I’m going to make the broad assertion that everything in movies is, to one extent or another, a “fad.”
The basic dichotomy in Hollywood, and the film industry in general, is that the square peg of an art form is being crammed into the round hole of business. In business, you analyze the market, identify demands with inadequate supply, and attempt to make a profit by addressing that demand. You can engineer products for safety and/or reliability, and balance the profit margin by making a reasonable compromise.
You can’t really do this with movies. Nobody really knows what makes one movie more successful than another. Nobody expected Big Fat Greek Wedding to march toward $150 million. And nobody expected Congo to barely limp to break-even. One one side you have the Blair Witches and Mementos; on the other you have Ali and K-19.
To make up for this, the MBAs who filtered from the parent conglomerate into the studio system have attempted to apply their business-school training to the industry. They try to calculate what a particular movie star might be worth. They try to evaluate audience interest in certain genre elements. They stake their careers on what is essentially a barely-informed gamble.
“The Sixth Sense made an unbelievable amount of money,” they say, “so audiences must really want twist endings.” Hence the flood of gotchas currently polluting the cinematic landscape. And by the same reasoning, “Even Harrison Ford couldn’t draw people to K-19, which means people don’t want to see submarine movies, so let’s not even bother to advertise Below” (a new horror/suspense thriller from the director of Pitch Black that happens to also be set in a submarine).
In other words, nothing succeeds like success. Turnover in movie-studio executive suites is ridiculously high, so the suits protect their jobs by not taking any chances at all. Everything is copied from something else successful; if you try something original and it doesn’t work, all you have to justify your decision is your own instinct, whereas if you can point to a precedent for your decision, you might be able to keep your job.
It’s the nature of the beast. When something really takes off, everybody runs to clone it. It’s always been that way, and until there’s an unprecedented upheaval in the general entertainment landscape, in which what we think of as “movies” is replaced by something unforeseen and radically different, it’ll always be the case.
Not trying to rain on anybody’s parade here, but I thought some context would be useful.
