Platform Cinema: Economical, Structural and Formal Convergence in Mainstream Hollywood Cinema

The essay commences from contemporary examples from blockbuster and action movies that present a completely different formal and structural approach to Hollywood narratives than either the classical, studio period, or the later, new Hollywood films. The author identifies three stages in the change of narrative models in Hollywood’s cinematic output through the past century that in fact parallels some significant shifts in the global economy and in the development of technology. An alternative model of the history of filmic narrative structure gets its shape in juxtaposing the three different levels of economy, technology, and cinema that sheds light onto the interrelatedness of these seemingly unrelated trajectories. The essay offers an insight into the contemporary model-in-formation that it calls “platform cinema” based on the economic and technological model of the platform as defined by Nick Srnicek. The author situates today’s structural and formulaic changes in recent mainstream Hollywood cinema in the framework of the new logic of the platform and proposes a critical-historical model to argue for the contiguity of shifts rather than emphasizing the breaks in the way film narratives developed in terms of structure and form in Hollywood.

Keywords: platform cinema, Hollywood, intensified continuity, Fordism, lean production