Whatever Happened to the Movie Overture?
Why it disappeared and why we should bring it back
When I think about the now almost dead convention of the movie overture, one word comes to mind: audacious. The idea that a movie, already three hours long, would start out by asking its audience to sit through a several-minute musical introduction looking at a screen with – at most – a still image and the word “overture” is unthinkable today for so many reasons. Even the Star Wars movies, which are bold enough to make the audience sit through a two-minute text crawl while the main title music plays, offer the viewer slightly more than Lawrence of Arabia (1962) with its four-minute overture played over a black screen.
Where did the movie overture come from, and why have we gotten away from this convention?
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