Imagine you're walking into a movie theater – the kind with the scent of popcorn and plush seats that always have a slight backward tilt. You look at the posters. One film is a sequel to a franchise that's already twenty years old. Another is a remake of a classic your parents saw. A third is a “reimagining” of a cult thriller. And only somewhere in the corner, in small print, is something new. Unfamiliar. Without a number at the end of its title.
Do you notice it? I do – and I have for a long time. The longer I observe this landscape, the more I want not to condemn it, but to understand it. Because behind the apparent monotony lies something far more interesting than a simple accusation of lazy screenwriting.
The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore
If you look at the lists of box office leaders from the last decade, the picture is quite telling. The overwhelming majority of the highest-grossing films worldwide are either parts of long-existing franchises, remakes, or adaptations of comics and books with an established audience. Original stories with no “backstory” in the form of a known brand appear at the top very rarely – and each time, it feels almost like a miracle.
Studios know this arithmetic by heart. A new film in a universe that audiences already love comes with a built-in audience. It doesn't need to be “sold from scratch” – it's enough to announce its existence. Marketing expenses, which can amount to tens of millions of euros for an original project, work differently here: the money is spent not on persuasion, but on reminding. These are fundamentally different strategies.
From a purely economic standpoint, everything looks flawless. But economics is just the top layer. Beneath it lies something more ancient.
We Have Always Retold the Same Stories
Allow me to take a step back – far back. To an era when there were no movie theaters, no studios, not even books in our modern sense.
The Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – did not invent their plots. They took myths that every Athenian knew from childhood and reinterpreted them. The story of Electra was told by all three. The same plot, the same characters – and yet, three completely different works. The audience didn't complain, “Electra again? This revenge plot again?” The audience went to see it precisely because they knew the story. The interest was not in what would happen, but in how it would be told and what the author would say through the familiar material.
Later came the medieval troubadours, who sang of Tristan and Isolde again and again, slightly changing details, adding new accents. Even later – Shakespeare, who, as we know, invented almost no plots: “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear” – all were reworkings of existing stories. No one called him derivative.
So, perhaps we are asking the wrong question? Perhaps the question is not why Hollywood retells old stories, but how it does so, and why?
Fear of the Blank Page and the Logic of a Large System
However, it would be naive to completely justify the current state of affairs by citing the ancient Greeks. Between Sophocles and the next superhero franchise sequel, there is a crucial difference: the scale of the financial stakes.
Producing a major Hollywood blockbuster today costs sums that are difficult to even comprehend in everyday terms. Budgets of 200–300 million dollars have become the norm. With such investments, a failure is not just an artistic disappointment; it's a catastrophe for the entire studio. And this is where one of the main drivers of the current system lies: fear.
Not the artist's fear of a blank page – that's different. This is a financial, corporate, systemic fear. When the decision to greenlight a film is made not by a director or an enthusiastic producer, but by a board of directors focused on quarterly results, the choice in favor of a proven brand becomes almost inevitable. This isn't the cowardice of specific individuals. It is the logic of a large system designed to find risk undesirable.
A curious paradox arises: the more money that circulates in the industry, the less room there is for experimentation. Big money demands predictability. And predictability means familiar characters, recognizable universes, and proven formulas.
The Remake as a Mirror of Its Time
But let's try to look at remakes differently – not as a symptom of crisis, but as a cultural document.
Every time a story is remade, it inevitably bears the imprint of its time. A remake is always a conversation between two eras. The original says one thing, the new version another, and in the gap between them, one can read what has changed in society over the intervening decades.
Take a simple example: any classic story about a hero, remade in our time, will almost inevitably feature a different distribution of roles, a different view on power, on family, on who even has the right to be a hero. This isn't just an “update” – it's an answer to the questions society is asking itself now. In this sense, a remake is not a copy, but a dialogue.
The same principle has always been at work. When spaghetti westerns were being made in Europe in the 1960s, it wasn't just an imitation of the American genre. It was an ironic, sometimes bitter commentary on the American myth of heroism and violence. The form was borrowed; the content was entirely different.
Thus, a modern remake can be either an empty repetition or a genuine reimagining – depending on whether there is a thought behind it. The problem is not with the remake genre itself. The problem is when a remake is made without a question, without a point of view, without a desire to say something. When it is made only because the title sells well.
