I can’t help but feel that part of this is because to make a movie there’s a higher barrier to entry and so a lot of studios and big budget production companies keep doing the ‘safe’ thing and regurgitating already existing properties or keeping their storylines ‘safe’.
This happens in gaming too (especially with big budget franchises) but there are really great experiments and indies out there showing what can be done, which is less so in the movie and TV industry.
People don’t always want the same thing over and over again and if executives could ever learn this it would be amazing how much creativity there would be, but they don’t.
I don’t think it is so much that executives cannot learn, it’s more that their priorities are consistent predictable margins, not the overall health of the industry.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma, most of the benefit of succeeding with something original is for the industry as a whole; proving certain concepts and ideas are viable, revitalizing public interest in the medium, ect. But the risks are mainly carried by a single publisher or studio, if it flops, they loose money.
So the general trend is to avoid risk and maximize predictable profit, this shrinks the over all profitability of the industry by fatiguing public interest and willingness to pay, but maximizes safety for individual publishers and studios.
Having a low budget segment that can afford to take risk on new ideas is key to preventing industry decline, but the industry has moved away from that towards the highest possible revenue generating films. The publishers and studios that used to do that have all ether folded or moved up to bigger budget higher return options, and they’ve pulled up the ladder behind them by making it so difficult to get indie projects in to theaters.
The same thing could happen in the video game industry. Luckily the indie game market exists, and they’re still able to get their products distributed on large platforms like consoles if they prove a big enough hit on the PC market. It is getting harder though, and more and more, small budget, small team games are getting relegated to PC where there is just a smaller market. Ideally, consoles should make it easier to get small indie games onto their platform, or more people should start playing on PCs.
The movie Everything Everywhere All at Once really brought a tear to my eye. It ignored a lot of “safe” conventions and just went all in on making a really good film.
That’s kinda’ how Rockstar Games started, apparently. Strauss Zelnik (spelling…?) suggested the Houser brothers to enter the gaming market because movie and music markets were too saturated and had success rates too low. Gaming was new at the time.
All of this comes from some YouTube video. Will edit in a YouTube/Invidious link to it here, sometime…
