“Big Momma's House 2.” “The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift.” “Mission Impossible III.” “Scary Movie 4.” Many Americans are complaining that our cinematic landscape is becoming creatively and intellectually bankrupt. With Hollywood bemoaning all-time low ticket sales, and with many talented actors making an exodus from film to television, the state of American cinema seems dismal, and the lack of competition at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony certainly speaks to this.
Hollywood could certainly stand to look inward in order to analyze their poor performance, as opposed to blaming the public at large or online piracy, but we as consumers are far from guiltless. In effect, Hollywood is just following a fairly narrow set of rules, but it's one that they know will minimize their risk and maximize their chance of getting our money. I present the following explanations for why we're stuck with Hollywood's limitless barrage of sequels and remakes for the foreseeable future. While they may not be obvious to the run-of-the-mill cinephile, they certainly aren't surprising given a little focus.
When motion pictures adapt exiting material into a new picture, they do so for one reason only: the pre-existing intellectual property has proven itself in one way or another as a success. Before they were films, Dan Brown's “The DaVinci Code” and J.R.R. Tolkien's “Lord of the Rings” trilogy burned up best seller lists. Properties like these had already created legions of fans and established their ability to draw hard cash to the authors' ideas. In an effort to minimize their losses, Hollywood has realized that they stand a better chance of making their motion picture a success if they back a success. If a book was a poor seller, the motion picture industry would be loathe to put money behind it.
With sequels, audiences are subjected to something of a corporate branding phenomenon: it would be far more profitable for a new action movie to ride on the coattails of a previous success. Although an action film released by Columbia pictures might have nothing to do with their previous Vin Diesel vehicle, “XXX,” they'd undoubtedly make more money by retrofitting the new action movie into a sequel, even if there's absolutely no carry-over of any of the previous film's talent behind or in front of the camera.
The bigwigs of the silver screen tend to have large egos. In many cases, several of the remakes we see today are studio efforts to make a title in their library “better.” What this usually means is that producers and directors feel that through the use of today's technology, any picture with a reliance of special effects can be improved upon, and the evolving marketplace of computer graphics is certainly capable of supplying explosions even bigger than what was possible with the technology of ten or twenty years ago. Now, “The Poseidon Adventure,” which proved itself as a disaster movie several years ago, can be remade with even more technically impressive eye-candy.
Since the goal of the disaster, action, and horror genres has always been to offer the most thrilling special effects possible, Hollywood can easily appease its viewers by repackaging the same winning formula with improved visuals. This has resulted in winning over audiences whose criteria for what makes a good action or horror movie is how many explosions or how much gore they can expect to see. For these viewers, and for Hollywood itself, the remakes of Wes Craven's “The Hills Have Eyes” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” improve upon their source material simply because they have more blood 'n guts.
Independent films are seeing a drop-off in recent years. With the present state of the media conglomerations in America, it's hard not to be surprised. All in all, the top 6 largest entertainment corporations (including giants such as AOL-Time Warner, Fox News Corp, Disney, and NBC-Universal) account for some 95% of the television and film viewed in the US. Many production companies that took a risk and found themselves successful in the past were quickly gobbled up by a larger company eager to assimilate their talent. At that point, however, the smaller company was under the umbrella of the larger, and their ability to push the envelope with an untested idea was greatly diminished.
Many outside the entertainment industry are unaware that Miramax, long considered a leader in independent pictures, is owned by the Walt Disney Company. This fact in mind, it’s dubious if Miramax would have the level of autonomy it currently enjoys if it decided to take a critical look at its parent company, any of its affiliates, or its business partners. In fact, Disney, wanting to remain neutral for the 2004 presidential elections, attempted to stifle the Michael Moore film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” leading to a struggle in order to get the film released. Had Michael Moore not already established himself as a financially successful documentary director, it's doubtful that his film would have had the leverage necessary to prevail over company politics.
Ultimately, it is through our wallets that we tell Hollywood what we want and what we don't want. Every dollar we spend at the movies is a vote, and unfortunately, the votes that go to a film like “Scary Movie 4” are more than those which go to a film like “Good Night and Good Luck.” There's a tendency to view the companies that make up Hollywood as a cultural institution designed to deliver entertainment to us. To a certain extent this is true, but it becomes something of a naïve notion to expect these companies to take financial risks in order to do so. They're businesses, first and foremost, and as such, they're attempting to make as much money as possible. The bottom line is that if you don't want to make “Big Momma's House” a trilogy, don't spend your hard-earned money on “Big Momma's House 2.” In many cases, we wonder aloud where the ideas for many of these terrible remakes and sequels are coming from. The sad truth of the matter is that most of the time, the blame lies squarely on us.