You may have seen the infographic above posted in a number of places some time last year, lamenting the fact that high-grossing movies in today’s cinematic landscape tend to be attached to stories already in the public consciousness—that there is less quality, original filmmaking coming out for audiences to consume. The only way that may be true is of course if we eliminate the entire independent film system which thrives on the original screenplay and low budget production of original and often off-the-wall material. By that metric, there are more original stories being told on film than ever. The movies making the most money, however, are the tentpole pictures usually tied to a successful introductory film like Iron Man or Pirates of the Caribbean. Building on the success of a hit is obvious less work for a bigger payoff, aka the American Dream.
What that does not mean, though, is that these movies are inherently worse than if we were getting so called original content. All it really shows is that to get people in to see a movie and make a lot of money from it, studios need to convince audiences that their movie is something familiar and has a high probability of being entertaining. Times have changed to allow for many different cinematic markets, and the most profitable one is the one geared toward the familiar. But that’s also totally fine, and results in movies that are full of spectacle and even good storytelling in the best cases. Indeed, this can spring up in the cases of reboots, remakes and franchise pictures just as easily as with anything else. Unsurprisingly, it usually depends on the people working on the project.
Here are 6 reasons remakes and franchise pictures should not be cast in such a negative light.
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