The Nuance of Numbers

On the internet we hear “movies aren’t as good now”, “well when movies were good” and “back when”, now these thoughts are all blatantly untrue because brilliant movies exist everywhere, people are just lazy and won't watch anything not handed directly to them. Often the general public blames writers for the lack of originality in Hollywood. The amount of sequels, remakes and reboots are often cited as to why writers don’t deserve to be paid properly. Especially in the year of the longest and biggest strike in entertainment industry history. What most people don’t realize is that all of those unoriginal movies that you hate are commissioned by studios, and are fulfilled simply by writers trying to feed themselves. You see studios see a movie that was successful, like Ghostbusters and they immediately think audiences want more Ghostbusters instead of seeing that audiences want more friend group comedies. They see no nuance in the numbers.

Barbie grossed over a billion dollars and instead of seeing that audiences want more films by women and for women (even though Wonder Woman broke records in a similar way) they saw a successful toy movie. Now we can probably expect an Uno movie sometime soon. There’s the Ghostbusters example and then of course the coasting on the success of franchises. The Hobbit movies failed in comparison to Lord of the Rings but they were at least operating on different source material. Whereas Fantastic Beasts never even finished their series because the second movie failed so hard and they lost so much money. And now they are trying to recreate the success of Harry Potter by making it a TV series (something that won’t make it past season 4, because that story isn't meant for a serialized format AND the fanbase has turned on JKR). Simply look at the overall grosses for the last few Halloween movies vs any original movie to come out in the last 3 years. 2022 and 2023 were INCREDIBLE years for original films and somehow that wasn’t enough to wake the AMPTP up.

Studios seem to think that they can duplicate the success of an original film by simply building off the same film, with the same concept and similar characters. When they really could just hire analysts who spend time finding out WHY a movie was successful through internet and in person surveys and then finding writers already creating original stories that fit what audiences want. Now as an aspiring writer it is very frustrating but as an audience member it's even more frustrating. We have to sit here and watch studios churn out crap, especially when I know I can do better.

I can’t help but ask myself, don’t studios have social media reps? Don't they have people that see what the internet says about their bad movies? Do they just not care about losing a few billion dollars?

Original thoughts exist in Hollywood. Writers are constantly creating golden, beautiful and brilliant stories but they are being silenced by major studios who fail to realize that if you feed audiences emotions, they will feed your wallet. Instead we are fed expensive to make but cheap in development movies completely devoid of emotion, heart, content or a coherent thought. And then they wonder why no one is going to the movies anymore. If the AMPTP would like to hire me to tell them everything they are doing wrong and how they could make the most money, I am here to help. But it's really clear, reboots, remakes and sequels simply make less money than original movies. That is easily verifiable and unbelievably easy to see. Only stupid, lazy, studio execs could possibly miss it.