Deliberate Deja-Vu
There’s a new pattern in the entertainment industry that thrives on repeated content that makes it harder for dedicated subscribers to find fresh, surprising, and quite frankly, entertaining entertainment. Oftentimes, voracious audiences are left wanting and wishing that someone, anyone, would make something original for a change. Audiences crave a content refresh that may never come. According to theories of supply and demand, the consumer’s desire for nuance and creativity should lead to a fundamental shift in content creation ideology. Hollywood, however, is following a different money trail.
These days, the cash is in the copies.
The modern entertainment industry formula has become exhaustingly repetitive, leaving viewers wondering: have I already seen this before? Odds are, the answer is yes. Remakes, adaptations, and live-action versions of fan favorites are cropping up everywhere, replacing original content with duplicates that skip on our streaming services like a broken record. Even newer movies, like the animated film Moana (2016) are getting remade for a quickie cash grab, with only a 10 year gap standing in between the nearly identical animated movie and the live-action.
Via The Rise and Fall of Nickelodeon
Production houses have found a formula for guaranteed success and keep button-mashing the same tactic over-and-over until it doesn’t work anymore. As long as audiences continue to tune in and give remakes their valuable views, everyone will have to keep fighting the sensation of deja-vu whenever they open their streaming apps.
Producers don’t care if people are actually enjoying their content, because they ultimately make money from viewership and clicks, not opinions. By creating content catered to existing audiences, who are curious by nature and can’t resist tuning in to their favorite character’s stories, studios have found that their cash cow productions require the least work: copy, paste, voilá… Viewers! Tapping into existing audiences and established IPs, the entertainment industry has hacked an infinite viewer glitch and, judging by continued, consistent viewership of remade tales, they show no sign of stopping.
How many Moana’s will it take for audiences to give up on rewatching the story? The limit doesn’t seem to exist…
Via Dessi Gomez
Disney, for example, is one of the largest, most profitable entertainment studios of all time. Once upon a time, they relied on their originality and magical storytelling ability. But can you even remember the last time Disney animation studios created an original story boxoffice hit? Once considered their crowning jewel, Disney has given up on their unique, pioneering stories. Wish, their most recent original animated movie came out a whopping three years ago.
Unless you’re a parent who keeps Disney+ on 24/7, you’ve likely never even heard of Wish. This film features the story about a young girl making a wish upon a star to save her village. The movie lost over $130,000,000 at the box office and according to Stanford Daily journalist, Katie Mannion, Wish was disappointing in more ways than one. Mannion says, “[It] feels corporate and lifeless in comparison to the more vibrant, engaging stories of the ’90s and beyond.” So not only was this movie one of Disney’s greatest risks since the hit movie, Encanto (2021), it also was their biggest flop of 2023.
Though Encanto was a success, Wish, ironically, made audiences regret their wish for some more content originality.
Via Disney+
Cautionary tales like this clarify the unseen reasons for producers avoiding original content. Why would they take risks on new, creative content when they have guaranteed audiences waiting in the wings for the repeats? The business end of a once creative industry has trampled its imaginative spark, and it’s because audiences are willing to, dare I say it, watch the repeats on repeat.
In a world measured by clicks, consistent and predictable viewership is steering a driverless boat into increasingly familiar waters.
Same-Same, But Different
Nobody is going to fix an industry that appears unbroken.
As long as studios and producers continue to cash in on remakes, reboots, and live-action versions of existing franchises, they will continue to do so. Financially, it’s the safe bet.
It seems that in a bustling entertainment-sphere, where studios are constantly vying for the attention of fleeting audiences, the only way to guarantee anyone’s attention is to give them what they know they’ll already want. Fans want Harry Potter; fans want Marvel superheroes; fans want Star Wars. Fans, who prove their loyalty with every click, want what they already know and love.
Audiences may hem and haw about the unoriginality of Hollywood and the uninspiringly stale stories getting rerun on our timelines, but it’s because of audience trends and shoe-in viewership that the cycle repeats. So until fans are willing to boycott remakes and take a stand against subpar, frame-by-frame redo’s of once-cherished stories, production houses will just keep doubling down on the cash cows that pay their bills.
And who can blame them anymore? The proof is in the viewer numbers.
