There’s a post that often does the rounds on social media. It’s a Parma teamsheet from the back end of the 90s, and features a quite frankly ridiculous set of players: Buffon, Cannavaro, Thuram, Veron, Baggio, Chiesa and Crespo amongst them. It’s basically a who’s who of 90s football.

It probably does so well on social media because it’s the perfect, nostalgic reminder of just how good Serie A was in the 1990s. Even a provincial team like Parma were attracting some of the world’s best players, and they went on to win the UEFA Cup when the UEFA Cup was almost on par with the Champions League.

But it’s also fascinating because of how Parma have fallen so dramatically after those halcyon days. They only returned to Serie A in 2018 having been as far down as Serie D, and seemed to constantly be on the verge of bankruptcy for much of that exile.

In many ways, Parma are the perfect symbol of Serie A’s decline since the 1990s. Back then it was unquestionably the best league in the world. Now, it’s a shock if an Italian team even reaches the quarter-final of the Champions League.

The question is: how did we get here?

The story of Serie A’s rise and fall starts, funnily enough, in Middlesbrough’s Ayresome Park. In 1966, that was the venue for one of the biggest ever World Cup shocks: North Korea 1-0 Italy.

In 1966, that scoreline was every bit as incredible as it would be today. It meant that Italy exited the tournament at the group stage - a disastrous performance for a team that entered as one of the favourites. And as it probably would do today, it led to grand plans and big overhauls from the country’s football association. Sound familiar?

The Italian football federation’s response to the defeat was dramatic: they immediately banned Italian clubs from signing foreign players. The idea was that the presence of foreign players in Serie A was harming the development of homegrown players. Banning them would mean more playing time for Italian players, giving them more opportunity to develop and resulting in a stronger national team. That was the line of thinking, anyway - and it’s something that plenty of national associations (including Mexico, Turkey and China) do to this day, though its efficacy has never really been proven.

In Italy, the ban on foreign players lasted from 1966 until 1980. In that time, only one Italian club would win the European Cup: Milan in 1969 (and even that was thanks to the help of two foreign players who were allowed to stay in Serie A because they arrived pre-1966). For some context, in the 10 years before the ban, three Italian teams won the European Cup and another two were losing finalists.

Even if the performance of Italy’s club teams was declining, the national team managed to recover from their 1966 nadir. They reached the final of the 1970 World Cup and, shortly after the ban was lifted, won the competition for the third time in 1982. That victory ignited interest in Italian football and meant that foreign players suddenly saw it as an attractive place to play football again. Trevor Francis - the world’s first £1m player - moved to Sampdoria in 1982, Zbigniew Boniek went to Juventus after starring for Poland at the 1982 World Cup, and Danish greats Michael Laudrup and Preben Elkjær followed soon after.

The trickle of foreign players soon turned into a stream. By the mid-1980s, Serie A had established itself as the strongest league in Europe alongside England’s Division One. Italian teams reached the final of the European Cup in 1983 and 1984 and then Juventus won it in 1985, defeating Liverpool in the final. That match would prove to be a pivotal moment for Europe’s top two leagues.

That’s because the 1985 final became better known as the Heysel Disaster; a stadium crush which led to the death of 39 Juventus fans and injuries to 600 more. Though the tragedy was more down to the decrepit state of the stadium than the direct actions of the Liverpool fans, they were deemed solely responsible by UEFA. English clubs were banned indefinitely from European competition, with the ban eventually lifted in 1990 (Liverpool were allowed back in 1991).

The tragedy created a chasm in European football. With the top English clubs unable to play in European competition, the continent’s leading players started flocking to Italy. Plenty of British players also starting making the move to Italy - between 1985 and 1992, Gordan Cowans, Paul Rideout, Paul Elliot, Ian Rush, David Platt, Des Walker and Gazza all moved to Serie A teams.

Though the influx of foreign players undoubtedly helped Serie A become the strongest league in the world, a transfer loophole would have an even bigger effect on the quality of the league.

In 1980, the ban on foreign players in Serie A was finally lifted. Now, each team was allowed one foreign player in their squad, which gradually increased to three by 1988.

But in reality, there were far more foreign-born players in Serie A during this period. That’s because most clubs benefited from a loophole that allowed oriundi - foreign-born players with Italian ancestry - to count as domestic players. It allowed Serie A teams to take advantage of the huge Italian diaspora in South America, and oriundi started flocking to Serie A in huge numbers, including the likes of Javier Zanetti, Diego Simeone, Gabriel Batistuta and Juan Sebastian Verón.

The oriundi helped set up an era of unprecedented dominance for Italian teams on the European stage. From 1989 to 1999, Serie A had at least one finalist in a European competition every season. In four of those years Italy had a finalist in all three competitions, and in 1990 Italian clubs won all three.

The era also produced some of the greatest teams of all time. The all-conquering AC Milan team of the late 1980s won Serie A and the European Cup in 1987-88 before retaining their European title the following season - the first team to do so since Real Madrid in the 1950s. They went on to win three consecutive Serie A titles in the 1990s and dominated European football, spearheaded by the legendary Dutch trio of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard.

