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Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

> everyday people are catching on to the fact that they're just being resold the same stuff they've already bought.

But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.

"catching on to the fact" suggest that this is some secret insight which undermines the enjoyment of the movie. But I'm pretty sure most people who goes to the Disney remakes go because it is remakes of movies they already know and love. They want to see the same thing in a new way.

According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK.

Hollywood does have problem, but it is not due to lack of originality. Hollywood produces plenty of original stories still, but it is the remakes and franchises which grosses the most. Because the consumers likes this stuff.

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>But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping.

Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks.

>According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK.

Exactly. People are bemoaning the current state of Hollywood, but it's extremely profitable, and that's all that really matters to them. There's no shortage of paying customers willing to see the latest sequel/prequel/remake/reboot. Sure, they might lose a few ticket sales from people like me and this OP and his nephew, but it's more than made up for by countless others who just don't care and want entertainment. And yes, they might make more profit on a really great original movie (like the original Star Wars in 1977), but that's also a big risk and it might flop and be a giant loss, so they tend to shy away from such things now and make safer movies that have an almost guaranteed profit, even if it isn't as much.

"Hollywood" has never, ever taken more risks than they are taking today.

Netflix alone spent $12 billion on new content in 2018. They expect to spend $15 billion in 2019, and expect this to hit almost $18 billion in 2020.[1] There is more new, original content being produced than anyone could ever expect to watch in one lifetime. Compare this to a few decades ago when you had 3 or 4 networks on TV each making a dozen or so shows each year, and a handful of studios producing movies (many of them remakes from the 30s, 40s, and 50s).

Everyone seems to view "Hollywood" with rose colored glasses. The medium through which people consume entertainment certainly seems like it is starting to change, but that doesn't mean "Hollywood" is dead or dying. The exact opposite is happening.

[1] https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/netflix-content-spendi...

Netflix isn't "Hollywood"; that should be pretty obvious from the context of this discussion. Netflix got into the made-for-Netflix movie production business because the traditional studios were pulling their content from Netflix. "Hollywood" is the studios producing movies that go to the big-screen theaters. We aren't talking about indie stuff here, movies only shown at art-house theaters, movies only shown on Netflix or Amazon Prime, etc.

Netflix is quite literally Hollywood...it has the only studios physically located in Hollywood, releases movies on the big screen, and adheres to all of the guild/union rules with respect to film productions.

It's had its share of horrible remakes, blockbuster crap, and arthouse films.

No studio releases all of its movies to theaters; most studio catalogs have more VOD releases (formerly "direct-to-video") than studio releases. The VOD releases are frequently more profitable on an average basis so long as budgets are strictly adhered to.

My understanding of the business is limited. I did hear Patrick Whiteside speak at a dinner though last year, and from his description, it seemed like most of these shows are packaged up and sold by the studios of even the agency itself. So say the agency represents a good writer who has a new script and Reese Witherspoon suits the lead role, is also represented by the agency, and wants the work. The agency essentially will go pitch the script and likely cast to Netflix, Hulu, etc. so often Netflix isn’t the one actually the entire conception and implementation of the show. They are just the ones buying the rights to own it and distribute it.

The OP article clearly counts Netflix as part of Hollywood, just like Disney.

What are we defining as "Hollywood" here? Is Netflix really considered the same thing as the studios that produce the blockbusters?

Your statement begs the question. The OP said "Hollywood" doesn't produce as much original content as it did decades ago. When I point out that there is more original content being created today than ever (probably on the order of several magnitudes) simply because it's cheaper than ever to produce original content, the only thing you mention is "blockbusters". Clearly, the production of blockbusters has nothing to do with the amount of original content being created. Why differentiate Netflix from the rest of "Hollywood"? (Remember, Netflix won an Oscar last year.) For that matter, why overlook the dozens of smaller or independent shops that are producing original content in staggering amounts, regardless of how that content is being distributed?

But, if you want to talk about more traditional blockbusters, Netflix makes plenty of those (arguably more than many traditional studios).

They share the same offices and employees move back and forth between them, so yeah, I'd say they're the same.

