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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).
I don't think that 28/34 fraction means a whole lot, necessarily. Sequels can be different from predecessors while being even better sometimes (The Godfather: Part 2 comes to mind, along with Terminator 2 and Aliens), and that's even more the case for spinoffs within the same universe (e.g. Rogue One being a spinoff of the Star Wars films). Remakes/reimaginings can also be perfectly good and creative depending on how they're handled - e.g. I haven't watched either Scarface film, but I've been told the remake from the 70s was even better than the original from the 30s. And if that 28 includes adaptations of stories from other media, then there's just no issue; making a film version of a written story is a new creative endeavor in itself, and there are countless examples of great, creative films that have come from adapting existing stories.
So the fraction might not be indicative of anything, but I do think there's something going on with the lack of creativity in Hollywood the past decade. The rise of the soft reboot (e.g. Jurassic World to Jurassic Park, The Force Awakens to A New Hope, Ghostbusters to Ghostbusters, and even arguably The Incredibles 2 to The Incredibles if you squint) does show some lack of creativity; these aren't remakes/reimaginings that try to present a fresh take on the same story, they do the exact opposite by dressing up the same stale core with minor cosmetic changes. And there are the Disney live-action (CG) remakes of their old cartoons, which they're pumping out at astonishing rates and which either add nothing to the original story (e.g. The Lion King which also took away a whole lot including one of its best songs) or just miss the entire point or "soul" of the original story (e.g. Mulan where the titular character literally had
The Forcemagical chi powers, or Pinocchio where the titular puppet never makes any mistakes and is also rewarded for lying by having his nose grow long in a way to help him get the key to his cage). These show both a lack of creativity and a lack of understanding of what made the original works so beloved. Then there's Marvel, where every character feels like they're trying to imitate Iron Man with their sarcastic quips and every film has the same tone due to that.Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that these studios have gotten very risk averse in part due to how much these high production films cost to make. Maybe there's something to it; after all, The Force Awakens and The Lion King both made a billion dollars. But I also have to wonder if that's the kind of trick you can only pull off so many times before the audience catches on, and Hollywood isn't adapting all that quickly. My hope is that with the rise of generative AI, we'll see the costs drop so drastically that indie studios - perhaps even dedicated hobbyists - would be able to put together 2-hour long films with the production values - encompassing everything from the visual effects, sound effects, set design, costume design, acting quality - of a modern Hollywood blockbuster. Hollywood still owns most/all of the well-known brands, and they also have the industry expertise to use these tools better than most, so they could still thrive in such an environment. But more independent filmmakers making something equivalent to Avatar 2 in production values could mean more creative and imaginative films in the landscape in the future.
It seems far more likely that Hollywood adapts imo. They've seemingly realised that low budget horror movies can be very profitable and low risk. It seems like a fairly small step to producing other kinds of low budget movies with "AI" effects. In fact, a lot of modern TV kind of is this.
It doesn't seem like a massive step for this to graduate to the big screen. Make things like "The Northman" on 10 million instead of 70-90 and you'll have big financial success even if it only makes back half as much.
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