.png)
photo credit: Paramount Pictures
At least forty 2024 film releases are remakes or adaptations, such as Despicable Me 4, A Quiet Place: Day One, and Mean Girls (2024). While recycling intellectual property is not a modern revolution for the entertainment business, the sheer quantity of artistic multiplicities in the past years marks a new era of risk-aversion in Hollywood.
Beginning in 1994 with The Jungle Book and increasing in frequency since, Disney has embarked on a journey to remake previous successes and wipe the dust off old box-office failures. From live-action remakes faithful to their source material, such as Beauty and the Beast (2017), to perspective-flipping spinoffs like Cruella (2021), Disney’s truly original creations are few and far between. The 2020 closures of Disney’s California and Florida theme parks cost the company at least 3.5 billion dollars (CNBC), causing the company to “put all of its eggs in one money-making basket” (NBCNews). For Disney, refreshed old classics have a built-in audience, and a mass of ticket-buyers and streamers. New content poses great uncertainty. While an original story could bring great success, throwing something new into the competitive streaming arena is far riskier. Even original successes eventually fall to the same franchised fate as every one of Disney’s stories: box office success Inside Out (2015) has a sequel coming this summer. Writer Aramide A. Tinubu says in his NBCNews Think article “by plugging people of color into past films with all-white casts, Disney may be trying to unravel its past mishaps — but covering something with a fresh coat of paint does not erase what was there before.” By choosing to take dated narratives and lazily renew them for the modern era of entertainment, Disney and other entertainment moguls are taking a valuable storytelling opportunity away from a marginalized voice with a fresh perspective. This is not to say that there have been no fresh stories, but that there has been a disproportionate influx of repolished old stories over innovative new ones.
Entertainment spin-offs and remakes are medium-defying, as well. According to the Washington Post, “More than a quarter of the shows playing on Broadway right now are based on films.” These shows are on their way to, or have already completed, the “movie-musical based on a musical based on a movie” cycle, which includes titles like Mean Girls and Matilda, both based on books (authors Rosalind Wiseman and Roald Dahl, respectively.) Similarly to the Disney phenomenon, musicals and movies marching after one another in sequence have one common attribute: a devoted, willing-to-pay audience.
The idea of entertainment taking inspiration from other literary and pop-culture pieces is not new, nor does it inherently signify the demise of creativity. Narratives are recycled and revamped, and characters are taken from board games and Shakespeare stories and placed into mansions and high schools. To discredit a piece of art because it is part of an existing universe of characters or inspired by work before it is to discredit the entertainment industry in its entirety. It is a practice that dates back to the earliest years of the moving image when Thomas Edison released The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905), based on a popular postcard character image (The Atlantic). The increased rate at which heavily recycled franchises are released is not a surefire marker of the end of creativity. Recycling themes, narratives, and characters is a strategy dating back to the silent era of film and one that will extend into the predictable future.
Sources Cited
Comments