Adaptations and remakes aren’t anything new to pop culture. The golden age of cinema is full of novel adaptations and remakes of prior films. Folklore comes from generations of people retelling the same stories. But those were people with limited scope and no media to record their tales. Now we have the sort of global culture where nearly countless tales can be adapted.
But they don’t. The problem isn’t that Marvel and DC and Star Wars get adapted or have new iterations, it’s that those are the only goddamn things that get adapted. It’s not because there’s stories there that someone feels passionate about or that enough time has passed since the last version that the new standards of film making can give it a fresh spin. It’s because they know those are the franchises that have a built-in baseline of boys and young men that will sit their asses in seats. And because there’s so many being made at any time, when one of them happens to be good it doesn’t feel like a result of strong artistic vision, it feels like the monkeys at the typewriters got one right for once.
And even when something actually novel breaks through, oh god do they rush to pump out derivative copies. All those middling GoT-esque shows that got rushed through production to cash in.
Adaptations and remakes aren’t anything new to pop culture. The golden age of cinema is full of novel adaptations and remakes of prior films. Folklore comes from generations of people retelling the same stories. But those were people with limited scope and no media to record their tales. Now we have the sort of global culture where nearly countless tales can be adapted.
But they don’t. The problem isn’t that Marvel and DC and Star Wars get adapted or have new iterations, it’s that those are the only goddamn things that get adapted. It’s not because there’s stories there that someone feels passionate about or that enough time has passed since the last version that the new standards of film making can give it a fresh spin. It’s because they know those are the franchises that have a built-in baseline of boys and young men that will sit their asses in seats. And because there’s so many being made at any time, when one of them happens to be good it doesn’t feel like a result of strong artistic vision, it feels like the monkeys at the typewriters got one right for once.
And even when something actually novel breaks through, oh god do they rush to pump out derivative copies. All those middling GoT-esque shows that got rushed through production to cash in.