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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).
Note : this is a uniquely Hollywood problem.
British TV media seems to be as creative as ever. Indian movies are in a golden age of new IP. Salman's lousy pseudo sequels and RRR overshadowing Bahubali's thunder proves that. Japan seems to be in the midst of a creative revival too. Major long running shows are ending, all the lazy soft-sequels are stumbling out of the gate (Boruto) and the newer IPs are crazier than anything that has come before (DANDADAN, Chainsawman).
This is my guess too. It has allowed creative directors to get bigger budgets than they could've imagined. Directors cast 1 big name for the thumbnail, and the rest of the mini-series gets filmed indoors. Great way to make a good buck, get more $$ over longer view times and if viewer numbers are tied to thumbnail/trailer impressions anyway, then that's all you need.
Some have mastered this model. Mike Flanagan managed to make money off Midnight mass. Would have been impossible in any other era. TV shows like Bear should have been a movie, but they managed to turn it into a nice 8 episode T series and get an unusual project greenlit.
Speaking of Japan's pop culture, Gundam, one of the oldest franchises around, has actually been doing stupidly well recently thanks to the Witch From Mercury series. The trick? They tried something new, and it's paid off to the point that the Gunpla has been flying off the shelves and it's brought in new fans just like Iron-Blooded Orphans did.
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