How Film Taste Has Changed Through the Decades (Part 2): From Rebellion to the Blockbuster

The 1960s set that upheaval in motion, and the 1970s and '80s turned it into something that would shape the next half-century of popular film.

The 1960s: When film got restless

The 1960s brought a generational rupture. Society was shifting, authority was being questioned, and young people no longer wanted to see the world the way their parents had.

Hollywood responded slowly, but by the end of the decade it was clear something fundamental had changed. Films about youth, rebellion, crime, and social taboo were taking up more and more space. The traditional Western lost some of its certainty, and the hero no longer had to be a spotless cowboy riding in to restore justice.

Bonnie and Clyde, from 1967, was one of the films that announced the new era. It gave criminals an energy and style that made them genuinely appealing, while quietly breaking several of Hollywood's old rules in the process.

It wasn't alone. The Graduate, that same year, turned youthful confusion and alienation into a central cinematic subject. In contrast, Rosemary's Baby, a year later, proved horror could be subtle, urban, and psychological rather than just a genre of cheap scares.

Stanley Kubrick, with Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey, demonstrated twice over, in two entirely different registers, that science fiction and satire could be serious cinematic art rather than Sunday-afternoon entertainment. The Western itself, a genre that had spent decades as shorthand for a clean split between good and bad, was shaken further by the arrival of Sergio Leone's Italian "spaghetti Westerns". A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly introduced morally murkier heroes and a dustier, harsher tone that permanently altered the genre.

Toward the end of the decade, Night of the Living Dead, an independent, low-budget production, laid the groundwork for modern zombie horror, while Midnight Cowboy, in 1969, became the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture - a clear sign of just how far the boundaries of what Hollywood was willing to show had shifted since the decade began.

In Europe, the new auteur cinema was already proving that film didn't have to be strictly a studio product. French, Italian, Swedish, and other European filmmakers were rewriting the language of cinema, while American audiences increasingly embraced films that were more provocative and formally freer.

The 1960s, then, were a transitional decade: old Hollywood was still alive, but the new one was no longer waiting to be invited in.

The 1970s: The best decade for dark stories?

If any single decade could be described as the moment Hollywood stopped believing the world had simple solutions, it would be the 1970s.

Crime films, political thrillers, horror, and a new strain of science fiction dominated a significant part of popular cinema. The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Alien, and Jaws belong to different genres, but they share one thing: almost none of them offers an entirely carefree view of the world.

The Godfather gave gangsters a family tragedy. Taxi Driver turned loneliness into psychological horror. Chinatown transformed a crime story into a story about corruption and individual powerlessness.

At the same time, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were beginning to reshape Hollywood's economics. Jaws and Star Wars proved that a film could become an event far bigger than the film itself. That's how the blockbuster era began.

And with it came one of the biggest turns in the history of popular cinema: Hollywood discovered that audiences didn't have to come just for the story or the star. They could come for the world.

The 1980s: The blockbuster becomes a way of life

If the 1970s invented the modern blockbuster, the 1980s turned it into an industrial model. E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Top Gun, Die Hard, and The Terminator showed how differently genres could operate within the same underlying formula: a clear story, a strong protagonist, spectacle, humor, and enough energy to leave the audience wanting more.

The action film became especially dominant during this period. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Jean-Claude Van Damme turned a movie star's physical presence into something close to a genre element in its own right. A hero no longer just had to defeat the villain - he had to look like he could take on an entire army by himself.

Teen comedies exploded at the same time, driven largely by John Hughes and his contemporaries. The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Sixteen Candles proved that teenage life could sustain its own self-contained cinematic universe.

And then came a shift that's easy to forget about today: VHS. A film's life no longer ended when it left theaters. It could go home with the viewer. Hollywood gained an entirely new economic model, and for the first time, audiences could watch a film whenever they wanted, rewatch it, and build a collection of their own.

The 1970s taught Hollywood that a film could be an event bigger than its own story. The 1980s turned that lesson into a formula - the very formula the 1990s would branch out in nearly every direction imaginable, before the following decade found the one genre that would, in the end, absorb it completely.

In the third and final part: how Hollywood in the 1990s managed to belong to Tarantino and Disney at the same time, how the fantasy boom of the 2000s opened the door for superheroes, and why, today, there no longer seems to be a single genre ruling over everything else.