10 Reasons Why 2016's Blockbusters Are Failing
6. Lack Of Creativity Leads To Audience Apathy
Audiences have voted with their wallets this year, and officially said NO to the belated sequel.
The failure of 2016’s Alice Through The Looking Glass came six years after the billion dollar Alice In Wonderland - the kids who saw the first one were too old to be interested in a sequel, but far too young to get a nostalgia kick or bring their own children to see it. Independence Day: Resurgence arrived in theatres twenty years after the original movie and without the star of that film.
The underperforming Ice Age: Collision Course, the fifth (fifth!) in the series, came an incredible fourteen years (FOURTEEN YEARS!) after the first movie, and four years after the last. The kids that loved the first one might be parents now… but the kids that loved the last one are teenagers, or nearly so. The ‘celebrity’ voice cast in this franchise for children are now pushing sixty years old and are only famous in 2016 for making Ice Age movies. Where’s the audience for this sequel?
By and large, movie executives aren’t creative forces of nature. To them, pouring money into an original screenplay is an incredibly risky proposition. It makes business sense to build on a previous sound investment rather than try something new.
Of course, people complain about the lack of originality in Hollywood as though it was a new revolting development. Well, the overkill of the sequel is only a few decades old, but the cynical cash-in remake has been around since the very beginning of cinema.
That 2016 Ben-Hur remake we’re all up in arms about? The classic 1959 ‘original’ is a remake too, made so that MGM could spend the lira that was tied up in the Italian economy. John Huston’s seminal 1941 debut The Maltese Falcon is also a remake - the third time the movie had been made in ten years - made because they weren’t allowed to re-release the original film.
In recent years, however, Hollywood has finally gone too far. They’ve moved from mining adaptations from literature and plays, remakes of older movies and okaying endless sequels. Now they’re adapting comic books, making prequels to all those sequels and then rebooting whole franchises of sequels and prequels to start the whole fetid sh*tshow all over again.
At long last, audiences have had enough. They’re responding to this vast, indifferent lack of creativity with their own shrug of apathy… and since their only metric for success is money, the studios need to rethink their strategy.