Hmm. I’ll go with:
The puppet genre. Remember Team America and The Puppet Master movies?
The troll genre. Remember Troll 1?
The female prison genre. Remember Chained Heat 1 and 3?
The Western.
Movies for grownups.
Ah, yes: the Golden Age of the Troll Movie.
This was done in by the lack of trolls in Trolls 2. You can’t make money at Troll movies if you don’t put trolls in it. Lesson learned, Hollywood. Lesson learned.
T&A teen movies. At truly lost art of the 80’s.
The “young kids from small town America who save the immediate locality” genre. It’s save the world or nothing, these days.
“Hey, let’s use the old barn to put on a show – we’ll have singing and dancing!”
When’s the last time they made a classical mystery movie? I mean something other than a thriller. A movie where the main story is the protagonist is a detective assembling the clues and solving a case. It’s still a common genre on TV but it seems to have disappeared from the movies.
I remember watching Larry Crowne and thinking how unusual it was to watch a movie about adults dealing with normal adult problems.
American Pie? Harold & Kumar? Granted not too many in the last year or three, but there was a resurgence waaaay post-80s. Nothing on the scale on Porky’s though. The quintessential teen T&A movie long may it live.
What happened to Chained Heat 2 Compared to 1 and 3, it was a cinematic disappointment with flat characterizations and a trite plot line?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
… okay, that was 1988…
I nominate musicals.
“Into the Woods” and “Annie” are both coming out later this year.
Blaxploitation. America needs Dolemite now more than ever!
The big-hair big-breasts 1980s sword and sandal movies are gone. Some might say they have been replaced by premium TV series like “Game of Thrones” and “Spartacus” but those series just don’t have the sense of FUN that the 1980s films did.
That said, the writing in Spartacus and particularly Game of Thrones is roughly 10,000 percent better than the writing in the 80s films, so all things considered … I’m cool.
With the Internet, there’s not much titillation you can offer a modern teen in a movie, short of filming a hardcore kink-fest bonanza (I guess that’s why Shades of Gray is being released as a movie…). Of course, then most teens won’t be allowed to go see them.
We must make sure that teens can’t see the things up on the big screen that they’ve grown up with on the internet.
That jive-ass mutha-fucka cain’t even fight! Have you seen The Human Tornado?
You should’ve/could’ve referenced Pam Grier’s, Black Mama, White Mama and gotten the blaxploitation/chicks-in-chains/prison-break trifecta!
What we hollywood is really missing is the Shaw Brothers Kung-Fu movies. Not the John Woo/ Chow-Yun Fat shooters. I’m talking Five Deadly Vemons/Master of the Flying Guillotine type movies!!
Would you consider Gosford Park an example of this? It’s from 2001.
“Subtle Political Satire”?
Both of which are going to great lengths to HIDE the fact that they are musicals.
The trailer for Into the Woods features NO singing and there are two trailers for Annie one of which has no singing and one of which has a snippet of Hard Knock Life and that’s it.
So Hollywood is willing to make a couple of musicals but doesn’t think audiences actually WANT to see musicals.