and 2005 share some eerie similarities and coincidences.

Both slumps began in a year following the November re-election of a president who was despised by the coasts, the media, and Bruce Springsteen. Both of these re-elected presidents liked to wear cowboy hats and boots. Both presided over ambiguous, hard-to-define wars: the Cold War, the War on Terror. During both campaigns the who’s-who of hip Hollywood actors (who now probably need hip replacement) such as Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand and Ed Asner came out in support of their guy (hint: not the one in the cowboy hat).

The cowboy candidates, then and now, had Chuck Norris. During both campaigns, Bruce Springsteen took a tour on the road to encourage people not to vote for the guy in the cowboy hat. The “bad guys” in the world--Godless Russian commies in the 80’s; Our-God-4-Allah-ya Islamic Terrorists in the 00’s--also didn’t want the guy in the cowboy hat to win. But they didn’t particularly care for Springsteen either.

It doesn’t take Doc Brown to see that the national landscapes preceding the B.O. slumps were as alike as two Rob Schneider movies.

There are also similarities in the reason given for the slumps. The Hollywood-Know-It-Alls in the panic induced by both the Slump of ’85 and the current Slump of ’05, were quick to finger all the new-fangled home entertainment technology as the culprit. In 1985 videocassettes, VCRs, Commodore home computers, and Ms. Pac-Man were allegedly sucking us away from theaters. In 2005 DVDs, plasma screen televisions, chat rooms, and “Destroy All Humans” are supposedly doing the job. In 1985, this proved to be untrue as Hollywood rebounded and had some of the best years of its life in the tech-filled decades to come. It’s untrue now as well.

So what caused the slump of ’85? And what is causing the Slump of ‘05? The eerily similar political climates preceding the slumps have led some to suggest that moviegoers who liked the guy in the cowboy hat were holding a grudge against Hollywood by staying away from the multiplexes. After all, even in a landslide election, the nation is pretty much evenly split between the reds and the blues.

Publicly picking a side is bound to alienate you from half of everyone. If just a small percentage of these moviegoers turned their backs on Hollywood, it could have a devastating effect on the bottom line.

(Found via Libertas.)