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The first indications of future trouble are identified. For most of history, new medicines arise from nature but this approach came into question as evidenced by the development of the cancer drug Taxol. As understanding of biology and chemistry incraesed, a degree of over-confidence arose as researchers assumed that new technologies would allow them to predict the most effective medicines. These changes were a response to an environment confronting twin pressures in the form of rising generic medicines coupled with ever more costly research and development activities needed to develop new products to replace those devastated by generic competition. These issues were exacerbated by a rising dependence upon “blockbuster” products, which conveyed short-term revenues but inevitably needed to be replaced by even more profitable products once generic competition intervened. Dependence on blockbusters was exemplified by the story of ulcer medicines, which was disrupted by an audacious study by an investigator who used himself as a Guinea pig to make his point. As such risks increased, the industry became more cautious and the race was on to make incremental improvements upon competitors’ products. All the while the cost of developing new medicines continued to escalate.

This chapter concerns and outlines Leitmotif film, a heavily state-sponsored film practice shaped by both the market and state mechanisms in the postsocialist reform. The reconciliations of Chinese cinema with Hollywood capitalism on the one hand and with the political regime on the other are the main thrusts of Leitmotif films and public culture in today’s China. Moreover, the cinematic display encoded by nationhood, historical reflexivity, transnational imaginary, and multilingual vocal track has become the defining feature of Leitmotif films, labelled as the Chinese big pictures. The chapter compares these Leitmotif epics to Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Titanic (1997) and calls particular attention to the dualities, multiformities, and congregations of varied tongues, peoples, and ideologies in the Chinese brand of blockbusters such as The Opium War (1997), Red River Valley (1996), Lover’s Grief over the Yellow River (1999), The Flowers of War (2011), The Founding of a Republic (2009) and The Founding of a Party (2011). They are epitomes of Chinawood and of the China Dream that refashion and re-vend national anthem at the restructured concourse of Tiananmen Guangchang (Square) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Disruption arises when great firms fail precisely because they continued to make choices that had originally made them great. It is important to distinguish this from other causes of failure (e.g., complacency or incompetence) and also from the over-use of the term “disruption.” To do this, the chapter is anchored in the case of Blockbuster video, which is one of the most often discussed poster children for disruption in recent memory. Here the author shows, contrary to many commentators, Blockbuster was always early in thinking about exploiting digital opportunities but the timing was never right given its traditional business model. To understand disruption, we identify its intellectual origins. The chapter discusses how each of these thinkers would have examined the Blockbuster case as a thought experiment, demonstrating that the case itself has a richer and more subtle narrative than ‘Netflix destroyed Blockbuster’. In particular, it is far from clear that this would not have happened even if Netflix did not exist.

In the spring of 1941, Britain began an active campaign to persuade the United States to manufacture RDX. The RAF case for RDX was presented in Washington by Air Marshal Sir Arthur “Bert” Harris. With strong support from Admiral “Spike” Blandy, chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, the first British request was approved. The second “staggering” request for RDX came as a “bombshell.” The U.S. Army Ordnance Department authorities preferred to rely on the existing high explosive TNT.

This chapter discusses how between 2002-2005 a selection of films emerged that sought to re-imagine the zombie film through the lens of 21^st century cultural and scientific pre-occupations. The global blockbuster, and critical, success of these films served to launch a renaissance of zombie cinema that continues to dominate contemporary horror films. Like the vampire, the new zombie film has been reconceived through the language of science via discourses of virology and pandemic, but also through the language of 21^st century media, in the form of the found footage film. This chapter discusses this new, post-Romero, zombie film in the light of 9/11 and the growing culture of apocalypse that dominates contemporary media. Case studies include [REC], 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Dawn of the Dead.

This chapter considers the representation of gender in the late 1970s and 1980s in the so-called blockbuster era, focusing specifically on the science fiction genre. The aural dimension of these types of films immediately conjures up ideas of space, technology and other worlds and thus potentially appear as acoustically distinct from the experimental or avant-garde nature of New Hollywood or the loud, pervasive sounds of weaponry, shouting and male camaraderie in war films, which, as previously discussed, explored alternative representations of masculinity in mainstream US cinema. Financially, the most successful American films to emerge in the post-New Hollywood era were Hollywood blockbusters. These films, which were popular from the late 1970s onwards, saw a return to classical movie formulas and genres which, according to some scholars, also saw the re-emergence of strong male heroes and passive female characters and thus a noticeable return to binary representations of gender.

In her chapter “The ‘Division Blockbuster’ in South Korea: Evolution of Cinematic Representations of War and Division,” Hyangjin Lee presents a snapshot of three distinct periods in the history of South Korean cinema. Beginning with an overview of state censorship and the burgeoning democracy movement of the 1980s, Lee goes on to discuss “nationalism in the arena of cultural consumption” during the increasingly globalized 1990s, before finally tackling the innovation of a new mode of war films that she describes as the “division blockbuster.” With the Korean War and the subsequent national division between North and South Korea emerging as the predominate focus, theme, and often obsession of these films, the traumatic memory of the war continues to fuel a rich variety of commercial genre forms, from mainstream war films (Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War) and spy thrillers (Shiri, The Secret Reunion) to horror films (The Guard Post).