Remake-mania: Has Hollywood Gone Stale?
By Declan Boyle-Shields
It seems these days that every other major movie release is a reboot, or franchise entry, or some tired old rehashed adaptation of something that’s been done 100 times before. From the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Disney’s live action takes on their animated classics to recent aspirations of classic novels, the conversation around Hollywood’s crisis of ‘unoriginality’ has become as repetitive as the films themselves, with sequels, remakes, and cinematic universes dominating both the box office, and the critical discourse, and while it is certainly clear that Hollywood is currently thriving on already existing ideas and properties, we might ask whether this is necessarily a new development.
Hollywood has always been a system built on reinvention. From its earliest days, the film industry relied heavily on existing material, whether that be adaptations of literature, theatre, or earlier films. Many triumphs of classic cinema, such as 1931’s Frankenstein or 1922’s Nosferatu, were themselves adaptations, and have been remade and reinvented endlessly across cinematic history. Even many of the so-called ‘original’ classics are rooted in pre-existing narratives, reshaped to suit new audiences and technologies. Sequels, too, are hardly a new concept; franchises have existed for decades, driven by the same commercial logic that has always underpinned the industry.
The difference, however, is one of scale and visibility. Today’s Hollywood seems to be becoming somewhat over-reliant on this model. It’s not like Hollywood has suddenly gone from complete originality to complete unoriginality, but it has seemed to worryingly predicate itself on audience recognition, with familiarity and nostalgia becoming central to the way films are produced, marketed, and consumed. This trend seems to have accelerated to a concerning degree, with recognisable faces in recognisable roles encroaching more and more on the opportunities for fresh talent. This seems almost a kind of cultural inertia, with the industry more comfortable revisiting the past than imagining the future. We seem to be more and more in a culture where our media has become trapped in already existing frameworks, unable to risk the unknown.
This change has not occurred in a vacuum; the film industry (as well as practically all areas of culture) has been undergoing a massive shift in recent years and has become even more risk-averse. In an era when the industry has to face up to streaming competition, recognisable intellectual property offers a safety net that feels more secure than any brave new original stories could. A familiar title, character, actor, or franchise comes with a built-in audience, making it far easier to make back your budget in today’s divided media landscape. I mean, would you, dear reader, splash out on an expensive cinema ticket for a movie without a familiar face or franchise? You can complain all you want about the staleness of storytelling in contemporary cinema, but how many of you are not complicit? In a time when the cost of living has increased dramatically, and there are much easier cheaper mediums than cinema, why should these studios give a big budget to an unfamiliar property? What we’re left with is an industry where originality is increasingly marginalised, as it becomes financially overshadowed by the predictable old stories we’ve already internalised.
The issue may not be the existence of remakes and sequels, but that their dominance has increased to the extent that they crowd out experimental, risk-taking, genuinely novel films. With independent cinemas increasingly shutting down, and mainstream cinemas increasingly being dependent on an increasingly smaller customer base who, by and large, will only come if offered a big, recognisable star-studded rehash movie, is it any wonder that our cinemas are falling back on the safest option? Perhaps, then, the problem comes from when repetition is the default, rather than the exception, with familiarity prioritised over new imaginative promise. If Hollywood continues like this, then surely it risks reducing our culture to one which grasps for old glories that are further and further in the past, and never materialises new ones. In the end, the question is not whether the audience is tired of seeing their old favourites, but whether anyone has the guts to change the system and let us experience something new. In the future, when pop-culture history is written, how will the 2020s be thought of? Will we be seen as a decade of difference, with great new classics that could never have come about before or since? Or will we be relegated to an era of cultural conservatism, where we all retreated back to old joys, with the risk of trying something new weighing too heavily on us? Only time can tell if comfort or creativity wins.