Yet the rest of the ‘Seven Sisters’ also built era-defining teams. Inter won the UEFA Cup three times and had the world’s best player in Ronaldo. Juventus won three Serie A titles and reached the European Cup final three times, winning it once. Lazio were bought by food tycoon Sergio Cragnotti and signed the likes of Paul Gascoigne, Juan Sebastián Verón, Hernán Crespo, Marcelo Salas, Christian Vieri and Pavel Nedvěd.

External factors were also helping to fuel the success of these Serie A teams. In the mid-1980s the Italian economy was booming, largely down to a revival in the manufacturing, fashion and export sectors. It even surpassed the UK economy in 1987, in an event that became known as il sorpasso. This was making a lot of people rich, and those rich people were suddenly looking for somewhere to spend their money. They often landed on football clubs.

Speaking to the BBC in 2026, Italian football expert James Richardson explained how seemingly every Serie A club in the 80s and 90s had a wealthy local ‘padrone’ - a benefactor who would spend lavish amounts of lira on the team. “They would curry favour in their city, demonstrating their largesse by spending large sums of money on players that they didn’t always need,” he explained.

Perhaps the best example of this was Calisto Tanzi, the CEO of food conglomerate Parmalat. His company bankrolled the success of Parma in the 1990s, who went from a middling Serie B team in 1989 to one of the leading clubs in Europe by the end of the decade. Their big spending was atypical of Serie A at the time. Between 1984 and 2000 the world transfer fee record was broken 12 times - nine of which were by Italian clubs.

However, Parma’s success was short-lived. Their demise mirrors the fall of Serie A and the Italian economy itself.

Though Italian football boomed in the 80s and 90s, there were warning signs during this period that suggested darker times were ahead.

One issue was financial sustainability. Though total Serie A revenue was €400m in 1992 - compared to €255m in England’s top league - by 1996/97 the newly-established Premier League had overtaken the Italian league in revenue. That was partly because of the padrone-fuelled business model of most Serie A teams, but other factors were at play too.

For example, in England the Hillsborough stadium disaster had led to the Taylor Report recommending the construction of all-seater stadia. It meant that over the course of the 1990s, many English clubs started redeveloping or even rebuilding their stadiums, maximising their revenues and bringing them in line with modern design standards. It helped to boost club revenues.

But in Italy, most clubs played in poorly-maintained, decaying stadiums that were often owned by the local council. That meant they didn’t make much money from them and were unable to modernise them to the same degree. In some ways this was quite unfortunate - several Italian stadiums were redeveloped ahead of the World Cup they hosted in 1990, but because the early 1990s were a turning point in stadium design, the stadiums soon went out of fashion. Juventus’ Stadio delle Alpi was built in 1990 but demolished as early as 2009 because it was deeply unpopular with supporters.

The Italian economy may have been booming in the 1980s, but economists have since pointed out that such growth was always unsustainable. According to one, ‘the ratio of government debt to GDP snowballed from 56% in 1981 to 94% in 1991.’ It meant that ‘the economic system was high from the injection of public money,’ leading to accusations of a drugged economy propped up by public spending.

In many ways, the Italian economy had similarities with the padrone-led system in Serie A. Though these clubs spent lavishly in the 90s, many had spent beyond their means. By 2001, total player costs among leading clubs averaged 125% of revenue in Italy compared to 85% in Spain and 75% in England. Without the ticket revenue to support them, Italian clubs began to suffer and sell.

Premier League clubs also started to establish themselves as global brands in the 90s. Manchester United opened club shops in Asia, Australia and the Middle East, and started to develop a global fanbase. Arsenal’s highly international squad and slick style of play started to draw admirers from across the globe. And of course, the global dominance of the English language certainly helped to spread the Premier League’s appeal.

The final nail in the coffin for Serie A’s dominance came with the seismic Bosman ruling in 1995. It removed foreign player caps in domestic and European competition, meaning that Serie A’s oriundi advantage had suddenly been wiped out. Other leagues could now recruit more aggressively from around Europe, and they did: Chelsea became the first European team to name an all-foreign starting XI in 1999.

The penny was now starting to drop for Italian teams. Their on-the-pitch success was masking deeper, underlying issues which were beginning to play out. It came to a head in 2001 when Juventus’ star player (and arguably the best player in the world) Zinedine Zidane joined Real Madrid for a world record fee of €77.5m. As Steven G. Mandis writes in his book What Happened to Serie A*, ‘before then, it was widely believed that the best players in the world played in Italy and wanted to play in Italy. Zidane leaving Italy was the biggest sign yet that things were changing.’

Italian teams continued to have success on the pitch into the 2000s, and 2003 even saw an all-italian Champions League final between AC Milan and Juventus. But since then, European success has become evermore fleeting for Italian clubs. Milan won the competition in 2007, and then Inter did so in 2010. Their success turned out to be the last European title won by an Italian team.

