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Comment by maldusiecle | Hacker News Reader

A good context to this piece would be the recent NYTimes article ("Attacked by Rotten Tomatoes") that claims Rotten Tomatoes is damaging sales for films. Everyone is to blame except for the studios, who are producing bad movies that no one wants: endless sequels, remakes, and adaptations of successes in other media.

If An Inconvenient Sequel really were controversial, that would be all the more reason for its success. Controversy sells. In fact, it's the least-risky kind of film to make: a sequel to a widely-lauded, successful film (An Inconvenient Truth has 93% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). Hollywood execs can cry me a river.

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who are producing bad movies that no one wants: endless sequels, remakes, and adaptations of successes in other media.

How do you square that belief with the fact that 8 of 10 top grossing movies so far this year (and 7 out of 10 for last year) is a sequel, remake or adaptation? Obviously someone seems to want them

Everybody hates sequels when they sit down and think about it. But, when they don't... When it's "Eh... Let's go see a movie. What's playing?" They are faced with two investment choices: One selection of high-risk, unknown, unproven, original movies Vs. another selection of low-risk, familiar, proven productions --some of which are well-known to be liked by their group and others are well-understood to be skippable.

The "Eh... Let's go to a movie" scenario makes up a far larger portion of the total revenue than the carefully researched, highly anticipating planners. It should be no surprise that they spend so much on sequels and adaptations.

People love sequels that are good movies - movies that tell you more about a beloved world and characters and recapture or extend the feeling of a good previous film.

The problem is too many sequels are simply not good movies - they exist only because they can sell tickets based on the strength of the previous film(s). They reduce or dilute the overall experience of the franchise.

> Everybody hates sequels when they sit down and think about it.

As someone whose only hobby is watching and discussing movies: No, this isn't true.

People just go to the movies for the sake of going to the movies. When there are no good options, they choose one of the bad options. The ultimate result is that they go to the movies a lot less frequently, because as much as they like the "movie theater" experience, most of what comes out is boring.

What we're seeing is a cinematic environment where there's very little passion for movies. Once all the passionate cinema-goers have tuned out (because there's nothing that excites them anymore), all that's left is reflexively going to the movies for the sake of killing time. And if you're only there to kill time, you'd might as well see the Emoji Movie, or Pirates of the Caribbean 11 or whatever.

Endless sequels, remakes and adaptations aren't necessarily a bad thing - it's just that they are sequels made without having good ideas for sequels, and remakes/adaptations done worse than the last time.

I really hope that the big rise of crappy Cinematic Universes trying to cash in on where Marvel have succeeded won't kill the idea of continuity in Film for a time afterwards. So many of the adaptations are terrible precisely because they try and cram novels/series/games/whatever into a single film and end up with something with no time to be good. Allowing films to take time to explore smaller parts of a bigger plot is a good thing, provided it is done well.

It actually has an okay rotten tomatoes score.

You see this kind of voting on anything where people get angry at it. Look at games that have their audience scores drop massively because they make something some portion of their audience decides is just absolutely awful despite the fact that they still play it (e.g. Playerunknown Battlegrounds is massively popular but has a mediocre score because they pissed off some people with some DLC thing).

I do agree though, all the complaining about rotten tomatoes is misplaced.

Yeah. I saw an ad last night during a late night comedy talk show. Said, "boy, sounds like someone didn't see this same exact movie two decades ago, Flatliners."

Turned out, no, that's exactly what happened. They remade the exact same movie with different actors. Why bother??? How stupid. What a waste.

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