Is Netflix taking risks though? If you look closely most of their content seem to be written by bots trying to maximize revenue. They are taking everything people love and then writing stuff around it. Sure, there are originals here and there but look closely there is lot of rehashed stuff as well.

Those are TV series for the most part. What's their movie budget?

Oh, please. With all the questions for Hollywood, it's worst creations are still much better than any TV-serie ever made.

When they produce a movie, they want to sell it to auditory, to lure us into theaters and make to pay for tickets. They are attaching stars and buying stories and making trailers and posters.

The only purpose of TV-serie is to work out a Pavlov dog reflex: they want us to be before a TV every week at the same time. So they are making cliffhangers and misterious faces, and are filling all the emptyness with action scenes and dialogs.

NB: I am aware that some of Netflix production are not series but feature movies.

> The only purpose of TV-serie is to work out a Pavlov dog reflex: they want us to be before a TV every week at the same time. So they are making cliffhangers and misterious faces, and are filling all the emptyness with action scenes and dialogs.

The studio system already assimilated this criticism and Netflix just dumps entire TV shows in one go. It's more like a 10 hour feature, split into easily digestible chunks.

Plus, TiVo et al already killed this "want us to be before a TV every week at the same time". There is a new episode every week at the same time, but I'll see it when I get the chance, I'm not peeing into bottles to watch the opening of The Fugitive.

The fact that some people recently changed their way of ingesting TV-series content does not cancel another fact, that hefty part of TV-series production industry is still working according to old principles. Intra-series cliffhangers are slightly giving way to intra-seasonal ones, but the idea is still the same: to get user's attention, not to sell the product.

There is a reciprocial movement in Hollywood with it's endless stream of sequels, which are closer in quality to TV rubble. There must be a junction point somewhere in a near future, I'm looking for it with amusement.

NB: I'm glad for those downvotes. It means I am close to truth, people used to hate uncomfortable truth.

That's not even wrong; lots of TV series don't have continuity, so they can't have cliffhangers and other tricks like that.

Just to be clear, out of the gross $920 million, Disney get ~50%, and the production budget of $180 million does not include advertising/promotion which is reportedly in the range of $50-100 million for big releases such as this.

That said it's still making good money and will make even more after the box office run.

> Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks.

It's harder to get people to go to the theater due to a bunch of factors like improved TV tech and increased competition for time, but "hollywood" is also capitalizing on those things. Look at how many original series are on Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, etc, and compare that to what we had 30 years ago between theaters and TV.

Not according to the numbers.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/?view2=ytdcompare

That doesn't take inflation into account though. You'd expect it to go up 3-4% in $ terms even if sales were the same. That the number is actually flat over the last 4 years does mean sales are down a bit.

The $6.05B 2016 figure would be about $6.45B in 2019 dollars.

Box office trends have been shifting over the last decade or so... the big blockbusters (superhero movies especially) are bigger and bigger, but the mid-budget stuff that was a mainstay of the 90s and early 2000s (think stuff like Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler movies) is getting squeezed pretty hard.

To give one look at the distribution.... last year the 100th best performing movie did ($21.7M / $700M) = 3.1% of the #1 movie.

In 2010, ($26.5M / $415M) = 6.38%

In 2000, ($18.7M / 260M) = 7.19%

> I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago

This probably depends on your definition of original. Franchises dominates today, but lots of older movies are based on books or plays or are remakes of even older movies.

> Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks.

Casablanca was a remake of another Casablanca 10 years before, but I believe this previous Casablanca is now lost.

> Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now.

This is false.

Sequels and book adaptions have dominated the top 10 every year for decades and decades.

Right. Movies don’t come out of thin air. They all need inspiration whether a book, a story, news item, etc. Its not writers making movie scripts ala SNL sketches.

I'd say all art needs inspiration, but there are certainly plenty of screenplays (just like theater plays) that don't come from a single item. As a random example, Woody Allen came up with the title "Midnight in Paris", then wrote the whole screenplay from the title.

I complained to Trekkie friend that nothing since Star Trek TOS has Star Trek been any good. He asked what evidence I had.

I said the lack of quotable lines. I know a long list of TOS quotable lines, and exactly one from after ("KKKAAAAAAHHHHHNNNNNN!"). No quotable lines means the writing is crummy and the shows are not memorable.

