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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!
Given Russia's performance in Ukraine, it wouldn't even be a stretch to depict them as a massive, terrifying force comprised of incompetent jobbers and cannon fodder, much like Nazis in popular fiction.
I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"
To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?
Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?
(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)
I would like to state for the record that my impression of Russian incompetence is, as HaroldWilson kind-of touched on, driven less by Western reporting and more by evidence surfaced by internet randos (i.e. Twitter people and Channers) looking for the dankest, funniest, you-literally-could-not-make-this-shit-up-if-you-tried bits of intel that trickle out of the area.
With that out of the way, I want to reiterate that we are talking about fiction. I suppose that if I had phrased my post as "the modern Russian army has now ascended to the tier of Enemy-faction-that-is-safe-to-use for fiction creators," maybe I would not be writing this post now. I can acknowledge that the reality isn't quite as popular image makes it seem. The Nazis were genuinely more threatening than certain hero-fantasy media (e.g. Rat Patrol, Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein) makes them out to have been. Similarly, the Russians aren't a complete laughingstock and still represent an undefined, nebulous threat.
But, in the ragged parlance of our sitting President, come on, man. Again, alluding to my first paragraph, some of the reports about the reality of Russian capability in the beginning of the war and beyond* were so out there that any fiction writer who depicted them as such before the war would have been slammed and roasted by no end of YouTube rantsona channels, armchair generals, and 4Chan pedants. However, we clearly live in the Dank Timeline, and I will never not be amused by the idea of future generations using the 2022 Russians in the manner described above.
*(using insecure commercial radios instead of actual encrypted military radios; tires that fell apart from lack of maintenance, making Russian trucks incapable of necessary off-roading; a Russian plane that avoided starting WWIII only because a missile failed to launch from, again, lack of maintenance; the Cope Cage)
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Clearly journalists do have to construct a kind of narrative around every ongoing event they report, whether it be election campaigns, sporting events or indeed wars, but there's nothing wrong with that (that is what every historian will try to do in their own way after the war is over after all, journalists are just doing it in real time) as that's the only way to comprehend anything, and I don't think they really are crafting that narrative to fit in a pre-prepared slot. After all, what other interpretation can there be except that Russia has so far failed emphatically? And most Western reporting, while certainly emphasising Russian failure, doesn't seem to me to have gone in particularly hard on Russian incompetence, tending to focus on the role of Western support and the effectiveness of Ukraine defence.
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What’s with the triple quotes? That’s the bit which sets off my speaking-plainly alarms.
As for the quality of news reports, there are two facts that matter:
Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine
Russia has not occupied all of Ukraine
Neither of these are really in dispute, and they’re the ones that put Russia into “Saturday morning cartoon villain” territory. The news could be lying about everything else—they’re certainly inclined to spin it—and Americans would still pattern-match it to Indiana Jones. It’s not a complex narrative.
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Ironically, the NATO tweet invoked just about everything but Indy: https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687961477750790#m
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