2010's-DECADES

Buff’s history of decades and the movies that defined them looks back at the Oneties, when crossover was cool and one studio ruled them all.

- NEIL SMITH

The twenty-tens began with James Cameron’s Avatar overtaking his own Titanic to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Yet Cameron, as if cowed by the prospect of emulating that gargantuan success, would not direct a single picture for the entirety of the decade – one that ended with Avatar relinquishing its place at the top of the box-office tree, and with 20th Century Fox, the venerable studio that released it, being taken over by an outfit that could truly claim, with rather more authority than Cameron did at the 1998 Oscars, to be the king of the world.

The Noughties were a decade in which technological advancements gave filmmakers the power to realise their loftiest ambitions. Yet it was corporate power that ruled over the decade that followed, with one global titan emerging as the dominant player in big-screen entertainment and another leading the way in video on demand. Netflix started out in the 1990s as a rental service distributing DVDs by post, but soon fathomed that online streaming was a more efficient means of reaching its rapidly escalating legion of subscribers. Its then-unique selling point was original content: addictive television series like Stranger Things, The Crown and Orange Is The New Black that could be voraciously consumed (or “binge-watched”) in a single marathon sitting.