A series of scandals didn’t help the league either. First there was the passaportopoli scandal of the early 2000s, which alleged that Italian teams were faking the Italian ancestry of South Americans and even forging passports for them. Then, the 2006 calciopoli match-fixing scandal left Juventus in Serie B and the league’s reputation in tatters.

Nowadays, the Premier League is utterly dominant. The league reported total club revenues of €7.1bn (£5.9bn) in 2023 - that’s almost double the combined revenues of its nearest challengers, Spain’s La Liga and Germany’s Bundesliga. Serie A sits fourth in the league; now someway off its minted competitors. There was no Italian club in the top 10 of the Deloitte Football Money League 2026.

On the pitch, the financial advantages that Premier League clubs have long enjoyed are starting to play out on the pitch. Since 2018-19, English clubs have won more Champions League titles (three) than any other country. Seven English teams have reached the final in that period; the next best is France with three (all of which were Paris Saint-Germain). It doesn’t quite match the dominance of Italy in the 1990s, but it’s starting to reach that point.

Whether Italian teams will ever again reach the heights of the 1990s is open to debate. However, the same structural issues that held the league back then still exist today. Most clubs still don’t own their stadiums, and many of them are in a state of disrepair. The league’s TV revenues are dwarfed by other countries, and their teams have become global brands in a way that Serie A clubs never managed. Football clubs are now multi-billion pound businesses, and local padrones can’t simply buy their way to success like they once did.

Football has changed, and Italy failed to keep up. But at least we’ll always have the social media content of those legendary teamsheets.

*I sourced some key information for this article from Steven’s excellent book What Happened to Serie A. If this article has whet your appetite for a deep dive into Serie A, please consider buying it.

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‘Everybody was rocking and roaring. Galatea and Marie with beer in their hands were standing on their chairs, shaking and jumping. Groups of guys stumbled in from the street, falling over one another to get there. “Stay with it, man!” roared a man with a foghorn voice, and let out a big groan that must have been heard clear in Sacramento, ah-haa! “Whoo!” said Dean. He was rubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face.’

Reading back this passage from Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, it’s difficult to believe that the thrilling scene he’s writing about is a jazz gig. However, back in the 1940s - when the novel is set - jazz was undoubtedly the most popular and exciting music genre on the planet. Its biggest stars were global celebrities and their shows packed out concert halls all over the Western world. The 1920s were christened the Jazz Age, and the American Dialect Society even named ‘jazz’ as the word of the 20th century.

But just 20 years after the book was set, jazz was pretty much dead in the water. It had long been displaced from its position at the peak of music, and in 1967 Melody Maker even wrote a requiem for the jazz ‘we loved and knew so well.’

So how exactly did jazz disappear from the public eye so quickly and so dramatically?

Though the first jazz record was technically Livery Stable Blues by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, the music’s origins stretch back to the African-American slave communities of the mid-1800s. Back then, jazz wasn’t really jazz in the way that we understand it today. It was a mishmash of various different genres such as ragtime, blues and gospel.

But jazz began to crystallise in New Orleans in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Mainly Black musicians would hone their craft late at night in the city’s red-light district, performing in late-night bars and brothels in an area known as Storyville.

Jazz was also popular in other American cities at this time, most notably Chicago and New York. But because The Original Dixieland Jazz Band were the first group to put out a recording, New Orleans Jazz became the genre’s first dominant style. And when the record was released, it was a sensation. Distribution networks had been established throughout the West in the decades preceding World War 1, meaning the record travelled far and wide - far wider than any other recording had to date. Though it has been claimed that Livery Stable Blues was the first million-selling record, that’s a bit of an urban myth: only 250,000 copies were ever manufactured.

Still, the record took New Orleans Jazz international and proved to be the foundation for the first golden age of jazz. Because when alcohol was outlawed in the United States in 1920, jazz rapidly became the music of Prohibition-era America. Jazz bands were hired to play in illicit speakeasies, and they earned huge sums (often from criminal gangs) for doing so.

And so jazz soon became associated with alcohol, illegality and immorality - according to the older generation anyway, who dismissed it as ‘an irritation of the nerves of hearing’ whilst simultaneously seeing it as a genuine threat to society. As if to illustrate the moral panic over jazz, at different points throughout the 1920s the New York Times blamed jazz for the quality of Italian tenors, a poor trade balance with Hungary, a classical musician’s fatal heart attack and frightening bears in Siberia.

As Stuart Nicholson writes in his history of the genre, “jazz music quickly became associated with youth, energy and a revolt against convention.”

But as we moved into the 1930s and the end of Prohibition, jazz became more polished, more professional, and more popular. It also went bigger in every sense of the word. Small, tight-knit groups playing in dimly-lit speakeasies gave way to huge ensembles playing in lavish ballrooms. This shift was partly out of necessity: it was before the time of electronic PA systems, and so to make yourself heard in big ballrooms, you needed more musicians. Hence the arrival of the big band era.

With big bands came big names. During this time, some of the biggest stars in jazz were born: Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway among them. The music had become popular not just in America, but globally. European audiences had been captivated by American jazz musicians performing live on their shores, while the onset of radio in the 1930s helped widen jazz’s appeal even further.

