Platform Anxiety: Locating Authorship in Tron, Hugo, and The Lego Movie

The term platform anxiety describes an existential crisis in industrial media-making arising from fundamental changes in the technological substrates of media. Platform anxiety has been expressed and confronted by a number of films that portray forms of authorial mastery over the techniques and the technologies of filmmaking. This article focuses on industrial anxiety related to the transition to digital cinema. Through films including Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011), and The Lego Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2014), Hollywood confronts its anxieties by asserting that established industrial strategies and modes of accreditation remain valid despite cinema's changing technologies.