Is the box office really being taken over by nonfiction stories?

Would you rather see King George VI attending public events and weighing in on the brewing war in Europe, or as an anxious king who finally conquers his stutter? The box-office and critical success of 2009 Best Picture Oscar-winner The King's Speech proved that most audiences preferred the latter. As described in an article in the New York Times, recent Hollywood movies from last year's Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln to this year's Fruitvale Station and Captain Philips all
drew from real-life happenings to compose their stories. The question is whether this constitutes a trend.

In the ranks of recent Best Picture Oscar winners, actual based-on-a-true-story movies are rare. When they do exist, they often focus on a "Great Man," like the 2002 winner A Beautiful Mind, Gandhi from 1983, The King's Speech in 2009, Schindler's List in 1993 or The Last Emperor in 1988. If there's any trend, I wouldn't say it's nonfiction, but a specific kind of nonfiction that tends to hone in on one aspect of a person's life, avoiding the downfalls of a sweeping biopic.

If you look at the "great man" theory of history, it's about exploring how single people changed the world. Now that view has fallen out of favor, both among historians and, it appears, audiences.
Filmmakers are more using pathos to connect us to characters. That's what The King's Speech did with King George's speech impediment, and that's what last year's Hyde Park on Hudson failed to do with its view of FDR as a womanizer. Fruitvale Station, which just released, focuses on one day in the life of a man who is later killed, offering the tiniest glimpse of his life--and it's more powerful for it. Captain Philips, coming out in October, stars Tom Hanks as the captain of a ship taken over by Somali pirates--heroism in a small situation. Last year's Oscar nominee Argo was a funny, polished take at a corner of the Iranian hostage crisis that was inconsequential enough (and confidential enough) that its failure or success wouldn't have changed history (sorry). And George Clooney's Monuments Men, coming out this December, isn't about fighting World War II but saving art from Nazis. You can't get more tangential than that.

These days, it appears that people are more interested in the real people and small events that occurred lockstep with the events in a history book, rather than a Saving Private Ryan kind of story that immerses its characters right in the heart of one of the most pivotal battles in all of WWII, D-Day. Certainly, in this day-and-age of social media, more private glimpses of people's lives are occurring in public than ever before. We can follow celebrities on Instagram and Twitter, and politicians appear on casual late-night shows and Oprah. People aren't as interested in idolizing characters. They're more interested in empathizing with them. The small event, small man view of history is an appealing tactic that has already worked with audiences. The success or failure of this year's crop of nonfiction contenders may predict whether this trend will continue in years to come.