We have Charlie Chaplin to thank for the blockbuster

The pandemic has hit the film industry for six – but there’s a precedent to suggest that it can come back stronger. Because that’s what Hollywood did after the devastation of the Spanish Flu a century ago. As that killer virus was still ravaging post-WWI America, a great auteur was at work on a project that would change everything. 

This week sees the centenary of the result – the first ever movie blockbuster. 21 January 1921, was the US release date of Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, The Kid. Never mind the endless present-day stress about if and when anyone will ever get to see the 25th Bond film; it’s small beer compared to the significance of The Kid to the 1920s and their subsequent roaring. It’s almost impossible to conceive now what a global media event this movie was: the then biggest name in cinema spending an almost unheard of $250,000 on a staggeringly ambitious project that became an instant global smash.