The same for Star Wars. Who quotes any lines from other than the first one? I stopped watching the SW new movies, too. Zzzzzz....

> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.

Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:

The Matrix

Fight Club

The Sixth Sense

Toy Story 2

The Green Mile

American Beauty

Being John Malkovic

Office Space

The Iron Giant

Magnolia

Austin Powers

American Pie

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Eyes Wide Shut

Dogma

Galaxy Quest

The Insider

Notting Hill

Man on the Moon

Analyze This

Detroit Rock City

Mystery Men

Bicentennial Man

This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.

You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.

This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.

Good point. I think “Hollywood” got eaten up by globalization (China) and easy route of super hero movies all-the-time. The Disney’s and big studios alike have no patience to make money off of creativity. Why do we even need Toy Story 4 to begin with? And how many super hero movies one need to drive same points again and again?

Why did you exclude the highest grossing film that year from the list? It seems you just selected the movies you thought helped you point.

Movies among the top ten grossing which you left out of the list:

- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

- Tarzan

- Big Daddy

- The Mummy

- Runaway Bride

- The World Is Not Enough

- The Blair Witch Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1999_box_office_number...

I do agree Hollywood is different today, but rehashing ideas is nothing new.

The Godfather was a book. Twelve Angry Men was a play. Ben Hur (1956) was remake of Ben Hur (1925). All the songs in Singing in the Rain was recycled from previous movies. The Lion King was the first Disney animated movie with an original story (and even then people say it was plagiarized from Kimba).

As for TV shows and made-for-streaming, do you exclude this from Hollywood? It is increasingly the same talent writing producing and acting, so it is more a question of format and distribution.

That's almost 20 good new movies in 1 year. I feel like I have trouble finding 20 good new movies for the recent years.

This is anecdotal to the point of being noise. How about comparing the top X grossing movies of 1999 vs. last year? Still subjective, but a step forward from "just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type" and two Netflix releases.

I worked in a multiplex in 1999, and that was a great year for movies. The Sixth Sense in particular was the little movie that could. If I remember correctly it was shown for like six months.

Originality? Hah! Even remaking Frankenstein every 20 years or so brought a new take to it, whether Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Robert de Nero, they all brought something new.

More than any point I can remember before Hollywood now turn every movie and remake into the exact same movie. There was always some degree of fashion, but there's no contrast any more - it's all highlight, so it drags and drags by being boring and samey (but loud). Highlight is now just the dull background. The loudness wars, movie edition.

Doesn't matter what it is, a current film (or Netflix high budget, Game of Thrones etc) will have:

+ An absurdly overblown inspirational speech inspiring the troops (or children, or escapees, or office colleagues)! This will take 5-10 ear-bleeding, cringing minutes. If unlucky, you'll get two or three of these in one show!

+ An absurdly artificial, but highly 3D friendly chase scene with no production value other than hype. This will take 5-15 minutes. It stopped being interesting after Blues Brothers' piss take of chase scenes!

+ Ditto, ditto fight scene. Super slow motion. I always think of Adam West's TV Batman, complete with music - Zap! Pow! OWWW! Biff! 300 enemies die, town levelled, 342,000 rounds of ammunition spent, hero hasn't broken sweat. Just about the only recent exceptions I can think of are Deadpool and Sin City. Damn, the sequels were disappointing.

+ Ditto, ditto villain's death or capture.

I wait for them to land on Netflix, then go make tea, tidy the kitchen or watch some paint dry in all those "highlights". Independents with next to no budget can still do original though.

This is getting close to "all the new music is crap and sounds alike, the music when I was young and impressive was much better". Every generation says that, regardless of when they were born.

Maybe those older movies just didn't seem so derivative to you because it was new to you then?

It was interesting from 50+ years before I was born, through B&W B movies of the 50s, to maybe early 00s. Independent movies don't have the same absurd tendencies, and often still have lots of contrasts. Sure, some of those are just poor too. Independents have changed too, but haven't magically ended up with the same framework every time. Hollywood didn't used to.

