When was the last time you watched a Hollywood film that was new? One that wasn't a sequel or a reboot? You might remember last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon perhaps or something similar?
Other than this though, have you noticed that most films these days are sequels and reboots? Has Hollywood run out of ideas? I think that for the most part, yes it has and Hollywood only has itself to blame.
You could argue that this is a problem with most industries these days, the constant push for financial and industry dominance meaning that, over time, you will need to reduce the quality of your products in order to maximise profits over a diminishing period of time. How do you sustain this? Simple.
Just like leftovers from last night’s meal, you reheat and remarket it as the thing of today even though it was actually from yesterday. This is most prevalent in huge multinational companies such as Disney. As of writing they have released yet another Marvel film and the third film of the Deadpool series: Deadpool and Wolverine, the consensus being that these films are excessively cameo-heavy, “unnecessarily sexualised”, and just a cash grab.
In fact, almost all of the recent Marvel films are just reheated leftovers. Films like Ant Man and The Wasp just seem to underperform: both as a film and at the box office. Disney, in their quest to reheat much of their old content, recently announced a live action Snow White film, much to a chorus of disapproval, mainly due to their insistence on rewriting the original story and growing controversy around casting decisions— which does not bode well for a successful release if history has anything to do by.
It’s not just Disney who fall foul of this: recent releases such as Ocean’s Eight, a revision of Ghostbusters, endless excursions into the Star Wars universe and perhaps most relevant right now: Joker: Folie à Deux—all remakes or sequels of frankly better films. These all had good ideas but were executed badly, hence ending up being nowhere near as successful as hoped. Of course, there are still original ideas, but they seem to be rarer. 2023 film-wise being dominated by the two aforementioned films, Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Two films with very different plots but both of which shared one simple thing: they were different, they were new. In a sea of sequels the people who developed the atomic bomb and an existentialist Barbie were bound to stand out and their box office revenues proved this: Barbie grossing over a billion dollars and Oppenheimer over nine hundred million (and a few Oscars to boot)! Compare this to Antman and the Wasp grossing four hundred million and The Marvels a mere two hundred and six million dollars— still a lot, but in Disney money terms, a failure.
Audiences are voting with their feet and with their wallets. Additional, if that was not enough of a message, then even titans of cinema like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese have vocalised their objections, with Scorsese’s description of Marvel being no more of a theme park rather than cinema probably delivering the hardest punch. This then should be the ultimate wake-up call for Hollywood: hire fresh talent, embrace new ideas, and stop making so much of the same thing.
This is after all how Tarantino, Scorsese et al. got their first breaks and became the defining voices of their generation. Hollywood needs to regain some prestige and allure and get people back into the multiplexes, because just more of the same just won’t cut it any more.