Why Have American Moviegoers Become Such Tough Sells on Period Pieces?

Not long ago here I remarked how popular historical period pieces were at the movies in the '50s and '60s (and even after), and how that has changed since.

What happened?

It seems to me that the popularity of the period piece then was largely a matter of the popularity of a few very particular genres--the Western, the old Biblical-Roman epic, the World War II movie, the lavishly costumed musical that was so often set in the Old West or World War II (like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or White Christmas, or South Pacific).

Those genres were all in decline by the late '60s, and in spite of brief efflorescences later (like the early '90s revival of the Western with Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, or the World War II movie with Saving Private Ryan), never wholly recovered, while never being replaced by some new period fascination.

Instead the action movie replaced dance routines and historical pageantry as the favored form of spectacle key to them; while those who had always enjoyed scenes of gunplay and stuff blowing up previously and got it from period pieces of various kinds, like Westerns and war movies, got those satisfactions from adventures set in the contemporary world from the James Bond movies forward; or later, more blatant science fiction (this, not the genre's cerebral uses, what made it a popular success).

It seems telling that where science fiction was concerned the genre material tended to be handled in a particular fashion. While Star Wars led the way, space operas, if now and then shooting to the top of the box office, have not been the big staple they might seem--successful examples of the type rather fewer in number than sci-fi tales set on contemporary Earth. Exemplary of this has been the superhero films, whose great virtue commercially has been their bringing sci-fi action-adventure down to Earth from the heavens. This may not suffice to make them very successful as absorbing personal dramas, but that this keeps the Brechtian "alienation effects" to a minimum--that the audience doesn't have to cope with a complex different world or process lots of other information, just come to terms with the now very, very familiar "concept' of super-powered people flying about and smashing things--still helps them get into the spectacle much more easily than they would a story set in some exotic galactic empire, which may be even less daunting for them than another historical period. (If you think otherwise, trying teaching college students about a piece of nineteenth century literature sometime.)