'The Empire Strikes Back' Tops The Box Office, Time Has Lost All Meaning
Shunted out of our routines, it's almost impossible in the age of coronavirus to gauge what time it is, let alone what the hell a "Wednesday" is supposed to mean anymore. But what better way is there to keep a firm grasp on linearity than to report on the most up-to-date pop-culture news. So I'm here to talk about 2020's latest box office smash, Star Wars: Episode ... No. No. That's not true. That's impossible!
Right on? Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, the sequel to the hottest movie of the previous decade (or do I mean prequel?) was last weekend's biggest U.S. box office hit. And it wasn't just dorks who went to see 1980's most mondo blockbuster, which cashed in a cool half a million dollars. Many also ignored the ongoing gasoline crisis to drive Chevys to their local drive-in whose open-air screens accounted for most of Empire's earnings. Wait, that's not actually that much money. And why are we talking about drive-ins? What year is it?!
2020. It's 2020. That guy who hadn't been relevant since the '80s is president. So why is the second oldest Star Wars movie currently the biggest hit of the summer? Due to the coronavirus lockdown, home movie experiences and a quarantine-friendly drive-in revival are giving a major boost to their most popular film genres, nostalgia flicks, and horror. Not that these movies are suddenly making billions, it's that the blockbuster bar has never been lower. With the destruction of the movie theater industry, studios keep pushing back their summertime releases so they won't be that movie that ends up in history books as the Typhoid Mary of cinema. Currently, the highest-grossing 2020 release continues to be January's Bad Boys For Life, topping at an embarrassingly low $204,417,855. The only time the top box office movie netted a similar number was way back in 1995, the year of the release of Bad Boys--no no no, it's happening again ... Time is a flat circle! Why are my tips suddenly frosted?
This is it. The ouroboros of pop culture has finally swallowed itself and chronology has become utterly irrelevant. We couldn't just stop at giving reboots the exact same title as the original, no, we had to go and accidentally kick the movie industry back into the last nostalgia cycle. This is exactly the kind of sloppy overlapping that made fringe historians start questioning if the Dark Ages really happened and the same shit will happen to us. Oh well, nothing to do now but to accept our time glitch of a present, sit back, and enjoy some hit music from today's most eclectic, socially conscious teen pop sensation. Take it away, Billie.
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Top Image: Lucasfilm
