Hollywood: The Fall of Originality

Hollywood: The Fall of Originality

Reboots, prequels, sequels, novel adaptations, spin-offs and those all-engrossing horror films which are, of course, "based on a true story." Yes, it's the curse of the sequel and while we've been casually enjoying all those expensively unoriginal features, that curse has been consuming Hollywood now more than ever.

In 2013 alone, we're being hit with over fifty massive blockbusters, almost all of which are sequels, prequels or reboots. From A Good Day To Die Hard in February, the unwelcome 5th instalment in the Die Hard series all the way to Anchorman: The Legend Continues in December, it's clear that in these times of economic instability and uneasy executives making the decisions, the movie industry is refusing to take many risks. 

Of course, there are still the usual suspects such as Director/Producer Christopher Nolan, who is currently undertaking a huge new original feature mysteriously called Interstellar which is due for release in late 2014. That said, Christopher Nolan is a safe bet for the movie studios, right? He essentially broke into the mainstream with a reboot of the Batman series, starting with Batman Begins in 2005.

Sure, he loves the characters as much as the next guy, but it's a safe bet to say that Nolan picked up an easily recognisable franchise in order to make his name heard amongst the less movie-savvy audience. He may have come up with one or two absolute winners since (if you haven't seen Inception, drop everything and watch it now), but behind the scenes he is still overseeing the rebooted Superman series Man of Steel. 

Old habits die hard, and with this particular project Nolan is, as many other writers of superhero flicks are, constrained by his source material. Many such genre movies are now falling back on direct adaptations of comics, or at least using most of their characters and storylines - at Comic-Con this month, it was announced that The Avengers 2 will follow the recent Age of Ultron storyline from the comics. What's the point in watching a story on the big screen that you've already experienced in a comic book?

Superheroes are, of course, an easily profitable bunch regardless of the director - most of the time, the face of the character is the most appealing piece of marketing behind the profit. Take Iron Man, for example, the first of Marvel's movies which led to the incredible crossover spectacular The Avengers last year (or Avengers Assemble, for us tea-sipping Brits). With Robert Downey Jr. on board as the man in the can, it was always inevitable that Marvel's billion-dollar crossover franchise would be a success with not only fans of the original comics on which they are based, but the general casual audience as a whole. In fact, The Avengers is the third highest grossing movie of all time - not bad considering it was written and directed by Joss Whedon, a man whose previous televised creations such as Firefly, Dollhouse and Angel were all cancelled before their time.

Moving away from the superhero franchises though, of which there are many, the horror genre has seen an incredible boost in popularity over the last few years, kick started by the original Paranormal Activity movie. Of course, the first was simply a small-budget, handheld camera flick in the style of The Blair Witch Project - a love letter of sorts to the horror classics of old. As is the way though, Hollywood executives saw dollar signs and picked up the franchise. As such, Paranormal Activity has spawned three sequels, with a fourth hitting our cinemas this October. Necessary? Of course not. Profitable? Definitely.

It's a familiar concept, that Paranormal Activity nonsense. Generic characters are terrorized in their own home by a ghost, spirit or demon (take your pick), and through the eyes of security cameras and camcorders, we see how each member is picked off one by one. The audience knows what is going to happen and where the jump scares are going to be - the trailers give far too much away anyway - yet the masses will stay pay their hard earned cash to watch the same thing all over again. So why is it?

Perhaps we crave what we know. Why take a £9.50 risk on some weird, intelligent, obscure sci-fi movie called Oblivion when you could spend it on Paranormal Activity 5 - you enjoyed the other ones, right?

Going by that logic, we're just as bad as the executives and movie studios making the decisions. Why should they pay millions to create an original, fresh and intriguing movie when they could pump more dollars into - oh, I dunno - a reboot of The Lone Ranger franchise? "Should we make it dark, gritty and morally ambiguous just like the original TV show never quite dared to achieve?" asks one fresh-faced producer. "Of course not," laughs an older, wiser executive. "Let's get Johnny Depp doing his wacky Johnny Depp routine, and we'll make sure it appeals to kids with over the top, ridiculous action scenes that physically make no sense. And you're fired."

Why should they pour billions of dollars into a brand new, epic action adventure directed by an up and coming director when they could simply hire Hugh "reliable" Jackman to pump out yet another Wolverine movie that nobody really wanted or asked for? Why should they, when we, the audience, aren't going to be open-minded enough to go and see them?

It's not all bad though - looking back over the last year or so, we have had rather a few original and mind-bending movies to entertain us. They, of course, can't rely on their story alone. Features such as 2012's Bruce Willis-starring Looper and this year's animated Oscar-nominated Wreck-It Ralph featuring John C.Reilly certainly challenged the intelligence and attention levels of the casual cinema audiences, but they still weren't enough to financially combat the heavy hitters, which is presumably why such big name stars were involved.

When you ask any cinema-goer which was their favourite "psychological thriller" over the last few years, their mind will immediately jump to Nolan's Inception from 2011. Not a bad movie by any means, one of the best to come out of recent years in fact, but it seems to be what the mainstream defines as a mind-bending movie, where in fact there are hundreds of independent and/or indie films which raise the bar beyond the reach of even the great Christopher Nolan.

They'll most likely never be seen nor heard though, which is a shame. Just look at the Oscar winners in 2013 - Ben Affleck's Argo nabbed the Best Picture award. Again, it was very well deserved but the point is that Argo is based on a true story. The source material is all there, the witnesses and the historical files - the plot is already mapped out for the writer and there is little creativity to be spoken of other than the technical execution of the scenes.

Amongst the other winners were Life of Pi (based on a novel), Silver Linings Playbook (same again) and Les Miserables (which is, of course, based on the acclaimed musical).

Thankfully other winners included Disney/Pixar's fantastic Brave, although Pixar themselves are falling in creativity levels. With 2011's Cars 2, this year's Monsters University and 2015's Finding Dory, the great animation studio are showing cracks in the concrete of their originality, falling back on sequels and prequels to please the adult audiences who remember the original movies from the early noughties. Still no Toy Story 4? Good!

At the end of the day though, Hollywood will continue to do whatever is most profitable. It's only whenl the masses stop paying for the same old rehashed movies again and again that the studios will sit up and take notice. If not, in ten years, we might be halfway through an American reboot of the Harry Potter series. In twenty years, we could be witnessing yet another Batman origin story complete with a fleeting cameo from Christian Bale. In thirty, a complete retelling of the Star Wars series with Justin Bieber as Luke Skywalker.

Let's hope they've invented space travel by then, because I won't want to live on this planet anymore.