The infinite monkey theorem goes: a monkey typing away at a keyboard for an infinite amount of time could, by chance, produce something worth reading – like, to take a joke from The Simpsons, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Churn out enough and treasure will emerge. Apply this idea to Hollywood, and its paralysing aversion to taking risk, and you end up in our current situation: cinemas clogged with safe, so-so sequels no one really asked for.
That is not to say brilliant films aren’t being made right now. Last year was particularly exceptional. How many years have we had a Past Lives, The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things, Oppenheimer and The Holdovers? How often do we get even one of those, let alone all of them in a single year? But while we may feel like we’ve made it very clear to the powers-that-be that we’d like more original and daring ideas, Hollywood is a very slow kitchen. This leaves us where we are now, sitting confused out in the restaurant. Who ordered Shrek 5, 16 years after the fourth came out? Or a second Devil Wears Prada (announced on Tuesday)? Do we want a new Beverly Hills Cop? Another Beetlejuice? And who asked for Bad Boys: Ride or Die? (Someone must have, it made $336m.)
Streaming has meant it has never been easier for Hollywood to measure the power of nostalgia. They watch what we’re watching and rewatching and it means they bring back, to varying degrees of success: The Matrix, Scream, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Mad Max, Hocus Pocus, Legally Blonde, Ghostbusters, Home Alone, Blade Runner, Kung Fu Panda, Jurassic Park, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Beetlejuice and many, many more. At this very moment, Twisters, Kung Fu Panda 4, Despicable Me 4, and Furiosa are in cinemas. In the very near future we are getting more Alien films, more Frozens, more Lord of the Rings, a Mufasa origin story, even more attempts at making Snow White, Jurassic Park and Fantastic Four movies, a bewildering number of Avatar films and, somehow, another Tron. Occasionally, an Ice Age film suddenly appears like a jump scare.
Hollywood is not nimble at the best of times, let alone when dealing with a backlog caused by the pandemic then two industry-halting strikes. Right now, it is on the ropes, in a fight with foes they created. They created a landscape in which no films end any more because they’re all The Empire Strikes Back in a never-ending story – which has eroded goodwill among casual moviegoers, who were asked too often to watch TV shows or read comics just to understand what is happening in a film. An investment banker’s approach to film-making that has left us hungry for more original, mid-budget films when they’ve put all their money in intellectual properties (IPs). And an overreliance on franchises that are loved for being familiar, not because they are strong enough to warrant more instalments.
Some will argue that sequel or franchise fatigue is not really a thing, in that it is immediately disproved when a hit like Bad Boys: Ride or Die comes along. But it’s hard not to feel fatigued when original films are just croutons in a Hollywood buzzword salad: made entirely of sequels and prequels and existing IPs and brands and reboots and remakes. Some of their decisions have even started feeling a bit insulting. Did we seem like we wanted a Pop-Tarts origin story? We didn’t mean to.
“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman once wrote of Hollywood, and he was right. Take Inside Out 2, which is single-handedly wiping Hollywood’s brow right now, having made more than $1bn at the box office. Even the people who made it don’t seem to know why it is has done so well. Did it succeed because it is a good film, a kids’ film, or a sequel to a good film? An argument could be made for all three. But it is important to not underestimate how important that last point was in getting it made. Of Disney’s confirmed upcoming slate, 19 of 25 films are sequels or reboots.
When A Tale of Two Cities becomes a hit, Hollywood has always responded by trying to make something that will scratch the same itch. That’s not new. But right now they’re only making Two Tales, Two Cities. Truly, the blurst of times.