By 1939, jazz was undoubtedly the most popular music genre in the world. Then World War 2 hit. With most recorded jazz music still emanating from the US, it meant the American recording ban enacted in 1942 had big repercussions on the world of music. Once again, jazz went back to only being performed in the clubs of New Orleans, Chicago and New York. Crucially, that didn’t stop its progress. Because whilst the world went to war, a new form of jazz was waiting to emerge; one which would reenergise the genre and help maintain its position as number one.

When bebop first appeared in 1945, it sounded like it came out of nowhere - which in a sense, it had. But in actual fact, it had been ruminating in the bars and clubs of New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side during the wartime years, waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Quicker, faster and more intense than the previous iterations of jazz, bebop hurled the music forward into the second half of the twentieth century. It’s at this point in the story where Kerouac’s vivid descriptions of jazz come from, and you can get a sense of just how thrilling bebop was in his writing:

“Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar, and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spreadeagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast - Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink and wire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes, somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn, and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air.”

The wartime intensity and disquiet of bebop soon transitioned towards softer, smoother sounds that marked the optimistic new era of the 1950s. The decade also marked the emergence of some of jazz’s biggest ever names, including Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.

In fact, writer Fred Kaplan argues that jazz hit its peak in the 1950s; specifically in 1959. That was the year of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Time Out by Dave Brubeck, Ah Um by Charles Mingus, and The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman.

However, the signs of jazz’s downfall were already on the horizon.

There’s a scene from the 1957 film Jailhouse Rock in which the film’s protagonist Elvis Presley encounters a group of jazz fans. But they’re not presented as cool, youthful, or rebellious, like they may have been 10 years earlier. Instead, they’re depicted as elitist, pretentious and out of touch. The scene suggests that now, rock’n’roll was the true music of youth and rebellion.

The scene may have arrived a couple of years before jazz’s supposed peak in 1959, but it suggests that jazz was already losing favour with young people. And after the emergence of pop and rock in the 1960s, jazz had been well and truly shunted into the background.

Suddenly, jazz - for the first time since it had emerged in the late 1910s - was seen as out of touch.

In the 1960s, some jazz musicians attempted to bridge the gap between their own genre and the dominant musical styles of the time: for instance, Miles Davis experimented with jazz-rock fusion, with mixed and middling results. But many went the other way, often by doubling down on increasingly experimental and inaccessible styles. One of those was free jazz: a careering, rule-free subgenre of jazz that had the tendency to sound like a group of cats being strangled. It only reinforced the idea that jazz was increasingly being made by a diminishing numbers of pretentious musicians, who were only really making the music to please themselves and their peers.

Though the 1960s were one of the most vibrant and creative decades in the wider world of music, they were lean times for jazz. In 1967, Melody Maker published a requiem for the jazz that “we loved and knew so well.” DownBeat magazine - a famous jazz publication - also declared it dead, with their attempt to stay relevant perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Jimi Hendrix was added to their Jazz Hall of Fame in 1970. The Atlantic, meanwhile, summed things up nicely: “Jazz seemed dominated and diminished by rock-oriented fusion,” it reads, “marginalised by outré experimentation, and disconnected from the youth audience.”

The subsequent decades weren’t much kinder to jazz. Miles Davis carried the genre on his back for a number of years, but the 1980s are seen as the first decade not associated with any new style or movement.

Still, at least jazz still had its finger on the pulse of society. Stuart Nicholson notes that in the 80s, jazz became a microcosm of the individualistic, money-obsessed era of Thatcher and Regan. Musicians started to strike out on their own, favouring solo albums and prioritising the idea of the individual star rather than the traditional group dynamics of jazz bands. Society? There’s no such thing as society.

In the mid-1990s, jazz’s downfall was immortalised in a comedy sketch from The Fast Show, in which Louis Balfour is the pretentious, ultra laid-back host of The Jazz Show.

“Seemingly having done his ‘research’, he introduces his guests by comparing them to avant-garde jazz musicians or describing their style/technique by using complex musical phraseology,” reads the show’s Wikipedia entry. “These guests usually turn out to be utterly talentless ‘experimentalists’, generally to his bemusement. Although he also often appears to appreciate the music, on one occasion he follows his apparent appreciation with a look of disgust. His catchphrase ‘Nice!’ is delivered after turning to a different camera for that word only; he later delivers other words in a similar manner.”

In his book Unapologetic Expression, André Marmot writes how “The Fast Show sketch branded jazz as deeply uncool for an entire generation.” Later in the book, he wonders something which many jazz fans may have also been wondering: “How did it go from that, to this?”

The reasons, as ever, are complex.

The first is sheer probability. No genre is ever going to stay on top decade after decade - that jazz managed to do so is testament to its adaptability.

Back when jazz first reigned, there simply weren’t as many genres of music out there. It meant that staying on top was far easier than it is now. And jazz evolved into so many different branches that people could easily opt for divergent styles. It was a broad church that could encompass different tastes and different people.

