With summer just around the corner, the block busters of the season are starting to emerge. The newest Avengers movie recently came out, and I look forward to seeing Jurassic World and the new Terminator. These movies sound great, but they’re all based on something else, either a previous film or a book. Nothing’s original. So what’s up? Has Hollywood run out of ideas, or are they just lazy? The answer, like most things in life, is a bit more sophisticated than you’d think.
It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten something truly original to become popular. Now I don’t mean original in the sense of something completely out there, but rather a film that isn’t based off a book or comic. The last good movie I heard of to fit the bill was Pacific Rim, and that was two years ago.  I don’t know about you, but I am personally tired of it. If I hear one more person say that The Hunger Games is their favorite movie, I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s not it’s a bad film, it’s just that the book will always be better and there are other films that are purely original that are better. It should be the norm for films to utilize original ideas, instead of the exception. The movie industry’s constant dependency on books and super heroes to base their films off of is an addiction that we as consumers need to stop. But hang on, is it all bad?
It’s quite easy to think of reasons why the film industry would base their movies off of another media. For one, there’s already an existing fan base. If you pick something that’s popular (say, The Hunger Games) then you’re guaranteed a huge audience with no need to heavily promote the movie. Movie executives take a huge risk whenever making a film, and if sales are bad, the responsibility and blame is on them. Now when an original movie tanks, the people behind it will most certainly lose their jobs. In a different scenario, the movie that tanked was based off, oh, let’s say G.I Joe. This time, the movie creators can make the argument, “Well, since the toys were popular, we thought a movie based off of them would be equally as popular.” And they might get a reaction from their bosses, “Yeah, we don’t know what happened.” This, along with the massive amounts of potential profits that they can easily gauge before production is why every tween books series on the store shelf is as at the box office.
You may be asking, why come up with anything original? And to that I drop the nuclear bomb that is Star Wars into the mix. With the Force Awakens coming out this Christmas, one would think that this is example is an argument for a tried and true franchise of our parent’s childhood (I don’t count the prequel trilogy). Well at one point in time, Star Wars was an original idea, and it blew up like crazy. If a film gets it right, they can create an entirely new series that can inspire people to create toys, TV shows and books based off of it. If we just keep on seeing the same stuff over and over again, then eventually we will run out.
Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have un-original movie concepts, it’s just that it’s important to keep the future in mind as well. The original movies are far more culturally important than their books based counter parts, the media worth which is based on is already popular, so something new has the potentially to be, well, something new. It has the chance to be a new series that you enjoy, with new worlds, characters and concepts to explore. That’s why this fad needs to end so we can enjoy new things instead of re-hashing out books and comics on the silver screen.
What do you think, is Hollywood playing it too safe? Is it time for this trend of unoriginal films to end?
Leave your thoughts and comments below.
I await your opinions.