The Cyclical Nature of Hollywood’s Interests

The 1980s gave way to the 1990s, where it felt like — with a few exceptions, including Scream — the film industry largely seemed to give up on horror after an onslaught the decade prior.

It got me thinking about how Hollywood’s interests in certain things seems cyclical and always comes back around to things … eventually. While racing movies are far more niche than horror as a genre, it still applies.

While there are probably 2% as many racing movies as there are horror flicks — probably less — I look at the 2000s and see an extremely strong foundation of motorsports films that went … nowhere.

Not all of them are great (looking at you, 3 and Herbie Fully Loaded), but the cornerstones were in place. It’s also worth pointing out that the 2000s were the prime decade for movie paint schemes.

Let’s give it some grace and look at the last few years of the 1990s.

In 1997, we start off strong. The IMAX documentary Super Speedway highlights open-wheel racing with the Andrettis, and a Herbie movie (The Love Bug) comes out starring Bruce Campbell — who, coincidentally, was a staple of that 1980s horror thanks to Evil Dead and Evil Dead II.

Jump to the first few years of the 2000s, and we get the much-maligned Driven, starring Sylvester Stallone, and Right on Track, more of a kids’ movie but spotlighting drag racing and starring a not-yet-famous Brie Larson.

Then, from 2004-06, we get hammered with five generally sizable and/or notable productions. NASCAR: The IMAX Experience hit huge IMAX screens (or domes, where I saw it) across the country, while 3: The Dale Earnhardt Story hits TV screens. It’s nowhere near as good as the IMAX movie, but it’s NASCAR on a relatively big platform nonetheless. We got Saving Private Ryan‘s and 61*‘s Barry Pepper as well as J.K. Simmons, who among other things was in Spider-Man 2 that same year.

Good start!

Only one big production the…