Starting in the 1950s, other genres also gradually pushed jazz to one side. First it was Elvis and his Jailhouse Rock, then it was The Beatles and Dylan and all the rest in the 1960s. By the end of the 1970s, there were suddenly more genres out there than you could ever have imagined: funk, disco, punk, psychedelia, pop, rock, house. There was simply too much competition outside of jazz and too little innovation inside jazz for it to compete.

Counter-intuitively, jazz’s longevity also started to work against it. Spending 40 years at the top meant that the genre had plenty of opportunities to grow, expand and experiment. But decade-after-decade of experimentation gradually led jazz down ever-more avant-garde paths. Free jazz was frequently unlistenable, jazz fusion was hit and miss, nu jazz was…nu jazz. Such divergence from jazz’s traditional roots disenfranchised plenty of fans and led to those accusations of pretension.

Jazz was in the doldrums for many years. However, there are signs that it’s making a comeback. Marmot’s book is dedicated to the recent ‘explosion’ of UK jazz, something which was topped off by jazz group Ezra Collective’s Mercury Prize win in 2023. There’s certainly a feeling that it’s no longer seen as uncool or pretentious in the way that it was in The Fast Show.

That being said, it’s also unlikely to ever reign the airwaves in the same way it once did. Maybe jazz will never get back to being that anymore - but it’s not quite the deeply uncool form of music it was once painted as.

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You probably know about Avatar: the film about blue people* that’s also the highest-grossing film of all time. But you may not know that the majority of Avatar’s $2.9 billion earnings came from 3D screenings.

This was in 2009, and as you can probably imagine, such mind-boggling figures led to something of a 3D renaissance in the film industry. In 2008, the percentage of UK box office sales generated through 3D films was around 2%. By the end of 2010, that figure had skyrocketed to almost 30%.

However, that turned out to be the peak of 3D film. By 2017, it was once again making up less than 5% of box office revenue in the UK.

So how did 3D film go from spearheading the highest-grossing movie of all time to a forgotten relic? This is the rise and fall of 3D film.

*I’m also available for film reviews.

The first thing to say about the rise and fall of 3D film is: which one? Because this Avatar-inspired boom wasn’t the first time that 3D cinema has gotten big.

The first 3D wave came all the way back in the 1950s, at a time when those Hollywood execs were worrying once again. This time they were concerned that the explosion of the home television would reduce box office takings at the cinema - which to be fair, was completely justified. In the US in 1946, cinema attendances peaked at an extraordinary 4.7 billion. That figure had plummeted to 2.8 billion by 1952.

So when 3D came along, it was perfect. People couldn’t watch 3D shows at home, so it was something totally unique that cinemas could use to attract the TV generation. The first big 3D film of this era was 1952’s Bwana Devil, which I haven’t seen but am nonetheless confident is absolutely terrible. It’s about a team of colonial-era railway-builders in British East Africa who kill a bunch of man-eating lions.

The snooty film critics weren’t impressed - Hollis Alpert said ‘it is the worst movie in my rather faltering memory’ - but what do they know? The film was a box office smash, grossing $2.7 million in the US and Canada alone. That’s about $32.5 million in today’s money. 3D was here to stay!

And for a while at least, it seemed like that might be the case. The next few years saw a flurry of 3D films, though none can be said to have really stood the test of time - apart from one, that is. Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder was originally intended to be shown in 3D, but ended up being displayed in 2D in most cinemas. The reasons for this illustrate the reasons behind 3D film’s first fall.

Firstly, projecting a 3D film back in 1953 took a hell of a lot of effort. They required two sets of film to be projected simultaneously, which was very difficult to get right. If the two prints were even slightly out of sync, the film would become unwatchable and actually quite painful - headaches and eyestrains were a common symptom of an out-of-sync 3D film. This also required two projectionists to be working at the same time.

Because you needed so many reels of film to be able to show a 3D movie, it meant that most feature-length films required a short intermission to allow for extra film to be loaded into the projector. Given that a film like Bwana Devil had a running time of just 79 minutes, it’s easy to see how these intermissions could get quite annoying quite quickly.

Then there was the issue of the glasses. They were uncomfortable, especially if you already had to wear glasses. They could lead to headaches and even motion sickness in some. They dulled the vibrant colours of films, reducing them down to a sepia-tinged freeze frame. Oh, and they also looked ridiculous.

Despite these issues, 3D films continued to be released fairly prolifically up until 1954. Then there was a dramatic drop-off. Forty-six 3D films were released that year. In 1956, just two 3D films hit the big screen. Looks like 3D film wasn’t here to stay after all.

Though 3D films did see another brief renaissance in the 1980s - the first time since the 50s that more than 10 made it to cinemas in a calendar year - it never reached the same peaks that we saw in the 50s. Until 2009, that is.

It’s not outrageous to say that the most recent rise of 3D films was down to one man, and one man alone: James Cameron. The Avatar director was an early and passionate advocate of 3D, and Avatar was one of the first 3D films that made the most of the technology’s possibilities. It was filmed using a 3D camera and the movie’s CGI was also done in 3D, unlike many films which tacked on 3D effects in post-production.

