movies

Streaming has meant it has never been easier for Hollywood to measure the power of nostalgia. They watch what we’re watching and rewatching and it means they bring back, to varying degrees of success: The Matrix, Scream, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Mad Max, Hocus Pocus, Legally Blonde, Ghostbusters, Home Alone, Blade Runner, Kung Fu Panda, Jurassic Park, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Beetlejuice and many, many more. At this very moment, Twisters, Kung Fu Panda 4, Despicable Me 4, and Furiosa are in cinemas. In the very near future we are getting more Alien films, more Frozens, more Lord of the Rings, a Mufasa origin story, even more attempts at making Snow White, Jurassic Park and Fantastic Four movies, a bewildering number of Avatar films and, somehow, another Tron. Occasionally, an Ice Age film suddenly appears like a jump scare.

Hollywood is not nimble at the best of times, let alone when dealing with a backlog caused by the pandemic then two industry-halting strikes. Right now, it is on the ropes, in a fight with foes they created. They created a landscape in which no films end any more because they’re all The Empire Strikes Back in a never-ending story – which has eroded goodwill among casual moviegoers, who were asked too often to watch TV shows or read comics just to understand what is happening in a film. An investment banker’s approach to film-making that has left us hungry for more original, mid-budget films when they’ve put all their money in intellectual properties (IPs). And an overreliance on franchises that are loved for being familiar, not because they are strong enough to warrant more instalments.

Some will argue that sequel or franchise fatigue is not really a thing, in that it is immediately disproved when a hit like Bad Boys: Ride or Die comes along. But it’s hard not to feel fatigued when original films are just croutons in a Hollywood buzzword salad: made entirely of sequels and prequels and existing IPs and brands and reboots and remakes. Some of their decisions have even started feeling a bit insulting. Did we seem like we wanted a Pop-Tarts origin story? We didn’t mean to.