and gigantic special effects are expected, with larger-than-life characters wielding those effects. When ever-larger sums are spent to make and market ever-fewer, ever-bigger movies, and those movies are aimed at Imax screens, then world-shattering comic-book I.P. The first tentpoles out of the gate did breakneck business, but a late run of expensive flops (and even respectable also-rans) has industry watchers reexamining Steven Spielberg’s prediction, in June, that Hollywood is headed for an “implosion”: An industry that makes only megamovies, prophesied the father of the megamovie, will die of its own gigantism.īut Hollywood’s gigantism, Lindelof points out, is practically algorithmic-and the effect tendrils all the way down to the storytelling level.

That escalation can be felt across the entire film industry this summer, a season of unparalleled massiveness: more blockbusters released, more digital demolition per square foot, and more at stake than ever. It’s hard not to do it, especially because a movie, if properly executed, feels like it’s escalating.”

“But ultimately I do feel-even as a purveyor of it-slightly turned off by this destruction porn that has emerged and become very bold-faced this past summer. “We live in a commercial world, where you’ve gotta come up with ‘trailer moments’ and make the thing feel big and impressive and satisfying, especially in that summer-movie-theater construct,” says Lindelof. But, hey, you have to give something to get something. He also resisted the temptation to threaten Earth’s existence (yet again!) at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, focusing instead on a personal vendetta-albeit one enacted via a dizzying mile-high pursuit across a 23rd-century cityscape. This summer, he (along with fellow triage artists Drew Goddard and Christopher McQuarrie) miraculously pulled Brad Pitt out of the mass grave that was World War Z’s zombocalyptic original third act and restored the regular-guyness that made Pitt’s character work. Damon Lindelof, the ubiquitous screenwriter-producer whose name seems attached to all of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, is doing his damnedest to get small.

Screenwriting cat