Plus, it probably helped that a lot of cinemas had to screen it in 3D or else they wouldn’t be able to screen it at all (out of the 3,457 theatres that showed it in the US, 2,032 showed it in 3D). According to one Redditor, “I work at a movie theater, and per Cameron’s request (literally, that’s what the company-wide email says), approx. 75% of showtimes have to be in 3D, which includes every IMAX showtime. I’d imagine other national chains were given the same direction.”

It seemed that Cameron’s deity-like worship of 3D was getting film fans excited: more than 90% of advance ticket sales for Avatar were for 3D screenings. Again, the economics of the format helped. 3D films took more resources to screen and were a unique experience for cinemagoers, which meant cinemas could justify charging more money to see them. And at first, cinemagoers were largely happy to pay the premium. Around $1.7 billion of Avatar’s colossal $2.9 billion takings were from 3D screenings. Was 3D…here to stay?

Initially, it looked like it would be. Hollywood execs, recognising another opportunity, suddenly released almost every film in 3D. And they fared well. Shrek Forever After took 60% of its opening weekend sales from 3D screenings. Clash of the Titans took 55% of its total revenue from 3D screenings. Alice in Wonderland’s proportion of 3D revenue was 70%.

In fact, the glut of 3D releases that year was even causing traffic jams in cinemas. “For a while, Hollywood was hanging back to see what would happen and whether 3D would catch on,” said entertainment journalist Kim Masters in 2010. “Then Avatar happened, and now everyone’s scrambling to make sure their popcorn movies can be seen in 3D. So along comes How to Train Your Dragon this Friday, and Warner Bros. is coming in with Clash of the Titans next week, there’s still Alice In Wonderland - and Avatar is still playing on some 3D screens. So there is in fact a traffic jam.”

This backlog of films was even leading to Godfather-style threats from competing families production companies. “Paramount Pictures is telling theaters that if they don’t show the upcoming DreamWorks-produced Dragon on a 3D screen, then it will withhold from the theater a 2D version of the movie to play instead,” reads a 2010 Washington Post report.

“If you have one 3D screen available and you don’t play Dragon, they’re not going to give you the version in 2D,” one California theater operator reportedly said. “It’s an underhanded threat.”

These 3D films weren’t just causing headaches for cinemagoers - cinemas were suffering too. Though 3D technology had come on considerably since that film about man-eating lions**, it still faced similar issues to before. Cinema screens had to be modified in order to be able to show 3D films, and there simply weren’t enough to keep up with demand. In 2010 it was estimated that there were around 3,500 3D screens in the United States and Canada; less than 10% of the total number of screens. “That’s not enough to accommodate two 3D movies at the same time, let alone three,” reckoned the Los Angeles Times.

Traffic issues aside, 2010 still turned out to be 3D film’s golden year. It accounted for 22% of box office revenue in the US & Canada (which equated to $2.2 billion), and 28% in the UK. Of the top 10 grossing films in 2010, six of them were available in 3D. It really, genuinely looked like 3D was here to stay.

“We are well beyond fad phase,” declared Masters at the start of 2010. “There are people - including me - who think that this will in fact become the standard, and pretty soon we’ll even be watching 3D movies at home.”

However, dig a little deeper beneath the surface, and the warning signs were there for all to see.

**just reiterating again that I’m available for film reviews.

Though 2010 saw a glut of high-grossing 3D films, only Avatar (and arguably Dragon) had really wowed audiences. In many more, the 3D element had felt tacked on or unnecessary.

For example, Clash of the Titans had pocketed tens of millions from 3D screenings, but was initially only supposed to be shown in 2D - it was hastily converted to 3D to capitalise on Avatar’s success. However, it was widely panned by fans and critics alike. A film reviewer from the Chicago Times reckoned the film was actually worse in 3D, whilst in 2013, the film’s director (yes, the director) called the 3D conversion ‘rushed and horrible’ and ‘a gimmick to steal money from the audience.’ Ouch.

The Clash of the Titans fiasco knocked the public’s confidence in 3D films. Where Avatar had broken down barriers and created a genuinely stunning movie, the flood of bolted-on films that followed in its wake seriously damaged the reputation of 3D movies. Gulliver’s Travels, The Last Airbender and Mars Needs Moms were all either expensive flops or criticised by critics.

There was also the cost element. Studio execs reckoned it cost an extra $10 million to shoot a film in 3D, making it vital to recoup those extra dollars in cinemas. And so if a film didn’t get at least 50% of its revenue from 3D screenings, it was going to struggle. In 2011, that started to happen regularly. None of the 3D films released in 2011 hit that magical 50% mark. In the first half of 2011, 3D revenues fell by 21% in the UK. Over the course of the year, 3D revenues in the US and Canada fell by $400m to $1.8 billion.

Still the industry insisted that all was well despite all the evidence to the contrary. “It’s institutionalised now,” said Brandon Gray, founder of film-industry website Box Office Mojo in 2011. “There’s no going back.”

