New Product

A few years ago I posted something on my old blog about the dearth of original or new product in Hollywood, essentially lamenting the infestation of sequels, remakes and the then-relatively new phenomenon, the "re-boot" flooding the market. That situation has not substantially changed, as borne out by the fact that in the first decade of the new millennium, six out of the ten years, the top-grossing films at the American box-office were sequels.

There is a built-in cynicism, as a result, among many casual moviegoers, that the market can only truly accommodate sequels. About a month or so ago I read an article in the newspaper in which several people who attended a film expo were asked (on condition of anonymity) what films they thought were going to pop and which they thought were going to flop. The answers were almost uniform; Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two (essentially Harry Potter Part 8 or Harry Potter Part 7.5, depending on how you look at it), Transformers 3. Their predictions for flops were a little disheartening. A number predicted Thor would tank, a number more predicted Captain America: the First Avenger, Cowboys & Aliens, Super 8, and Green Lantern would bomb. Two weeks into the U.S. summer season, those would-be soothsayers already have egg on their face as Thor is a bona fide box-office hit.

Now, most of those films represent aspiring franchises and aren't exactly high art, but the off-the-cuff certainty of these people, some of whom claimed to be "industry insiders" that the public would reject new product is a sad reflection of how the movie viewing experience has, by-and-large, metamorphosed into the intellectual equivalent of eating at McDonald's or KFC. The belief is apparently that people will pay money for the same old dreck every single time.

Well, that belief is misplaced; people are forgetting that two years ago, Iron Man not only saved Robert Downey Jr.'s career, it conquered a known brand name like Indiana Jones, despite being put together without any name recall whatsoever by a fledgling studio, and by a director whose biggest hit had been a Will Ferrell comedy. Last year, the highly original Inception, though it may have ridden on Christopher Nolan's goodwill from his Batman exploits, was a global box-office hit, a critical darling and eventually a multiple Oscar winner, and its success is particularly gratifying because the nature of its story does not lend itself to a sequel, and therefore it was not designed to be a part of a franchise.

The first Matrix movie became a pop-culture phenomenon until its sequels wore out its welcome. Pixar, with the exception of the Toy Story and soon Cars films, has churned out a new, original movie almost every year since 2001. Heck, landmark movies like E.T., Star Wars and Forrest Gump weren't exactly pre-packaged hits, were they? Sure, marketing a new movie has a lot to do with its success, which explains the rather massive marketing costs involved in trying to launch a new franchise, some of which pay off (e.g. Thor) and some of which do not (e.g. Speed Racer), but at the end of the day, people will go to see a new movie if they think it's any good.

Thor, franchise-in-the-making though it may be, struck the first heroic blow for new movies this year with its meaty grosses in the U.S. and around the world, and perhaps out of consideration for their subsidiary Marvel, Disney has scheduled POTC 4 two weeks after Thor, allowing the God of Thunder to breathe a little and stretch his legs before the inevitable onslaught of sequels begins. I'm honestly hoping this is a harbinger of good things to come, not necessarily for my favored movies like Captain America and Green Lantern, but for the new stuff coming out in general, like J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Terrence Mallick's The Tree of Life, and other films that may find themselves a part of moviegoing public's collective consciousness if people only give them a chance. The inaugural Tintin movie, which is due out later this year, is another example of a fresh new product that needs people to approach it with the same open minds they had when they walked into Star Wars, Iron Man, or Inception.

There is still plenty of room out there for new ideas, if one can only look past the re-boots and remakes and sequels. Here's food for thought; as derivative as it may be, Avatar was not directly adapted from any book or previous work, and yet it is the top-grossing film of all time. People will still pay to see something they've never seen before.