Reruns for Christmas

Well my wonderful reader, we have arrived at the time of the year known as Christmas. Everyone is taking some time out of the year to spend time with his family. Some people may go out to the movies and see the vast variety of films available to watch. Once they go to the box office they may notice a trend. Hollywood is fond of sequels, prequels, spin offs, and reboots. Original ideas are not the coming to the big screen as often as they used too.

After visiting the-numbers.com, I saw that out of the top ten grossing movies of 2015 six were sequels, prequels, spin offs, and reboots. That is a important piece to the puzzle. Sequels make money. If an idea worked once, why not do it again? It has a dedicated fan base and sequels have previously done well in the market. Making a sequel to a popular movie is low risk.

Hollywood is risk adverse. A billion dollars can quickly go down the drain if a movie flops. The times have changed. Movies cost more to produce. Less people go to the movies now compared to the early days of cinema.

Why?  The invention of the television and the internet. Going to the movies used to be an integral part of American life. The only place to see relatively cheap entertainment of that movies could provide were the theaters. Now we have televisions with over one thousand channels of mind numbing content. No need to go to the movies every other weekend. Going to the theaters is something special you do maybe four times a year. The brains behind Hollywood know this.

That is why marketing for movies is so important. Marketing costs money. Money is an investment. As we can see Hollywood does not want to risk it's money. When money becomes the most important factor in the creation of fiction, originality takes the back seat.  So we say goodbye to new awesome movies and have to settle with the same one retold once again.