It turns out there was a going back. 3D films gradually became rarer and rarer, and revenues started getting smaller and smaller. By 2017, 3D takings in the US and Canada had plummeted to $1.3 billion. In the UK, they had gone from a 30% market share to a 5% market share. That market share has only continued to shrink.

It’s not that 3D films have disappeared entirely. James Cameron has continued his one-man mission to boost 3D film-making with the release of the two subsequent Avatar sequels. Other, isolated examples have shown off the possibilities of the technology.

But the same problems that were there 70 years ago remain today. 3D rarely adds anything extra to a film, and even if it does, it’s rarely enough to justify the elevated ticket price. The 3D glasses remain clunky and uncomfortable. They can still give you headaches and eye strain. It remains expensive to make and screen 3D films - often prohibitively so.

What’s more, other technologies have now appeared. For example, 4DX is a kind of sensory film experience where your seat sways and special effects are sprayed at you from the seat in front. And maybe worst of all for those Hollywood execs, 3D is no longer exclusive to the cinema. With the rise of VR headsets, you can now just as easily watch a 3D film at home.

While you should never say never, 3D will never return to those heady heights of 2010. But during those golden years, it really felt like it was going to change the world.

“It was a game-changing opportunity for the industry,” says film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. “But we blew it.”

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The first thing you notice when you walk through the doors of The Rutland Arms in Sheffield isn’t the scent of stout or the smell of pub grub, but a big metallic box in the centre of the room. And it holds a kind of mystical power over the punters here. Every few minutes someone sidles up to it, pokes some buttons, swipes a card, and then fills the room with the sound of anything from Miley Cyrus to Megadeth. This process seems to repeat itself endlessly, despite the pub only being half-full.

Given its popularity here, you’d think the jukebox in The Rutland would be replicated at pubs up and down the country. And for many years, it would have been. But recent years have slowly seen the disappearance of jukeboxes from our pubs, replaced instead with generic Spotify playlists, the hum of 24-hour news channels or simply Spoons-esque silence.

This vague feeling of loss is supported by cold, hard numbers. Toby Hoyt, managing director of the biggest jukebox provider in the UK, recently told The Lock In podcast that his company supplied 15,000 digital jukeboxes across the UK in 2015. Now, they supply about 10,000: a 33% drop in the past 10 years.

Yet the reasons behind the jukebox’s fall from grace are unclear. It’s all the more strange given the influential role they’ve played in British culture over the years.

Jukeboxes first started appearing in the UK in the mid-to-late 1940s, originally as a kind of niche fascination in amusement arcades and fairgrounds. In the immediate post-war years they were still a rare sight; there were thought to be less than 100 jukeboxes in Britain in 1945.

From these slow beginnings, jukeboxes became really popular, really quickly. By 1958, it’s estimated that there were more than 13,000 of them across the country. But it wasn’t pubs that propelled this early boom. It can instead be put down to another cultural phenomenon that was sweeping the UK: milk bars.

A kind of proto-dessert parlour, milk bars served milkshakes, coffees and desserts to a predominantly teenage clientele who couldn’t get served in pubs. Though they weren’t exactly a new thing - the first milk bar in the UK opened in 1935 and by 1938 there were more than 1,000 - in the 1950s they established themselves as the main meeting point and hangout spot for young people. That’s in large part down to the presence of jukeboxes in them.

A Guardian article from 1956 outlines how important jukeboxes quickly became to milk bars. “Mr Stanley Morris, a Manchester manufacturer, has a revealing story about his first “placing,” reads the report. “He selected a small milk bar which was clearly suffering from the competition of three more imposing establishments near by, and lent its owner a juke-box on specially favourable financial terms. Within a few months the rivals had all asked for machines to win back some of their lost customers.”

In fact, milk and coffee bars reached such a level of prominence that they were said to have triggered a youth revolution in 50s Britain. “Along with the growth of milk and coffee bars, the jukebox gave teenagers an ‘escape’ from the parental gaze and a freedom to explore their own tastes in music, fashion and styles,” explains the team behind Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution, a joint project between Mirador Arts and Lancaster University. The project highlighted the importance of jukeboxes to the growth of youth culture and the social phenomenon of coffee and milk bars.

According to the project website, jukeboxes also played an important role in spreading musical awareness throughout the country’s teens. “Jukeboxes were an important catalyst because they disseminated American music by bypassing the BBC’s near monopoly broadcasting position. Jukeboxes in this instance played a remarkably similar role to those in pre-war America, where jukeboxes circumvented racist restrictions imposed by commercial radio stations.”

Jukeboxes became so popular during this period that record companies started to send the first pressing of a new single directly to jukebox operators. They acted as a sort of market-testing device for the big record labels, since they could see how many times each song on a jukebox had been played.

At this point, they were also the only way that most people could listen to their own music outside their home. The Sony Walkman was still 30 years away, and the iPod wasn’t even a glint in the eye.

