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Notes -
Red Letter Media just did a review of Guardians of the Galaxy 3. In their usual tangent at the beginning of the video, Mike read off an online article of the 34 biggest movies coming out this year. Of the 34, 28 are sequels/remakes/reimaginings of existing properties. Of the remaining 6, 3 are based on real-life people (ex. Oppenheimer). That leaves three major movies in all of 2023 based entirely on original ideas, and all three are made by big, established filmmakers with lots of studio clout. This is a trend people have been recognizing for at least the last 5 years, if not the last decade.
EDIT - the RLM guys actually got a few of these wrong and the numbers are even worse than they thought. At least one of the 6 supposedly original films are based on a book (Scorcese's next project) and another is based on a true story (Taika Waititi's next film).
My question is -
Is there any historical precedence for this? Has there been a time and place where popular culture so heavily converged on recycling products that the flow of new products was stymied.
I don't want to be too doomer about this. There are still new, original, interesting movies being made, but they have been shuttled off to low-budget indie and streaming avenues. These days, if a movie is big enough to get a wide release, it is almost certainly not original. It's hard to imagine a new Star Wars (the original) or anything like it coming out today - a big, bold, truly original vision with a budget.
(Alternatively, maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television where for a variety of technical and cost reasons, interesting stuff can still be made on a big budget (ie. HBO).
This seems likely to be more the norm than the exception, historically. Spin offs and retellings of King Arthur, Robin Hood, St George, Coyote, Tarzan, or whomever is probably normal, with an actually new story every decade or so.
At the same time, I agree that whatever's going on now feels like something of a wasteland.
Maybe this has to do with the tendency to mine the same stories too quickly. But I used to binge read King Arthur anthologies, and the entire Wizard of Oz collection, so I'm not sure that's it, either. Maybe something more basic, like that the stories are just not good stories, for various reasons. I'm on board for an Ant Man story, but not the one they have, by report, actually produced. I'm on board for a How Raven Stole the Sun retelling, but not as a three hour CGI fest. If someone with the aesthetics of Miyazaki decided to retell it (that would be odd, but supposing an equivalent folktale), I would absolutely be on board. I don't so much feel inundated with retellings, as that there's a specific "memberberry" version of those retellings that's insufficiently universal, pandering too much to specific target demographics. A war movie about Judith and Holofernes could be fine and interesting, but not the way it would probably be produced in actuality. Companies are recycling too narrowly, from their own slate, rather than from the broader catalogue of world civilizations.
Yes. I fully agree with these criticism of the modern movie industry. That said, I think TV is getting interesting again; after the Golden Age of the 2000s (The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under) and the Silver Age of the early 2010s (Breaking Bad. Mad Men, early Game of Thrones), we’ve had a rocky few years, with far too many streaming services chasing too few eyeballs. But The White Lotus, Ted Lasso, and Severance are both excellent and are new IPs, if I’m not mistaken.
Is Ted Lasso still good? Cause I've heard awful things about the last season (I was going to binge after it ended) and this doesn't inspire confidence.
Shit. That accords very well with the Atlantic review I saw that claims it's confused itself for prestige TV.
I can't fathom how anyone thought that was a good idea.
Perhaps the natural extension of treating prestige TV as a movie alternative?
Perhaps. Exceedingly silly idea to take something that makes sense for Game of Thrones and apply it to a comedy.
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Do you mean season 3? I haven't watched season 3 yet (because I haven't felt like being sad), but my brother has been watching and said he has been enjoying it same as usual.
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A reason for why people feel like there has been such a decline in visual storytelling I think is due to how it has declined.
Firstly, while some kinds of "prestige" shows and movies have been made throughout this entire period but in contrast to earlier eras some genres have been practically abandoned, like comedy.
Secondly, I feel like the some current trends just are much shallower creative wells than earlier trends. The most prominent example of this is irony, meta commentary and deconstruction. This is further exacerbated by a ton of things effectively being serials, which do run out of steam eventually, even if the underlying concepts doesn't.
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