Five of the top 10 films at the US box office last weekend were made by Steven Spielberg. Jurassic Park roared in at No 1, leaving Jaws biting at its heels at No 2. Back to the Future was No 6, just above ET, with The Goonies at No 10. What people want to watch during a pandemic, it seems, is feelgood nostalgia – especially if it’s from the early- to mid-1980s and well suited to a drive-in (pretty much the only cinemas currently open in America).
“There’s an element to these films I miss now,” says Josh Gad. “They allowed the audience to lean in and didn’t speak down to them. Today, that’s been relegated to kids’ animation, as opposed to the transcendent live-action family films we grew up with, which now don’t really exist.”
Gad, best-known as the voice of Olaf the snowman in Frozen, has spent much of the past two months on a web series called Reunited Apart, in which he hosts Zoom calls between key players in his favourite movies – all mainstream 80s hits, save for Lord of the Rings. He began with The Goonies, moved on to Splash, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters – and finishes on Sunday with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
“That film in particular struck me as being so from its time,” he says. “The main character, not based on any existing IP, speaks to the camera and tells us about a day he skipped school and he’s chased by a psycho. Pitch that today and you’d be thrown out of the room.”
The inventiveness and innocence are refreshing, says Gad, likewise plots in which freaky things happen to normal people, rather than superheroes doing extraordinary things. “I’m curious about the evolution of entertainment after coronavirus,” he says. “People may want to go back to some of that, [rejecting] the cynicism that’s in a lot of stuff now, a lot of which was a direct result of 9/11.”
While audiences in the second world war were eager for films reflecting their own battles, people in the future will, thinks Gad, desire escapism and uplift: “We’re all worn down.” The enemy is different – global, mysterious, existentially troubling. “I think part of the success of Reunited Apart is that it reminds people of a time when films didn’t necessarily have a message loaded in them. They just were.”
The series, like other upbeat celebrity home efforts such as John Krasinski’s Some Good News, has been a hit. The shows have turned a substantial profit for good causes: the Lord of the Rings episode, now seen 5m times, raised more than $2m for the child anti-poverty group No Kid Hungry. (Each episode comes with a designated charity, and usually has a corporate partner.)
Stock in Gad’s brand has likewise risen, although the actor was already something of an American sweetheart for his roles in Frozen and the Beauty and the Beast remake, as well as the original Broadway cast of Book of Mormon and a run of small and big screen satires.
This eclectic CV – he’s also a dab hand on the chatshow circuit – has made for an estimable contacts book. Preparing Reunited Apart, he wrangles names for a week, shoots for a couple of hours, then hands over to an editor. Some hoped-for shows fell through: Beetlejuice, Coming to America: “I was told candidly by Eddie Murphy’s agent that it’s not gonna happen.”
You can see why some stars might hesitate. High-profile Covid outreach efforts – such as Gal Gadot’s Imagine singsong – have perilously misjudged the divide between stars and fans, reiterating difference, not commonality. The insights Reunited Apart offers into the homes of the rich and famous are more endearing: chandeliers are tactfully stashed; instead there’s a lot of distant spatulas and gentle shelves, plus the chance to admire Christopher Lloyd’s equine photography or Bill Murray’s DIY hat.
A collegiate atmosphere polices any excess self-congratulation, while the intimacy of the format acts as a clever leveller. It’s easy to feel as if you’re eavesdropping on the Zoom reunion of an actual extended family: many generations, thrilled to see one another in a time of crisis, some better with tech than others.
“We ask everyone to have a second camera, even just an iPhone,” says Gad. “But it is incredible how difficult it is for so many people, once they’ve taken the footage, to get it to us. A lot of times we just get what we get.” Our line is bad, but there seems to be some indulgent muttering about Dan Aykroyd.
Tom Hanks’s participation on the Splash show, says Gad, was powerful not just because he talked about having had coronavirus, but because “his internet didn’t work for about 80% of the shoot. That was so endearing. He really is just like us. Everybody is going through the same craziness, trying to operate in a world that’s still very new and complicated, where our sole connection is through the internet. And sometimes it just fails.”
• Reunited Apart is on YouTube.
