Hollywood Keeps Becoming Ever More a Parody of Itself

Looking at the schedule of Hollywood releases for 2023 I was struck by just how packed it is with sequels, reboots and the rest--perhaps even more so than in recent years. Even the movies that are not summer blockbuster-type action movies (e.g. at least ten live-action Marvel and DC superhero films, along with new editions of Transformers, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Mission: Impossible, etc., etc.) are do-overs or at least trading on old names and ideas, with the horror movie genre exemplary.* In 2023, it seems, we will have more Scream, more Evil Dead, more Insidious, more The Nun, more Saw, more Exorcist (not to be confused with The Pope's Exorcist, also due out in 2023), while even old Count Dracula will be coming back to the screen in the form of Nicholas Cage (in Renfield). This even seems to be the case with the minute share of theatrically-run filmmaking that now passes for "drama," with Creed III on the way.

Of course, point all this out and a certain kind of suck-up Establishment critic will claim that you've got it all wrong, that the theaters are chock full of original and highly diverse content, so much of it that they don't need to be able to give you any examples, they are all around you--and in the process remind you of the adage that you can't win an argument with an idiot. If they prove themselves other than idiots (or at least, other than complete idiots), they will take a different tack and say that Hollywood is merely giving people what they want--that, yes, it is as you say, but very few people are ready to go for the theater for anything else.

I think that the "giving people what they want" claim has its limits--the consumer will not get what business does not offer, and in this case we are talking about a high-capital industry in a financial milieu where it can make more sense to bury a nearly complete $100 million film rather than to release it because the tax write-off is more attractive than the revenue. Still, it is only fair to admit that there is some truth to audience behavior having an effect on what the studios are ready to invest in--insofar as the function of the theater has changed since that era in which a motion picture could be seen only in the movie house. In an age of small screens everywhere, affording greater convenience and control and far lower cost than the trip to the theater, only big-screen spectacle of a kind for which the bar has only just gone on rising, and the sense of the release being an event, will get them to make that trip--for which nothing else substitutes financially as a revenue stream for Hollywood. (Yes, video, TV, merchandising are important, but the studio's cut of the $15 or $20 ticket is critical, and selling a lot of those tickets what paves the way for big money from all the rest.)

All the same, it is a reminder that in Hollywood, just like everywhere else in the business world, there is far more (insufferably pompous) talk about INNOVATION! than there is the actual thing.

* Yes, ten, count them, ten live-action DC and Marvel superhero movies. The live-action Marvel films are: Kraven the Hunter (January); Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (February); Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (May); The Marvels (July); Madame Web (October); and Blade (November). The DC films are Shazaam! Fury of the Gods (March); The Flash (June); Blue Beetle (August); and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (December). The reader should also note that there will be an animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June), while from outside the Marvel-DC domain there will also be an animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (August).