I get that major motion film companies want to make money. But there will be a time when people want to see something different. Solo bombing might be an example of that.
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, new franchises were being created and they worked well.
All of these sequels, prequels and reboots are getting tiresome.
Just create something new.
Depends on choice of what new material to adapt for the big screen.
They took a big SHIT with The Golden Compass.
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is a great book trilogy in so many ways, the Golden Compass movie (based on the properly-titled 1st book, Northern Lights) is a horribly neutered abomination which may have won an Oscar but was doomed to failure because it cut out the anti-organised religion stuff which would otherwise offend Americans.
I would dearly have loved to have seen an adaptation of my personal favourite of the series, The Subtle Knife, but to be honest, I think for once the book is better.
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Will anything new not be a vehicle for left-wing politics?
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You know I recently found out that Jesse Plemons was up for the role of Finn. He's Todd from breaking bad and was also in Black Mirror as a deranged Star Trek fan. Now this guy - famous for playing maladjusted sociopaths - would seem like great casting for a brainwashed storm trooper but instead they went with Boyega and we ended up with his bizarre non nonsensical character/borderline racist caricature. If you listen to JJ's interviews he basically says 'I look around and see white people everywhere' and so they decided - quite late on - to switch the role to a black actor. Now this wouldn't be quite so bad (still racist in my opinion) but then they obviously decided to re-write the role to remove the trained-from-birth killer aspects and replace them with lines like 'droid please'.
So thanks to identity politics we have:
People being denied work based on the colour of their skin
Two old white guys writing a black character as a cliched semi-racist runaway slave type cliche
A key character in your $2 Billion investment now makes no sense, significantly harms the story and is insulting to many.
Fantastic!
I don't get how hard it is to just not be racist.
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70s, 80s & 90s audiences took chances on movies... they were open to seeing something unfamiliar or being challenged and sometimes dissapointed...
Contemporary audiences , as a culture, do not do this... They don't take chances.... They want to know exactly what they will get before going to a movie and are upset when it doesn't work the way they wanted it to (ratings culture, trailers that show everything, etc..)... They view movies through a TV and video game lens... They want things to be explained, they nerd out on minutia and want ithe details to align... They miss the woods for the trees, etc... They do NOT want to be offended... etc... This is the culture of movie going today (not judging the audience as people, rather saying how movie going has changed)...
This can be seen be seen in the towering success of everything from Transformers, harry potter to Marvel and pixar...
And that is when they go to the cinema, which is rare anyway as they mostly watch TV or stream movies at home...
How the movie going culture got this way is complex, but a lot of it had to do with the studio buyouts of the smaller independent producers in the late 90s early 2000s as well as audience torrenting and such which decimated revenue streams for dramas and adult oriented genre thrillers, scifi and horror, etc... The interesting stuff that is more idiosyncratic...
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I agree with your point on torrenting.
People view piracy as a victimless crime (or that the victims are all filthy rich Hollywood execs) but the truth is its sucked a huge amount of money out of the system which has increased the risks in film investment leading to 'safe' but creatively redundant movies becoming the norm.
In other words, blame the torrenters. :D
Insightful!
I can understand though. There are lots and lots of entertainment products today, easily accesible anytime and anywhere via smartphones (online games, chat, social media, forums, photography, music, youtube, etc.)
So I know the feeling when I invested my precious entertainment time slot for a long ass movie and turns out it's pretty bad. The same time that I could use to play games and get more entertained as a result.
I think the issue is that Hollywood has an agenda. They want to destroy old franchises. This is a tactic used by cartels.
There is also the issue of intellectual property having inordinate power. Imagine if anyone could make a Star Wars movie or toys. Competition would force Hollywood to be good. But it's much easier to do rent seeking, where Hollywood lobbies big government for handouts like the TPP trade deal that expands our stringent intellectual property rights worldwide. Hollywood spent more trying to get that deal than on making movies so you see how they operate. It's more like an advertising propaganda arm of multinational corporations than an entertainment industry.
HERES A THOUGHT.....MAYBE THERE IS JUST TOO MUCH SCIFI/FANTASY FILMS!!!!! Add all the scififantasy tv shows and it just gets worse. I don't think any new original content is gonna help. People are just getting fatigues by these films. Now good old action films are only done a couple times a year at most now. Mission Impossible has been great, John Wick etc. Those are the films I look forward to now. Scifi/Fantasy are just getting boring now. They are being done to death and I see the end near soon.
shareEvery big-budget film made these days is either part of a franchise, or an attempt at creating a new franchise. That's Hollywood's favorite business model these days, but of course creating a new franchise that everyone wants to see is easier said than done.
So far the only new or new-ish movie franchise that's hit the spot for me and the mainstream has been Marvel Films.