10 Trends That Are Destroying Modern Movies
6. Audiences Complain About Sequels But Won't Watch Anything Original
Every year as general audiences become aware of the new slew of movies coming their way in the summer, the reaction is always the same. "It's all remakes and sequels," they grumble, hitting on a point that has been prevalent now for decades. And how do they deal with the franchise problem? They go and see the remakes and sequels, ignoring genuinely new ideas.
Seriously, in the first half of this decade only three films have made it into the worldwide box office top ten that aren't based off an existing franchise (or are a big budget animation which are guaranteed to print money) - Inception, Interstellar, and Gravity, three films with across the board good press.
The reason behind this is that while people recognise the unoriginality behind the ideas in Hollywood, they're also much happier seeing something familiar; a new idea is a risk most people don't want to take. What most don't realise is that in going to see all these films they habitually bemoan is that in doing so they're actually stifling creativity. Inception spawned a slew of innovative imitators (Source Code, The Adjustment Bureau, Trance), but those all did so bad that the phase of smart-but-entertaining sci-fi is already over.
Pacific Rim did so poorly at the box office it took strong DVD sales and almost a year to get a sequel greenlit. Similar Kaiju-fighting movie Godzilla did it in the opening weekend. Why? Because most people have caught part of a Gojira movie on TV at some point so felt safer with that.