The Sequel as an Endless Novel
Sequels are a separate story, and I want to dwell on them a bit longer.
There's a temptation to think of sequels as a symptom of purely commercial logic. But look at the history of literature: multi-volume novel cycles existed long before Hollywood. Balzac's “The Human Comedy” is, in essence, a sprawling universe with recurring characters who appear in different stories, acquiring new biographical details and connections. Readers returned to Rastignac again and again – not because they didn't know how it would all end, but because they loved the character and wanted to spend more time with him.
Isn't the same thing happening with successful franchises? The audiences lining up for tickets to the next installment aren't doing it because of marketing. They're doing it because they've grown attached to the characters. They want to know what happens next. This is a very human desire – and it has existed for as long as storytelling itself.
Of course, there's a vast distance between Balzac and the average sequel. But the mechanism of attachment to a character, the desire for continuation – this is not an invention of modern marketing. It is an archetypal need.
So, Where Is the Real Crisis?
It seems to me that the conversation about Hollywood's “creative crisis” often misses the point. The problem is not that remakes and sequels are being made. The problem lies in the quality of thought within them.
One can make a remake that is a true work of art. One can write an original script that turns out to be empty and lifeless. Form is not a sentence. The sentence is the absence of an internal question.
The real crisis, if it exists, is not a crisis of ideas, but of environment. Hollywood as a system is becoming less and less tolerant of failure. And art – any art – is impossible without the right to fail. Without this right, risk disappears. Without risk, authenticity disappears. All that remains is a well-polished surface.
And here, it's worth noting a curious paradox of our time: while major studios delve deeper into safe franchises, the space for experimentation is gradually shifting. Streaming platforms, independent cinema, European and Asian productions – this is where stories that have surprised and lingered in the memory have appeared in recent years. The industry isn't dying – it's reconfiguring, and its center of gravity is shifting.
Hollywood and the Myth of the Golden Age
Before definitively condemning the current state of affairs, we should ask one more question: was the “golden age” of originality we long for really so golden?
Each generation tends to idealize the cinema of the past. Those who grew up in the 1970s are nostalgic for the era of the American New Wave – Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. But if you look at the box office leaders of the very same 1970s, you'll also find sequels, genre clichés, and commercial calculations. They just haven't formed a cultural myth, because they've been forgotten.
Memory is structured to preserve the best. From each decade, we extract a few masterpieces and judge the entire era by them, forgetting the mountains of mediocrity that surrounded them. This doesn't mean everything is equally good – it means comparison requires honesty.
Perhaps even now, amidst all these sequels and remakes, something is being filmed that will be called a masterpiece in twenty years. It just hasn't yet separated from the general flow and acquired the aura that time bestows.
What Does the Viewer Do with This Knowledge?
It seems to me that understanding the mechanisms behind the Hollywood machine shouldn't turn into cynicism. On the contrary.
Knowing that financial logic is behind a remake doesn't mean you can't enjoy a well-told familiar story. Knowing that a sequel exists to extend a franchise doesn't mean it won't have a single living scene, a single moment of genuine feeling.
Critical perception and aesthetic pleasure are not mutually exclusive. One can simultaneously understand the system and find beauty within it – just as one can admire a Gothic cathedral while knowing it was built, in part, to consolidate the political power of the church.
Art is rarely pure. It is always woven into economics, politics, and social structures. This doesn't make it any less art – it makes it human.
Instead of a Conclusion: The Old Through a New Filter
I often think that the current Hollywood landscape – with its endless universes, remakes, and reboots – is not so much a decline as a particular form of cultural memory. The industry is doing what humanity has always done: it returns to stories that once meant something and tries to understand what they mean now.
Sometimes it turns out badly. Sometimes, surprisingly well. And sometimes, it's just different from what was expected.
The Greeks retold myths. The troubadours retold legends. Shakespeare rewrote others' plots. Hollywood reboots franchises. The form changes – the need remains. And perhaps the question is not whether old stories should be retold, but whether we can hear ourselves in the retelling?
If we can, the story is still alive. If not, it's no longer art, but an echo.
