Cinema is now over a hundred years old, the very first movie cameras being invented all of the way back in the 1890s. With the invention of this new tool and the decades since, film has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry and is constantly changing. One may say that today’s audiences are happier sat in front of a comic book or superhero movies, or being transported to a galaxy far, far away, but in fact there are many influences to the modern film, none more popular than the casino-themed motion picture.
Casinos have influenced film in many ways over the years, and can be traced way back to the very early days of cinema, but you have to look back at the year 1965 for one of the first proper casino movies to hit cinema screens. That film was The Cincinnati Kid, a picture that saw Hollywood hot property Steve McQueen tackle a character who got himself involved in a high stakes poker game opposite one of the game’s top players. This was in the days before people took to playing in the online casinos like www.yourmobilecasinos.com, or in fact many decades before the invention of the internet itself. Of course, if you fast-forward many years, casinos became more and more popular on film, but still set their stories in the gambling world of yesteryear.
One of the most high-profile casino movies was Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 1995 masterpiece which saw Robert De Niro’s Ace Rothstein, a mob boss from Chicago take on Vegas in its heyday. The film also starred Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone and James Woods, and would go on to make millions of dollars at the worldwide box-office, and be nominated for an Oscar and multiple Golden Globes.
Since then, Casino movies continued to evolve, and since then became more popular on the silver screen. In the years since, the likes of Very Bad Things, Leaving Las Vegas, Swingers, Hard Eight, multiple Bond movies and many more have had scenes set in casinos, and the Brits even got more involved in the late 1990s with the Clive Owen film Croupier. That film saw Owen play a casino croupier who looked to his job for inspiration for his new book. It was a huge success for director Mike Hodges and catapulted Owen to Hollywood as its new leading man.
Perhaps the biggest film to hit revolving around casinos was the 2001 Warner Brothers film Ocean’s Eleven, the remake of the Rat Pack classic that saw George Clooney assemble a team to rob three big Las Vegas casinos. The film was a big success, and even led to two sequels, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen. There are even plans for a further film in 2018 called Ocean’s Eight, a film which sees a group of eight women plan a big heist in New York City.
Casino movies will continue to attract audiences and draw in millions for as long as films are around, which we hope will be for some considerable time to come.
