Boring Hollywood

Boring Hollywood

Last week culture magazine HUMO came with a free cinema ticket for Trainspotting 2. This of course another attempt to hold back the negative impression numbers, but this aside. I remember how impressed I was after watching the original Trainspotting, which must be over 5 years ago right now. I was interested to see how the characters would be off 21 years later and the free ticket was an excellent excuse for it. I liked the film but I wondered: what is the value of a Trainspotting 2? Of course it’s fun to see how the young junkies turned into 40 year-olds, but still, should you make a new movie about that? Couldn’t we just leave that to our imagination?

Let’s take a look at some of the temporary blockbusters and films who will be released in 2017: Belle and the beast, Fast & Furious 8, Despicable me 3, Spiderman: home coming, Cars 3, Fantastic beast and where to find them, The LEGO batman movie, Kong: skull island, etc.  I can easily give some more examples but you probably already get the point. They are all sequels, remakes and spin offs. Hollywood’s creativity is far to be detected. They invest absurd amounts of money in their films. The new King Kong for example, had a production budget of 185 million dollar plus 135 million dollar marketing costs. With these absurd high investments, Hollywood simply can’t afford a failure so they keep on using movies who already proved their success. In film and media studies this phenomenon is called artistic imitation. The idea is that a media product should have both novelty and familiarity to reduce financial risks. A great example is the creation of cinematic universes such as Star Wars and Harry Potter where they can endlessly make new stories about. New Star Wars films or for example remakes of old Disney films are labeled as pre soled property: an artistic imitation which is in advanced known as a success, because of a loyal fan base. The ratio new and artistic imitation is since 2007 50-50 percent.

But let’s be honest: sequels and spin-offs are boring. Stop making another Belle and the Beast movie, we’ve already seen 5 different versions! Bring us a new fairy tale, bring us a new super hero, leave Harry Potter alone and create a new fantasy world. Hollywood can easily halve their budgets and take more risks in producing brand new movies, but the chances are little that they will do so.