I was thinking about the defining movies of my childhood, or at least, the movies I remember watching multiple times - and still awtch today. It got me to thinking, what are the defining movies of this generation's kids? Granted, maybe the kids these days don't have quite the nostalgic outlook that we do - looking back fondly on our favorite movies, television shows, toys, music, etc. It seems like many kids (and in some cases, adults) are more quick to move from one thing to another (I think this was brought up in the loyalty/future of collecting threads).
For me, there were the "big ones" from my childhood that most people from the same basic age group probably related with as well:
Star Wars Original Trilogy
Indiana Jones
Ghostbusters
ET
The Goonies
Karate Kid
Back to the Future
Superman (1978)
Batman (1989)
I'm probably forgetting a few, but off the top of my head, I remember watching most of those movies multiple times growing up, and own most of them on DVD now. Some were out when I was little, and others were more in the junior high or older range. What do you think would be the movies for this generation of kids - from the youngest group up to high school aged kids? Do they/will they even look at movies the same way we did back then? Maybe not. Off the top of my head, here's the ones I could think of - or at least I guess I would pick if I was in that group:
Spider-Man
Harry Potter
Lord of the Rings
Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Pirates of the Caribbean
X-Men/Batman/etc.?
Narnia?
There's a lot of others that I really enjoy, but I'm thinking of ones that would really last with this generation. Obviously, most of the summer superhero movies are big hits (with kids and often adults too), but how many of them will really stick out to kids 10-20 years down the road? There's other movies that fall into this same category. Harry Potter might be one of the most defining franchises of this group, just taking the overall popularity into consideration. Maybe kids look at the Star Wars PT the way we look at the OT, maybe not. Do you think kids these days will even look at things the same way we did, and if so, which movies will define their childhoods? I'm not sure if my title was the right way to word this, but I'm curious if there will be movies from the past ten years or so that will be remembered fondly 20 years down the road and beyond the way that Star Wars/Indy/etc. were for us. Obviously, there won't ever be a phenomenon quite like the Original Star Wars, and also times have just changed from years where there was only 10-20 movies a year, let alone every two weeks like there is now.