Throughout the 1950s, pubs had largely resisted the jukebox craze. They often refused to get on board with youth-led trends like this, with young people looking upon pubs with similarly cynical eyes. But as the milk bar craze slowly died out in the 1960s (largely replaced by coffee or espresso bars), jukeboxes started to become widespread in pubs. Indeed, by the end of the decade they were pivotal to the pub experience.

Back then, many pubs were defined by their jukebox. Because this was the age of physical jukeboxes, each one would have had its own selection of vinyl records chosen by the landlord. You could pick a song, but only within certain parameters set out by that pub. It gave each pub a distinct personality that drew certain crowds in.

It means that if you wanted to hear a specific artist when you were out, you had to find a pub that had them on the jukebox. In Sheffield, The Nelson was said to be the place for hard rock like Led Zep and Deep Purple. The Sportsman was a little more proggy; think Pink Floyd and Genesis. Meanwhile, The Elephant Inn was a refuge for Irish immigrants to listen to music from their own shores. Similar scenarios would have played out in countless other UK cities at the time.

For many people, the pub jukebox wasn’t just a metallic box in the corner of a dark pub - it acted as a gateway into new music and new communities. The jukebox helped you find your own people.

After the explosion of the pub jukebox in the 60s and 70s, operators introduced new innovations over the years to keep patrons interested.

The first of those was the video jukebox, which started appearing in pubs in the 1980s. Instead of just hearing the audio from a track, you’d be able to watch an accompanying music video for the song you had selected. When these jukeboxes were first introduced into pubs, they cost 50p for two plays (£1.80 in today’s money) and led to plenty of moral wrangling over whether or not they would kill pub conversation.

Source: BBC Facebook

Though video jukeboxes proved to be a bit of a passing fad, jukeboxes have generally been able to keep pace with technological change in the music industry. CD jukeboxes slowly started to replace vinyl versions in the 90s, before digital took hold in the 00s. This shift to digital certainly didn’t mark the start of the jukebox’s decline - you could argue they were part of the pub furniture right up until the 2010s.

However, the sight of a pub jukebox has gradually become rarer and rarer in recent years. According to a 2025 survey, 27% of Brits now believe that they are out of date, placing them alongside former pub staples like pickled eggs, fruit machines and pork scratchings.

Anecdotally, they now appear to be more common in smaller towns and villages, where the pace of life and speed of change isn’t quite as quick. They also seem to be more common in traditional pubs that are community-run or wet-led. Their decline appears to be sharpest in larger urban areas - Hoyt notes that Touch Tune supplies fewer jukeboxes to London than any other region.

There’s no obvious reason why jukeboxes are dying this slow death. They haven’t been replaced by anything in particular, nor have they been left behind by technological advances - the vast majority of jukeboxes will allow you to pay by card or via an app. And it’s not like most pubs opt for silence instead. Music remains a big part of the pub experience.

The jukebox’s decline is all the more mystifying given its many benefits. For one, it gives people a chance to set the atmosphere in the pub. They feel like they have a say in what’s going on, and aren’t at the behest of whatever the staff are choosing to play over the loudspeakers.

They also bring people together. When a song comes on the jukebox, tell me you don’t have a quick scan of the pub to see if you can figure out who put it on. Similarly, when you put a song on, I know you’re looking around to gauge people’s reactions. These kinds of moments can strike up welcome interactions with strangers and give us a chance to leave our silos, if only for a few moments.

Importantly, jukeboxes make money as well. Estimates on the exact amount vary, but one jukebox provider claims their machine in a central Liverpool pub makes more than £150 every week. It’s not earth-shattering, but it’s not nothing (£150 a week equates to £7,800 a year). And the income more than covers the not-insignificant PRS fees that pubs have to pay every time they play a song.

Still, jukeboxes are far from perfect. Though The Rutland’s jukebox is something of an icon in Sheffield, it does have a list of banned music above and a jerry-rigged skip button behind the bar. It suggests that turning over the power of music choice to a pub’s clientele isn’t always the best idea. Maybe there’s always going to be someone who plays ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ until they get kicked out, or empties their wallet playing ‘I’m a Barbie Girl’ on repeat. Given such situations, landlords may simply prefer to play their own music in their own pub.

Their decline may also be down to the shifting priorities of modern day pubs. Faced with increasing costs and shrinking revenues, pubs want to know how long you’re going to be there and how much money you’re going to spend. They want to optimise that process as much as possible. They want you to reserve your table online, pay via the app and leave promptly when you’re done. They want predictability, organisation and control. Jukeboxes - those big, glorious agents of chaos - offer none of those things.

Whether the decline of the jukebox is a terminal one remains to be seen. But the next time you happen across one in a pub, it’s worth remembering the role that this big metallic box has played in our country’s culture. So swipe a card, tap your app or stick a quid in - because you may not be able to do it for much longer.

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How did dubstep get so popular, and why did it die?

What happened to those 3D glasses you used to wear in the cinema?

The Rise and Fall examines how cultural moments, trends and traditions became so popular - and why they fell away. I’ll mainly be covering topics related to music, film, literature, sport and British culture, but no topic is off limits.

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