There were always derivatives, themes, fashions, but without dull homogeneity. Too much chasing what sells, I have no idea why, but it seems to have reached self parody with succession of predictable remakes that add the standards and take away what made the original interesting in the first place. e.g. Total Recall

I still regularly find new bands and music. shrug.

You think older movies were better because of the time filter - we remember the classics and forget the crap.

You think movies you saw in your youth were great because they were original to you - you hadn't seen all the previous movies and plays they were inspired by or remakes of.

This is the same for everybody, which is why people was saying the exact same thing as you do 10, 20, 30 years ago.

> Too much chasing what sells, I have no idea why,

Hollywood is a business, it exists to make money. It have always been like that.

> You think older movies were better because of the time filter - we remember the classics and forget the crap.

No you're making excuses. I don't think they were always better, but that they took from a FAR wider selection of production styles. Hollywood has been afraid of variety for decades, inserting the cliche "family values" ending in every movie, or even demanding the neat happy end every time, or some cliche camera technique, whether the Dutch angle, or today's overhead rotating zoom-in. Habits and techniques that run in eras. Those homogenised 5 or 15% of the film, with half of that always the cliche ending.

There have been shite movies in every era, but both good and bad provided a far wider variety of production styles. Emphatically not saying that every film became crap - though they often seem tired and boring because even a good or perfectly directed and produced film feels tired when its 5th or 15th in the franchise. Everything feels like it's in the same franchise now at 70-90% homogenised.

Maybe you don't see it, but my kids and their friends seem to and regularly take the piss about movies they saw. They can't compare with earlier eras but they can, and do, come back and take the piss about the scene or idea lifted straight from the last movie they went as a group to. Not always - they can rave about some film I thought awful too. :)

> Hollywood is a business, it exists to make money. It have always been like that.

The point, that I could have expressed better, is that it always existed to make money, but didn't completely sacrifice everything else on that altar. Yet despite scifi, yes even Star Wars, usually being western in space the theme book had more than one page. Maybe there were a dozen or so common, cliched themes and production styles, but clearly more than one.

The point I suppose boils down to: every movie now has become a super-hero martial arts movie. A horror film has become a super-hero martial arts movie in a cabin in the woods etc. The book must say that's what encapsulates the perfect movie, so that's the form given to every movie.

As for happy endings etc., this have always been a mainstay of Hollywood. In the Hollywood satire "The Player" from 1992 it is actually a plot point how a script without a happy ending cannot get produced. (And that movie itself have an improbable tacked-on happy-end to drive the point home.)

For fun I looked up the term "Hollywood Ending" ("a film ending of a conventional type, characterized as sentimental, simplistic, or melodramatic, and often featuring an improbably positive outcome; frequently in extended use."). The first example of this usage is from...1929.

So not exactly a recent development.

As for every movie being a "super-hero martial arts movie." - well this genre is certainly big at the moment, but by far isnt the only type of movie. If you look at the most recent Oscar awards, you will see movies like Roma, Vice, The Favourite, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book. These are mainstream Hollywood movies (almost by definition, this is what the Oscars awards) but there is still a span of genres and narrative styles. I don't see this as notably more homogenized than any other year.

And despite the hand-wringing over superheroes, I would like to point out that the "Marcel Cinematic Universe" is actually a pretty original concept in itself. Never before have such a complex shared universe and storyline unfolded over so many coordinated movies. I don't know if this is particularly worse than bygone Hollywood fads like westerns, sword-and-sandal epics, musicals etc.

But if you don't like superheroes there is still plenty of movies to choose from, since the overall number of movies released is steadily growing.

The Hollywood ending defines them and probably always has, so far from recent. It's been a standard for everyone to take the piss out of as long as I've known of movies!

