How Documentaries Became the Hottest Genre of the Summer
Ah, Summer! the season of Superhero Blockbusters and exhilarating action movies, enterprises that demand little more of us than shutting down some of our brain power and sinking into cushy stadium seats. But the summer of 2018 has put a wrinkle in that pattern. We're in the midst of a mini documentary boom, during a season in which a surprising number of people have made the effort to go out to the moviesto see a nonfiction film. Since its June release, Morgan Neville's documentary portrait of beloved TV personality and children's advocate Fred Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, has grossed 22 million at the box office. Two other docsJulie Cohen and Betsy West's homage to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RBG, released in May, and Tim Wardle's potent and unsettling adoption saga, Three Identical Strangers, which opened in Junehave also hit big at the box office, grossing some 13.7 million and 10 million, respectively. Those figures are nothing close to what huge hits like Black Panther or Avengers Infinity War have raked in. But they're still surprising. Think of it this way All three of these docs have already cracked the list of top 30 highest-grossing documentaries since 1982and they've been in theaters for only three or four months. The top-grossing doc since 1982, according to Box Office Mojo, is Michael Moore's 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11, which has made 119 million to date., It's too soon to tell if this current love affair with documentaries is the beginning of a trend or simply a testament to the quality of these three films. But sometimes numbers tell a story that has less to do with profit statistics than with an almost indescribable state of yearning What if this summer's big documentariesand a few others that aren't as splashy but are still worth your timeare giving audiences something they didn't know they needed? At a time when the press is under constant attack and many of our government leaders operate under a rather elastic definition of the truth, maybe audiences are looking to connect with stories they can truly believe in. The rise of documentary films may run on a parallel track with the recent popularity of true-crime podcasts. Of the new doc crop, Three Identical Strangers is most similar to a whodunit. It may not be a true-crime story, but it is a tragic mystery with a sinister twist. Director Wardle tells the story of Eddy Galland, David Kellman and Bobby Shafran, triplets who were separated at birth in the early 1960s and adopted by three different families. The trio found one another, almost miraculously, in the early 1980s and enjoyed a brief run as minor celebritiesuntil certain facts about their adoption disrupted the fairy tale. The picture asks some teasing questions about nature vs. nurture, and it's as suspenseful as any fiction that a screenwriter could dream up.