Shawshank Redemption was a book. The Godfather was a book. Lord of the Rings, Forrest Gump, Fight Club, Goodfellas, Silence of the Lambs... That's just from the first 25 of IMDB'S top 250.

The Thing is a remake. The Fly was a remake. Scarface, The Departed, The Mummy... all remakes.

The problem isn't remakes or adaptations, the problem is they're shit remakes and adaptations. Nobody cares that The Batman was the 75th adaptation of Batman, because it was good.

Cody Johnson put it very well when he talked about how movie executives saw that Barbie was a smart and funny movie with a good message and decided that meant they needed to make more movies about Mattel toys.

Executives don't even like movies very much. They just want to make money and they do whatever they think will make money, not make good movies.

It’s easier to extract profit for the shareholders from an established IP, rather than trying to build value through building your own IP. Catching lightning in a bottle is difficult, so it’s easier to just sell replicas of the bottle.

I swear the creator dialogue has got to have some amount of advertisment mixed in with real people because the biggest compliment I see everywhere is that the movie looks expensive but cost very little.

I saw it. It was gorgeous. The art direction was wonderful. But that was about everything positive I have to say about it.

The world building was atrocious, the plot was trope heavy, the sound design was serviceable but not many sounds stood out, I couldn't find an impactful or nuanced message, the pacing was a rubber band, and the individual challenges were boring.

I love original content, and quite frankly I feel like there's enough of them every year to not be heart broken everytime a bad original film doesn't make a stellar return. I'm kinda tired of the "where new IP" discussion though.

Of course I wish there were more big budget independent films but right now the problem seems to be big budget films in general to me. More often than not they hit like duds, but they're built on good will and that's all it takes to get me to return to the first dud.

Idk, Creator sucked and it hurts to say because I want new, great, and scifi worlds coming to the theater every year but the Creator isn't good simply because it's new and that doesn't meant new IPs are "hard for the masses" to understand/appreciate/turn-out-for.

It's always been lowest common denominator content that's made the most money. I always ask people about movie preferences and an ever increasing common theme "Life is already tough, I don't want a serious movie, I just want mindless entertainment." Sequels provide that, you know the characters, you know the stakes, sprinkle in jokes and you have a mindless money maker.

movies, at the most fundamental level, are investments.

Before anything else can happen, somebody needs to put up the money, often hitting nine digit figures, to get it made.

They want to get their money back. They want sure bets.

If it isn't going to be a sequel, it had better carry some powerful names like Tom Cruise or Christopher Nolan or Margot Robbie + Ryan Gosling

Because people prefer familiarity over the unknown.

It's not a new phenomena, as there have been remakes and sequels for almost as long as there have been movies. It's also not unique to movies as far as sequels go. Readers begging for sequels to popular books are the bane of authors everywhere.

Just enjoy what you enjoy and ignore the things you don't. For every remake or sequel there's an original movie produced by a small independent studio somewhere that's desperate for viewers.

I think it’s also similar to the reason all the bands from the 70’s and 80’s have taken up touring again. When these bands started their audience was in the prime of their youth so they were interested in new sounds and experiences. Now that they’re all old and comfortable they don’t want to venture too far from what they know. They also acquired the bulk of the wealth and power and this group of people is also the ones running these companies

This is why: https://youtu.be/OZ28knLt5Rs?si=SddCmwZnETY3n_1R

Edit: I see I’m not the first person to post this video.

There's the corporate side of it, which other comments have covered, but consumer mentality is a big piece, too. Seems like we're so awash in content there's a widespread jaded expert mentality that's taken hold. A lack of naive willingness to try new things, possibly paired with or caused by a feeling of being overtaxed financially from all sides and having too many things demanding our time.
A lack of willingness to spend time or money on something we don't already identify with as being good, on both the sides of consumers and producers.

Late stage capitalism has changed us all. Feels like there's a lot less room for experimentality in this huge carefully curated experience. We've all seen too much.

edit to add: Maybe the popularity of reboots are us yearning for simpler times. We can't reboot society so we reboot our movies, music, shows, etc. Meanwhile, constantly rehashing old plots prevents the renewal we really want.

Big reason is because people keep buying it.

Lesser reason is that these companies are risk averse, and would rather spend 500 million risking a flop on a remake of somethign that has an existing base, than spend 10million to support something new, unique and creative.

Risk.

The thinking is if an idea worked the first time, people will want more of it, so it's going to work the second time too.

Plus, it's way easier to get people working together on a project when everybody had already worked together before.

I still have yet to figure out why nobody does remakes like HeartGold and SoulSilver anymore.

Not everything is a sequel, reboot or remake.

Every week, original films are released. Most lack money for advertising and are commercial failures. If we wish to see more films like them made, we need to see them - preferably with people who wouldn't otherwise have, and spread the news about them in person or Lemmy or whatever you wish.

Or you could just wait. The movie industry has gone through this many times.

https://media.tenor.com/sqOZZnRhjMsAAAAC/money-mr.gif

Part of it for me is im not paying for anything anymore. Avengers endgame was like the last thing I bought and that was mostly just wanting to finish off the story. To much rehashing and to much individual little streaming fifedoms and such.

Because it's cheap and people keep buying.

Hollywood ran out unique ideas years ago for the most part. Reboots etc just easier .

Here's another essay about this by Patrick (H) Willems. It touches on other factors as the risk adverseness of theaters and producers. The death of the movie star, the high costs of CGI, the devalue of the cinema experience by way of Netflix straight to stream content, the rise of streaming in general, profiteering by executives, the raise in TV series budget, etc.

But quite pointedly, it touches on the fact that audiences have been trained for decades now to stay at home and not to request higher quality media. The emotional experience of “going out” to the movie theater, spending the evening engaging with an unknown novel narrative, trusting the director and the publisher to keep you entertained for a couple of hours is all gone. Mass marketing media has made it so that this experience is not possible anymore, so people have stopped requesting it. People only invest on blockbuster, $200MM+ mega productions. So they go to the theaters once or twice every year for those mega events. But people no longer go any random weekend to a theater just to see something that's being played there regardless of mass marketing. It would take years to retrain audiences that such an offering exists and that they don't have to hunt on streaming services or pirate movies just to emulate that random Saturday evening experience at home.

It’s low risk - or, it’s at least a more quantifiable risk. It’s easier for studios to be able to estimate the returns on investment

money

As much as I was fed up with "Batman: Hulks Revenge - Infinity Multiverse Edition, a Groot and Thanos Love Story" ten years ago, I can't deny that they're popular titles. I just hope that movie makers will shift back to originality at some point.

But for now, due to the shift in how media is consumed, they're unlikely to go for anything that is not a safe choice, which sadly means that they'll stick to sequels or renoots of established brands.

People want the familiar. That's why mom & pop stores lost out to chain retailers, why your dad just wants to go to chilies again instead of trying out that new place that just opened.