Recently I was watching a video bemoaning the current state of Hollywood. I won't bother linking it — you've seen it before, or read it in print. Hollywood has no creativity left, it's all remakes and adaptations of older stuff. You know the drill.
I don't really disagree. I do think that we forget how much Hollywood has always relied on remakes and adaptations. It's possible to acknowledge that and still be a bit put out by how poorly Hollywood is doing it nowadays. When a film like The Martian or Arrival faithfully adapts its source material, I am almost shocked.
However, one point in the particular diatribe I was watching made me puzzled. The critic mentioned that one cause of the "dumbing down" of cinema is the increasing reliance on foreign markets. For big movies, more than half the revenue now comes from Asia. That means the films have to cross cultures easily, so no subtle depictions of social class dynamics in a mostly-black Catholic private school in New Orleans in the 1970s, because nobody in Shanghai really gives a damn about that.
Okay, fine, and true enough. Globalization is real and ongoing. One reason so many films are about punching aliens is that aliens don't buy movie tickets and won't boycott or ban your movie for showing them getting punched.
BUT, this made me wonder about a seeming contradiction. If Hollywood wants to make movies for a global audience . . . why are so many films based on old American TV shows, toys, and cartoons? How many adults in China right now remember playing with a Hasbro Battleship set when they were kids? How many moviegoers in India have fond memories of watching Lost in Space? Heck, how many people outside the United States have read any Marvel comics lately?
Can someone explain this seeming contradiction? If you want to appeal to a global audience, why not just make movies about new characters and save the cost of buying rights and the grief of complaints from fans? Surely there must be some rational economic motive underlying this, but I can't see it.
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