It's one reason I miss a healthy British film industry - sure those mostly ended happily, but rarely so cheesy, except some from the 1940s. Yet there was a decent proportion of surprise unhappy, cynical, tired and non-endings too. A twist would sometimes be something you actually didn't see coming, rather than a "surprise" set up from the start and regularly telegraphed like a five year old keeping a secret. :)

It's not that I dislike superheroes. Well, didn't used to. The whole Marvel universe thing started off well enough. I enjoyed Wolverine, Iron Man, Deadpool 1 plenty, and some others. I really like roast lamb and mint, but getting it for 2 in 3 meals would cure me by boredom within weeks. Maybe it's just too large a proportion of the canon. Except it infects all genres... Wolf of Wall Street? Great Gatsby? Chernobyl? Superhero movies - in style, in script, in camera work, and in tropes used. Now that's putting lamb and mint in with my choc cake and just spoiling every meal.

Chernobyl was the surprise disappointment. It didn't need to deviate so far from reality - the affected were dangerously radioactive too? Not in our universe's physics. Nor be quite so McCarthy child's comic book (and wildly inaccurate) in representing the Soviets. That kind-of suited Stranger Things, though even there it was rather overblown, or Bruce Willis' Red, but not here. Legasov was the superhero - except he didn't actually tear down the whole Soviet system in court, nor get arrested by the KGB after the show trial. The plant manager (I forget the name) was the absurdist villain, missing only a white cat. Do as I say or I will throw you into the reactor Mr Stark. Oh wait, that was Serbina in the helicopter.

Chernobyl was clearly set in a comic book universe. It would still have been bloody good, and well made without any of that bullshit. The attention to scenic correctness and actors resembling the real people was remarkable. Spoiling the plot for a ha'p'orth of reality then.

Suffice to say, I don't think we're going to agree, but it's been a fun back and forth. :)

I don't really disagree with you about the criticism towards Hollywood for being profit-seeking, clichéd, fad-chasing, derivative etc. This is often fair. I'm just pushing back against the idea this this is somehow a recent development. I believe this is ingrained in the nature of Hollywood since its inception, and due to the nature of creative endeavors: 95% of everything is crap, and movies are so expensive they need (at least on average) to catch the tastes of the audience in order to be made.

For example, regarding Chernobyl, this is a dramatized retelling of historical events. Characters have been invented, dialog made up, and event changed or rearranged in order to sharpen and intensify the drama. Every "based on a true story" movie ever have done that. This is not something which can be blamed on comic books or recent trends. And compared to typical Hollywood history like "Amadeus" or "Braveheart", Chernobyl is practically a documentary.

>According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK.

That's not an objective way to look at things. If there were only 1 model of car being sold this year, you can bet it will sell with record numbers and produce more profit than any other vehicle in the past. The fact that records are being broken so rapidly is a bad thing; it means there's very few films worth watching, so everyone is going out to see the same thing.

But the number of movies released has been steadily growing, not shrinking.

"Released" isn't really important; "marketed and/or advertised" is.

I can’t watch the original stuff they are making if it doesn’t come to my theater. My theater is a bunch of sequels and remakes, the Hollywood you are describing seems completely foreign to me in this era.

An old story in a new telling and interpretation is a different thing from a remake.

>Hollywood produces plenty of original stories still

I'd love to see you back this up with data in comparison to previous years. Even a cursory glance at opening weekends over the years on Box Office Mojo tells me you're misinformed.

You’ve asked for hard data, and then make a contrary assertion for which you have no data either. No, glancing at a website periodically doesn’t count.

Conversely, you made a broad claim that runs contrary to popular consensus. Cursory glance or not, the onus is on you to back up your initial wild claim with a source.

Regardless, are you really going to double-down on Hollywood producing more original stories than ever?

Hollywood studios today are in the business of SASOR (sequels, adaptations, Spin-offs, Remakes). That is their primary business model. They may buy up an original productions at festivals like Sundance & SXSW, but that is only for distribution and a light spend on P&A.

I’m not the op. But I see you doubling down on your own claim, still without providing any data. What makes the op’s claim any more wild than your own? Why is the onus them, rather than you?

You have presented no data to back up you claim that greater than 50% of people (popular consensus) believe Hollywood produces less original content than at some time in the past. Even if you did, the fact that most people believe something is distinct from that thing actually being true.

For what it’s worth, my intuition says you’re right. But intuition is not data. Confirmation bias is real...

To even discuss this quantitatively, we have do define what "original" means. Is a movie based on a book, play, or comic original? What about a sequel with an original story but existing characters/universe?

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