To
many of us, seeing a movie is one of the simpler pleasures in life. You
go out with your friends, buy your tickets, sit down for two or three
hours of entertainment, and it feels good. Movies can take you away from
the dreariness of the real world for a few hours and put you somewhere
completely new and fantastical. But movies aren't always just flash.
Film making is an art form, and we as the consumers have the right and
the privilege to demand a higher quality of film to view and appreciate.
So the question is: why don't we?
Hollywood
has been on a downward spiral in the last decade, with many calling
this era of film the least creative since the dawn of cinema. In the
last year alone, 8 out of 10 of the highest grossing films were either
adaptations, sequels, or reboots, with the remaining 2 films being Ted and Brave,
neither of which being critically acclaimed. So then where are the
original screenplays? Is Hollywood out of ideas for new movies?
The
answer is no, but why should they change their habits now? From a
business perspective, creating remakes, sequels, and reboots is a very
lucrative business as of late. Every one of the 8 highest grossing films
of last year made over 200 million dollars domestically and much more
internationally, which is excellent for the studio making the movie, but
it bodes ill elsewhere. When a studio recognizes that it can make a
large amount of profit from a particular kind of movie, they capitalize
on it like any good business would, but when Hollywood studios pour all
of their funding into creating adaptations and sequels, there isn't
anything left in the collective bank to fund the creation of an original
screenplay, which are regarded as risky compared to the prospective
money gained from using an already established franchise.
It
may not be fun to hear, but we are basically the entire problem as
well. It's our duty as audience members and consumers to take what the
studios give us with a grain of salt, but lately we've just been blindly
licking our plates. If we want to see original screenplays again, and
not Iron Man 8, we have to convince Hollywood to invest their money in
screenplays again, and take a chance on it being successful. Otherwise,
production studios will continue to happily pluck our pockets in
exchange for mediocre products. We need to be more discerning in what we
support and more critical of what we consume in order to dictate the
choices that the market allows us, and we need to start now.
Hollywood isn’t going to change without some incentive.
References:
http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012
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