cboath
Master Member
IIRC it has been demonstrated by researchers that creativity goes down when you ask kids to make art that they think is popular, rather than make whatever they want.
I don't think art & business are diametrically opposed either. But predictable mass-market success and creativity do have a strained relationship at best.
I don't think the first POTC movie was where it started. IMO it seemed to creep up over time around the turn of the century.
In the late 1990s the sheer number of movies hitting theaters seemed to be ramping up year after year. I mean not only the little Tarantino ripoffs & horror flicks, but also the number of decent-sized movies with recognizable stars that would have been expected to last a while in theaters. The amount of net-total money that the studios were throwing at theaters (like counting total biomass rather than number of individual life forms) seemed to be on a steady increase.
For a while they were trying to sell stuff based on the star-power of actors but eventually that wasn't working well enough anymore. Putting Al Pacino or Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford on the headline wasn't guaranteeing butts in the seats like it used to. They switched to sequels/reboots/etc as their next attempt to find a predictable formula. There was a lot of bottled-up ideas for "big" movies that SFX limitations had kept out of production in previous eras. Going BIG was where it's at, and that has largely been true ever since.
Cable TV had also been showing a lot of older TV shows to younger audiences in the 1980s/90s. I think that primed the pump for a lot of theatrical remakes of old TV show that would not have happened in previous eras. That helped feed the idea that remaking existing stuff was a low-risk investment.
The LOTR trilogy was a remarkable incident of betting on three huge movies to succeed before seeing the box office take of the first one. That only seems like a safe risk in hindsight. They didn't even do The Hobbit first, they jumped right into the big three. That was the same era when studios thought blowing a hundred million bucks on Travolta's Battlefield Earth or Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic messes were good ideas.
I remember that time in the 90's - there's a whine fest from the studios about no one going and blaming cam-corder piracy and stuff like that. Only for someone to do the research and find that the number of movies coming out had increased significantly. Seems as if they thought that if 5 flicks a year netted them 500M that 15 should net them 1.5B no question asked. Instead they started stepping on each others feat left and right. It took a while, but the number eventually came back down.
I don't think POTC was the first 'franchise' either. It didn't seem to be a must until much more recently. Frankly, it was after Marvel succeeded that people decided 'we have to have one of those, too'. Obviously the first real ones were SW and ST. But both were largely abandoned before the so-called explosion. SW returned prior to the explosion actually. And they tried to push JJ trek afterwards. If want a 'universe', find it organically. If you force it (see DC or GB) it doesn't work out very well. I mean, talk about thinking you're owed a universe - there were all these plans and everything sony had for ghostbusters.....FFS, maybe concentrate on getting a good, solid, first project out the door before you start expanding it???
Just too much copying of the other guy. That worked? OK, we have to copy it. I mean, the head of DC literally said post Avengers 'we have to find a way to cash in on this now'. Just the wrong way to go about it IMO.
As for older TV shows, honestly, if they did a good job it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal. As I said before, they're screwing up the original with the reboot and then complaining when it bombs. Well, no @#$% it bombed, you changed the essence of what made it good to begin with. I mean, what's next? Turn Remington Steele into a new movie starring Melissa McCarthy and Jim Carrey and directed by Paul Feig? The casting is an epic fail of what the series was even about - but all they seem to do is turn these things into slapstick comedies. If you wanna redo a TV, keep a drama a drama, keep mystery mystery. WATCH THE SHOW, figure out what made it last and what made it good and focus on that. All they care about is a title that puts butts in the seats week 1. If it sucks, who cares. It seems as if 'suck' never ever figures into why a movie fail when asking a studio. Ishtar? Ishtar was great - if it wasn't for piracy we'd have raked it in and won oscars!
You make an epic bomb, own up to it. Anything short of that makes these articles fall on deaf ears 100% of the time.
Dear Studio exec: You know why no one saw baywatch? Because no one wanted a comedy version of Baywatch, or, frankly, was asking for a true to the original Baywatch movie. There was an OBVIOUS reason it was popular when it was popular and it's much easier to get today than spending 20 bucks at the movies.