Producing Movies is hard

[TheIronRuler]

Hello Dear Escapists,
In this topic I will present you reading material and you will return an answer. It is about the movie industry located in the USA, specifically Hollywood and their new insistence to stick to what they know best.

One may say that the economic crysis had caused companies to lose faith in financing new projects and that sequels, no matter their quality compared to the original or previous installment can make money based upon being a sequel. An example of this can be seen by the movie "Scott Pilgrim versus the World" which was a failure at the box office and managed to somehow return most of its investment by world wide theaters and video sales. The studio that produced the film was in shock financially, so it decided to go safe and make a sequel - "Fast and Furious 5", which made much, much more than the first comic book film.

This had translated into the formula that if an idea is good, there is no reason why you can't reuse it. From here studios began buying rights for old franchises of TV shows or movies, and even toys, so they could make something new basing on the original fan base. The recent comic book films are a great example for this, but there are also other films that parody this very act, see "21 Jump Street".

Now, the question here is - Is this a bad thing?
If it is, what should we do to try and stop this phenomenon? Will it simply go away if we wish hard enough?
Let us watch the next stage in the evolution of movie production, courtesy of Monty Python.
Do you fear this will become the future?

 

[JokerboyJordan]

The rise of the remakes are indeed disturbing, but there will always be people willing to take a risk. People years ago probably couldn't fathom the kind of films we see today, so who knows what the future could hold?

 

[TheIronRuler]

The rise of the remakes are indeed disturbing, but there will always be people willing to take a risk. People years ago probably couldn't fathom the kind of films we see today, so who knows what the future could hold?

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I seriously doubt that anything as ground-breaking as Star Wars could be introduced in this day and age...

 

[polymath]

It's not the producers imo, it's the writers.

They are very little good original screenplays out there. If there were, producers would be all over them.

It really, really isn't. Very few studio's are going to greenlight an Original Screenplay. The best hope a writer has is that a good original screenplay gets them work as a go to guy when Transformers number whatever needs a re-write.

One of the biggest bidding wars of the last few years was for a script called Nottingham, that was a Robin Hood story told from the point of view of the Sheriff of Nottingham as a detective style movie with medieval crime solving techniques. That then went through Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and some studio execs and became a fairly generic take on the Robin Hood myth.

Even if you had a brilliant screenplay with a really original hook, if the marketing guys told you they couldn't market it, or the studio head just doesn't like it, the film isn't going to be made.

Hollywood studios have got stuck in a scenario where they're budgets are almost entirely tied up in one or two "tent-pole" movies a year, and if those film's bomb, the studio is at serious risk of going under or at least being unable to compete for big franchises.