Is there any way to spot where a new act begins?

[The Old Mixer]

I think I read that George Lucas got in trouble with the unions for holding the credits to the end on Star Wars in 1977, but the practice quickly caught on and now it's uncommon for a movie to show its credits at the beginning.

I don't know if I'd say "quickly"...it eventually caught on, and may have ultimately been in emulation of what Star Wars films had always done, but it was still pretty common for films to have decent-sized opening credits into the 2000s. (Though yes, much longer credits at the end.)

 

[Christopher]

I don't know if I'd say "quickly"...it eventually caught on, and may have ultimately been in emulation of what Star Wars films had always done, but it was still pretty common for films to have decent-sized opening credits into the 2000s. (Though yes, much longer credits at the end.)

I'm not talking about how quickly it became the standard approach, just how quickly it became an acceptable approach, something that multiple films did and wasn't objected to like it was with SW in '77. Of course, the SW sequels did the same thing, and by 1990 we had cases like RoboCop 2 where they didn't even show the name of the film onscreen until the end -- another practice that's become relatively commonplace since then, but that I still find utterly bizarre. Okay, granted, if you bought a ticket to see a movie in the theater, or if you bought it on disc or clicked on it in Netflix or whatever, then you already know what its title is, so it's not as weird as leaving the front cover off a book would be. But it's still weird not to start with the title.

 

[The Old Mixer]

To me it makes a bit of conceptual sense in superhero origin movies, because you're lucky if they've started using their hero name by the end of the film.

 

[Christopher]

To me it makes a bit of conceptual sense in superhero origin movies, because you're lucky if they've started using their hero name by the end of the film.

Yeah, sometimes it feels justified in that way, but a lot of the time it doesn't.

 

[FormerLurker]

It's more than just the unions complaining about credits at the beginning/end. There are regulations in place with the cinema governing bodies that interact with the unions that actually require certain credits to run at the beginning or end. Steven Spielberg had to pay a hefty fine for only having the one title card at the beginning of Jurassic Park, for instance. And every film that doesn't even have that has to pay an even bigger penalty, because of authorship credit and things of that nature.

 

[Christopher]

It's more than just the unions complaining about credits at the beginning/end. There are regulations in place with the cinema governing bodies that interact with the unions that actually require certain credits to run at the beginning or end.

But those regulations were only established because unions fought for them and won.

 

[FormerLurker]

I never said they weren't. I'm all for unions fighting for the rights of the workers, believe me. And I'm happy when they win. My point is that it isn't merely complaining about getting credit for work done. It's about receiving that credit, and the fact that filmmakers get in big trouble, and get fined out the wazoo, when they don't give out said credits the way they're supposed to.