Movies are a big part of many people’s lives. The excitement from viewing CGI heroes, fighting CGI villains, on a CGI background. Movies have the ability to cause wonder, excitement and many tears. But movies have become stale recently. I don’t need to tell anyone that Marvel humor has become its own joke.
Movies today have lost their magic and Hollywood’s lack of originality is to blame. 2023 was one of the most sequel-filled years for movies. Containing disappointing post-Thanos continuations of the MCU with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania and Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3, or D.C. flops like Aquaman 2 and Black Adam.
Non-superhero movies are offenders of this too, movies like Saw X, Fast X, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny all ended up being cash grabs. Hollywood not funding new ideas makes no sense to me, as a good number of up-and-coming directors on smaller budgets can make great movies.
George Lucas’ Star Wars is a great example of a low-budget movie taking risks. Now, Star Wars is a cultural phenomenon. But of course, like Star Wars, Hollywood finds a way to bleed the IP dry.
The rise of streaming services is ruining Hollywood movies even more. The statement, “I’ll wait for it to come out on streaming,” was common post-COVID and many companies hoped if they made exclusive streaming service movies, they would get more views. With everyone inside their houses, it worked, but now, with more things to do than watch TV all day, Hollywood has reused IPs to attract more people to use their streaming services to see movies that made them nostalgic for their childhood, only for it to be a half-baked attempt of a once beloved movie.
Sequels, reboots and movies based on other properties are on the rise. Video game movie popularity has been on a steady decline and reboots of classics have mostly been panned by critics. Hollywood has become creatively bankrupt in the past few years since they cannot realize that nostalgia doesn’t make up for bad writing.
We’ll just have to see how many million-dollar flops need to be produced until we actually get some true original gems again.
