Hollywood isn't out of ideas — in fact, the opposite is true
We're so inundated with original content perfectly attenuated to our preferred niches that the only movies and media able to rise above the din are those with mass appeal. Is that a bad thing?
Much has been made of the demise of originality in Hollywood. But if originality in Hollywood were a person, it might say, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
What first got me thinking about this topic is a tweet from Columbia Business School Postdoc Adam Mastroianni:
I agree with Mastroianni’s contention that “Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct.” The key word is “chart-topping.” But in the internet age, who cares about charts?
As the internet has made it easier to seek out and find niche content, the media landscape has become increasingly fractured. That’s not an inherently bad thing. It's allowed people to find movies, books, songs and video games that more closely match their interests, and to build communities around them.
Granted, this has come at a cost: the diminishment of a shared national, mainstream culture, which has perhaps contributed to the divisiveness of our national politics. But that's like everything in life; there are always tradeoffs. People used to all be watching more or less the same things on TV or in movie theaters. Home video shook things up a bit, allowing people to find obscure titles or cult classics, but media creation was still mostly beholden to the traditional studio system due to the cost of production.
Two key factors disrupted the media landscape: The availability of (relatively) cheap digital equipment making it easier than ever to produce high-quality content without breaking the bank, and the internet making it easier than ever to find, watch, and share that content.
There is probably more original content being produced across every possible medium than at any point in human history. Netflix's current financial woes notwithstanding, it wasn’t that long ago that the streaming platform's hunger for content was so insatiable, it was driving up production costs for the rest of Hollywood. Sure, the platform is scaling back after losing subscribers, but new rivals have entered the game with their own mandates to produce a deluge of original content: Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, and Paramount+, to name a few. (Disney+ is an obvious exception, as most of its exclusive content is based on existing IP, such as Star Wars and Marvel).
The same is true of music, too. It's easier than ever to discover indie musical artists thanks to streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Granted, indie artists may not be making a ton of money from streaming platforms — but that's a separate issue. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s easier than ever to discover obscure musical artists in just about every genre imaginable.
Self-published authors have proliferated in the wake of e-books and the introduction of Amazon's Kindle store. Sure, you have to wade through a lot of low-quality drivel to find the gems among the explosion of self-published content, but there are still more gems than ever — look at the success of self-published superstars like Mark Dawson and Hugh Howey, for example.
Even video games are more diverse and varied than ever. Platforms like Steam's make it easier for indie game developers to reach a wider audience, resulting in cult hits like the farming game Stardew Valley.
Mastroianni argues that the calcification of the blockbuster charts is bad for society, because it forces people to all consume the same bland content instead of expanding their minds with original content:
Mastroianna makes a fatal logical flaw here by assuming that just because franchises and sequels dominate the charts, those are all anyone is watching, reading, listening to, etc. Au contraire; people are consuming more original content than ever — it’s just that they’re consuming so much different content that, generally speaking, no single piece of content can attract an audience large enough to register on the charts.
The data backs this up. Take foreign cinema, for example. The caricature of American media consumers is that they eschew foreign cinema, yet Axios proclaims that we're increasingly open to international perspectives when it writes, “Americans are consuming more foreign content than ever.”
There’s another issue: In the streaming age, with streaming platforms keeping their viewership numbers close to their chests, it’s possible a lot of original content on streaming platforms would top the charts if the charts were aware of their existence. Consider Netflix's original action film, Extraction, which was released exclusively on the streaming platform in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (admittedly, this film is based on a graphic novel, so depending on your definition, it may not qualify as an “original” film). It got a lot of buzz on social media, but it didn't top any charts, aside from Netflix’s platform-specific ones. Charts are also becoming increasingly less relevant for music, as demonstrated by the Washington Post headline, “Billboard's charts used to be our barometer for music successes. Are they meaningless in the streaming age?”
One last point: Not all sequels, remakes and spinoffs are made equal. I'm thinking here of the 21 Jump Street movies starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. Yes, the films are derivative of the original 21 Jump Street TV series. But they also have a lot of fun pointing out the tropes and cliches expected of remakes and sequels, forcing the viewer to actively evaluate what they're watching rather than passively taking it in. The self-referential fun the films seem to be having flies in the face of the idea that all sequels are dumb and mindless. Sequels are by definition derivative, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're all wholly unoriginal.
It feels a bit silly to be arguing about the state of the entertainment industry — first world problems, right? — but the fact is, this is something people care deeply about, as evidenced by the various fandoms that have popped up around various franchises over the years. In the end, the effect the internet has had on the entertainment industry as a whole is a double edged sword. Yes, it has resulted in the biggest players playing it safe and sticking with familiar franchises that often feel tired. But at the same time, it's opened up possibilities for thousands of independent creators who are often bold and inventive (and we haven’t even touched on user-generated content, from YouTube to TikTok, supplanting studio-produced fare — that could be an article in its own right!)
So to those who would claim a dearth of originality in movies, TV shows, music, books, or video games, I implore you: Look harder.