Book Review: The Future Was Now by Chris Nashawaty

The idea of the Summer blockbuster as we know it kicked off with Stephen Spielberg’s smash hit Jaws in 1975. As Universal Studios raked in cash it became apparent that the months that schools around the United States were on break was the prime time to try and replicate that success, something that seems glaringly obvious in hindsight. When George Lucas’ Star Wars burst onto the scene in the Summer of 1977 and made 20th Century Fox a small fortune, the theory bore out even more which led the studios to start releasing bigger and bigger budgeted films between late May and late August each year chasing similar results. 1978 saw Grease and National Lampoon’s Animal House take the country by storm, followed by Alien in 1979, The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. An even bigger takeaway though, was that the once maligned genre of science fiction was equal to box office gold, and suddenly every Hollywood executive was scrambling to get their own special effects-laden projects off the ground, leading to the Summer of 1982, which saw 8 genre pictures released within weeks of each other, nearly all of which would prove successful financially and each destined to become a classic in their own right.

In The Future Was Now, author Chris Nashawaty posits that the movies that Summer and the public’s reaction to them are directly responsible for the state of cinema today, for better and for worse. He fills in the basic facts around the years leading up to 1982 that set the stage for that Summer and provides fascinating details about the development of the 8 films in question: Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, E.T., Mad Max: The Road Warrior, Poltergeist, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, The Thing, and Tron. In so doing he also gives us brief looks at the creators of these movies and the studio system they were dealing with at the time.

Coming in at around 300 pages it can sometimes feel like the subject isn’t given the necessary space to be fully realized, but Nashawaty’s quick and witty writing style keeps the reader engaged and cinephiles in particular will be compulsively turning the pages late into the night. Factoids about the near-fatal accident Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered on the set of Conan or the rapturous reception E.T. received at the Cannes Film Festival fill in the story as he argues his point about the influence these films had on pop culture moving forward. By the end it’s hard not to be convinced that he’s right.

In the ensuing years Hollywood would come to fully embrace “nerd” culture, spending more and more money on increasingly spectacular films, often earning bigger and bigger paydays in return and building rabid fanbases in the process. It’s hard to believe there was ever a time that the cinema wasn’t so dominated by franchises, IP, and CGI, but it was in the Summer of 1982 that it all began in earnest, and other than in this informative and entertaining little book, we haven’t really looked back since. Movie lovers, especially of a certain generation, will eat this up like Reese’s Pieces. ★★★★