Building Up or Building On?

Media is one of the world’s biggest industries, not because it is a necessity, but because no matter where someone was born, when they were born, their culture, or ethnicity, everyone wants to be entertained. Media aims to entertain, to fascinate its audience, to capture their attention and to help them leave their day to day life, but its main aim has always been to make money.

Movies and TV are regarded by most as art forms, combining the creativity of many people (the writers, editor, director, etc.) to create a riveting and beautiful collage of their collective expressions, yet this is not always the case. Creativity is sometimes thrown out to cater for its audience, to restrict the decisions of a director to make a movie more popular, not better. This restriction also comes in the lack of original screenplays and in the abundance of sequels and remakes.

Knowing that a sequel brings more ticket sales (fans of the original and new comers to the series), studios are heavily favouring them. This trend has become very popular and is very evident when looking at box office numbers. According to Box Office Mojo, only 2 movies in the top 20 domestic grossing movies (for 2017) are original live-action scripts, one of them being Dunkirk which is based on true events. All other live-action movies in this list are either sequels (Star Wars Ep. 8), expanded universe (Spider-Man: Homecoming), adaptations (It), or remakes (Beauty and the Beast).

While making sequels and building on previously explored content isn’t bad, it is starting to saturate the market. A lot of these non-original scripts have received good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, such as Thor: Ragnarok and Logan, receiving 92% and 93% scores respectively, but a lot of critiques are starting to have this feeling of fatigue. The industry saw the demand for these types of movies and capitalised on it, but this lead to the supply over-extending, each studio wanting to cash in.

A perfect example of this is the Pirates of the Caribbean series. In 2003, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was released to a 79% but in 2017, the fifth instalment to the franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales was released to a meagre 30%. But the fact remains that even with such a low score, Dead Men Tell No Tales came 18th in the domestic box office, meaning the audience still has a demand for these types of movies. So who’s right, the critiques or the audience?

There is no right or wrong, simply people’s opinions, and when it comes to media, these will always differ. The highest grossing domestic movie of 2017 was Star Wars: The Last Jedi yet it hasn’t received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and only received a total of 4 Oscar nominations, 3 of which to do with its audio and the other being for visual effects. This is because most of the time, the general audience and critiques have different criteria which deem a movie good, the audience asking for a fun and digestible movie and the critiques looking for more complex and artsy films.

The general audience in this case is passive, accepting what they are given and going to watch these “recycled” movies while the opinion leaders are being active, criticising or praising when needed and trying to get their voices heard, but at the end of the day, no matter how loud their voices are money always wins. Maybe if the general audience keeps going to watch these non-original movies, then the studios will keep making them, feeding the vicious cycle of supply and demand. Or maybe Logan was just the perfect foreshadowing from the industry, an old hero dying, knowing his time is up and the future will hold new things.

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P.S. This post was written in early 2018 so the examples may be a tad dated but the concept still stands.