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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30021 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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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).

What I wonder - have we done this sort of check for any years well into the past? Yes, Star Wars was a classic, but what other movies were released that year, and how many were original? I recall hearing about music, many say older music is better because they only remember the smash hits from some particular year 3 or 5 decades ago, but that was one hit, when there were maybe 500 released that year, and 90% of the rest were relatively mediocre pop. Is the same true for movies?

It should be noted that even Star Wars started as a clever rework of Hidden Fortress with other plot elements and characters added in rewrites wrapped in nostalgia for Flash Gordon.

The appeal to the audience is not "I saw Hidden Fortress/Flash Gordon, so I'll see this", so it shouldn't count. Every work cribs from previous works in some fashion.

That poster messaging is literally an appeal to the audience of "you saw Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers as a kid, this will make you feel like that again". Hence the tag line "it'll make you feel like a kid again" after invoking the earlier two properties.

That poster messaging is literally an appeal to the audience of "you saw Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers as a kid, this will m

There are shades of this. Being named the same as a previous movie that came out two years ago except you have a number on the end of your title is high on the scale. Being inspired by a property that hasn't had a hit in a while is lower on the scale. Being inspired by a genre which contains hits rather than by one and only one specific hit is lower. So is having the reference only appeal to some of your audience (the overlap between the whole Star Wars audience and people who've seen Flash Gordon is a lot less than the overlap between the audience for Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3).

I think that Star Wars is overall low on the scale, even if you can certainly point to some elements that are derivative.

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