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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.
This is a strange take to me. Have you heard much in the way of woke takes on foreign policy? Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad. It fits neatly into the broader oppression dynamics as well as the hatred of imperialism. They also vaguely see Russia as fascist, and many comfortably assert that red tribe and/or Trump has a love affair with Russia, which is reason enough to hate them, and has broadly built a "current thing" alignment against Russia for years. I have constantly been seeing woke people disavow tankies in spaces where they were previously tolerated or at least seen as a lesser evil. The real question is whether they will be willing to acknowledge the importance of the US's place in the world if that's what it takes to stand against something like Russia.
There was a lot of drama in my woke spaces over games like Call of Duty portraying poor innocent Russia as bad, back in 2019. These kinds of arguments were very common and have suddenly become extinct.
Russia invaded a number of places before Ukraine, and nobody had any trouble with that. Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Central Africa...
Well, Russia is fascist, but I don't see anybody on US political scene daring to officially recognize the fact, even among the wokes. For the wokes though, "fascist" is a bad word to call everybody they hate, not a political taxonomy term, so they can't hate somebody for being fascist - they call somebody fascist after they already hate them. And since everybody by now knows the link between Trump and Russia is wholesale fake (it doesn't mean they wouldn't LARP as if they believed it's true, but they know it's false) - unlike the link between Russia and Clintons, say - again, they link Trump to Russia because they hate Trump, not the other way around. In Obama years, people who thought Russia is a threat were laughed at. In Trump years, people who thought Europe needs to beef their defenses against Russia were laughed at. So we back to the question why would they hate Russia enough, per se. They don't hate Iran and North Korea and China - at least no more than political expediency requires them to perform - despite those being no less oppressive than Russia (though currently not invading their neighbors). Is the invading the only thing? So if Russia is beaten back to their pre-Feb-2022 borders, would the hate go away?
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