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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).
You could frame the whole Renaissance as basically recycling the Greek/Roman culture, if you wanted to. Recycling is not bad by itself. I don't mind somebody making another Sherlock Holmes movie or a remake of Herbert Wells stories. Or even Hamlet, for that matter. Yes, it's not original, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily worthless.
But I think the decline in originality may be because the production is now controlled by a limited set of big corporations, and they would necessarily favor safe, data-driven approach. Can you prove, with data in your hands, that your new original crazy idea would make more money than Superheroes 28, take 17? Probably not. Superheroes it is.
It doesn't mean the new thing can't happen now and then, on shoestring budget just through the power of it's own creativity. Possible. But on the volume, it would be one such thing per several years, while 99% is the safe, data-driven shlock. And once that new thing comes up, it will be milked for the next two decades, turning it inevitably to the shlock too.
You have the wrong culprit. It isn’t because of the studios or data per se. The problem is international revenue as a percentage of the total. Asia pacific alone is like 2x the domestic market. Big studios make movies that are accessible/salient to China, India, the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, Europe. The largest common denominator is MCU, which doesn’t really have gay people, dialog, romance, or Taiwan. Both the problems and solutions are violence. Why doesn’t Thor solve homelessness or Wakanda fix fentanyl? Because neither exist of course, just like actual injuries from all of that play fighting.
Maybe with the reemergence of revanchist Russia, we can make movies were they are the baddies again. Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!
I don't think your explanation necessarily contradicts mine. A set of smaller studios could target different markets and it'd be fine for a small studio to ignore China - US market is enough for it, and you don't need to squeeze every last dollar to pay for it, there's plenty of market for many small players. For a megacorp, you need mage-movies with mega-budgets and you can't pay for those without China.
As for Russia, I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad. Surely, they have an oppressive uni-party regime where there's no free speech and your rights depend on whether you agree or not with the ruling party. But that'd only make the wokes to envy them, not despise them - freedom is a red-tribe word. Of course, Russians hate gays and transes, but I don't think we're ready for a movie where Russia invades Wakanda to kill all gay people there, and the heroic Rainbow Transvengers push them back and perform the pride parade in the Red Square. Not yet at least, give it time. In the times of the Cold War, it was simple - Russians are commies that hate Our Way Of Life (TM). But now we know that Our Way Of Life (TM) is racist, colonialist, patriarchal and long overdue for deconstructing and dismantling. And the communists (if under slightly different names) are sitting on the board of every academic institution and are proudly represented in Congress. So where exactly is the good/evil line? I don't think Hollywood would be able to articulate it better than "they are bad because they are against us, and we are good!" - especially while at the same time releasing 50 movies about how we're actually very very bad.
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I'm not saying they admire Soviets or Russians (though some of them definitely did when Russians were Soviets) - what I am saying is it'd be hard for them to cast Russians as a convincing movie villain without undermining their own message. "They are villains because they restrict homosexuality" is not going to make you a billion dollars in movie receipts I'm afraid.
Oh no, there's actually a huge difference, but that'd take us way off topic I think.
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Well, starting from communists, for them it is about power. It's not only about power, but the classic communist revolution must result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. No setup where it's not the case can be recognized by a communist as legitimate, and any such setup must be overthrown. Now, when they have the power, there's still much work to be done, and that's where communists go Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea and splinter into various *isms. But that's after the power has been captured.
Conservatives are probably the closest ones to your description - they need power to prevent people from doing bad things and to force them to do good things. As long as that's what is happening, the application of power is unnecessary.
The classical liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, are probably the farthest, because they reject application of power to force people to behave in certain ways, unless that behavior comes into immediate conflict with a narrow set of natural rights (such as murder, bodily harm, theft of property, etc.). Applying power just to make sure people don't do something you think is not good, even if it does not violate their rights, is contrary to this mindset. Here, the power is to be used as little as it is possible to keep the whole system from collapsing into chaos (anarchists would claim this minimum is actually zero).
Now modern liberals, they are somewhat similar to conservatives towards application of power, but with couple important twists. First, good things are never enough - the standards evolve and change constantly, and the continuous application of power is necessary to keep up, what was perfectly good a year ago, is an appalling bigotry today. Second, there's a class of natural standard-setters, who define and re-define these constantly evolving and changing standards, and those people are the only legitimate candidates for holding power (not all of them will hold power, but all power holding should be done by them only, or it is illegitimate and should be resisted by any means). Also, since their vision involves forcible redistribution of resources from people who have them to people who "deserve" them (standard-setters identify those) but don't have them, this again requires constant application of power. So while the power is not the end in itself, their vision necessitates constant control and exercise of power.
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