Media-ocrity

Are movies out of ideas?

By: Kylie Heider

It is very easy to be pessimistic about the future of media. Too often, the media landscape of the last ten years feels like a cruel mistress, a swindler who appeals to the viewer’s natural inclinations towards comfort, familiarity, and nostalgia, only to leave you hanging yet again as she walks away with your money. You know (and she knows) that you will return to her alluring gaze the next time she feels like making another hundred million dollars. Every year, theaters and streaming services are flooded with the same blue-gray, pulpy action movie, the same “fresh” live action adaptation to the same tired fairytale, the same Oscarbait drama, the same endless reboots, remakes, and sequels. Now more than ever, the age of data and information has turned the film into nothing more than a mechanism of commerce, yet another slithering appendage on the dark leviathan of capitalism. The viewer is not seen as a human being, but a piece of information, a simple input/output function whose only need is to be marketed to.  Audiences, in turn, have started to ask if they will ever see original content return to the big screen.

Recently, Paramount Pictures, a division of ViacomCBS, announced that the studio would be pivoting away from theatrical film production and toward content that is created exclusively for the Paramount+ streaming platform. This change marks a huge transition for the studio and the film industry at large, with streaming quickly becoming the dominant method of distribution for new film and television. Major studios like Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, and Paramount have all shifted towards streaming with services like HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, and Paramount+. In turn, we will likely see a boom of short-form, cheaper content that is more suitable to watch online. 

With the exception of Disney, who seems to have mastered the art of convincing its audience that its formulaic, recycled content is actually something new and fresh, major studios seem to be experiencing a disconnect between what long-form content audiences want to see and what is produced. For example, based on the online reception of the trailer, it seems unlikely that audiences will be flocking to the theatres to see live-action “Clifford the Big Red Dog” despite fond memories of the books during childhood. Other remakes that flopped this year include Paramount’s “G.I. Joe: Snake Eyes” and Warner Brothers’ “Space Jam: A New Legacy.”  Nostalgia, as it turns out, is not always profitable (or even interesting). 

It is important to remember that the era of recycled content that we find ourselves in is not actually unprecedented. In many ways the “Golden Age” of Hollywood and the Studio System reflected the same media landscape we see today. The major releases of this time were primarily musicals and westerns. Almost every working professional in Hollywood had worked on either a musical or a western, just as every working professional today has worked on a Marvel movie. Of course, this system was corrupt and antiquated, and had to be dismantled eventually. During the same period, alternative cinema movements were emerging around the world, which pushed the boundaries and applications of the medium and established it as the art form we know today. The combination of these two factors led to a cinematic renaissance of the 1960s-1980s. With the shift to accessible, short-form content and the rise of democratized, user-based digital media, perhaps in the future we will see more alternative, original content appear in long-form features. 

So is originality a thing of the past? No. At this moment, however, original content is just not being platformed by mainstream media corporations because it is easier and less financially risky to invest in something that is guaranteed an audience, such as a sequel or remake. There is no reason to assume this will change so long as this structure of media making continues to be profitable. However, nothing lasts forever. This moment in media is simply a bubble, bound to burst eventually. Perhaps in time, the heady calls of our beloved media conglomerates will lose some of their customary luster as we tire of the same cheap thrills and old gimmicks. Just as all things do, with time, media will adapt and evolve, shed its old skin, and bloom into something truly new, exciting, and interesting.