why'd the film world take a long time to learn that lazily making sequels and remakes is sure money?

Cafe Society
41

Heh. I considered Boogie Nights, too. But because in that movie it was the protagonist who went downhill (rather than a protégé who did well while a mentor deteriorated), I went with Shawshank.

But seriously, the Star is Born story hinges on Female Self-Sacrifice–and though there’s still a huge market for that (hello, Lifetime Movies!), it’s not really “A” picture stuff, these days. So I suspect that the Lady Gaga version will be something of a cult affair (utilizing a lot of ‘transgressive’ sexuality for shock value), rather than a straight retelling of the 'GOOD women support their men’ theme of the original(s).

42

FWIW, the studios do make a bunch of non-franchise, non-superhero comic sci fi action/adventure films every year. These aren’t very successful, on average, compared to the comic book sequel du jeure. But they keep making them, presumably because they realize that eventually, people are going to get sick of comic book movies and they’ll need some new films to base future franchises off (from the last two years:The Martian, Jupiter Ascending, Interstellar, Edge of Tomorrow, Lucy, Transendence, Automata, Big Hero 6) .

And of course, they are occasionally successful, and then we get a new franchise. For example:

Supposedly the four(!) planned Avatar sequels are all going to be filmed at once. I don’t think they’ve actually started production yet though, and Cameron says a lot of crazy stuff, so who knows.

43

I dunno. I mean, yeah, they’re not sequels, but Edge of Tomorrow and Big Hero 6 and Lucy seem sufficiently comic-book-y and superhero-y.

(Wait – what are we talking about, really? What’s the difference between a movie about Bruce Wayne and one about James Bond? What’s the difference between a movie with Indiana Jones and one with Don Diego de la Vega? What’s the difference between Stephen Strange and Harry Potter? What’s the difference between Wanda Maximoff and Rey – Skywalker? Kenobi? Jinn? This is kinda getting away from me. Still: what’s the difference between Thor and Hercules? What are the Men In Black?)

44

Big Hero 6 isn’t just “comic-book-y”; it was a comic book before it was a movie. And of the others mentioned, The Martian is adapted from a book.

45

And wasn’t Edge of Tomorrow adapted from, uh, a heavily illustrated novel?

46

Wikipedia says it was adapted from a short young adult novel (what is called a “light novel”). My point is that only a tiny number of films are truly original.

47

No doubt. If your looking for films that are totally not based on anything, your obviously going to have a short list. But I think the OP is talking about stuff that is based on pre-existing franchises, and my point is that the studios do try and release a few non-franchise action/adventure films every year.

(though I think the Big Hero 6 comic was a novelization of the movie script, so I think the comic was based on the movie, even if it was published beforehand.)

48

It’s an weird point, isn’t it? I mean, THE INCREDIBLES was original and beloved and in a lot of ways more ‘superhero-y’ than various comic-book adaptations: the Hulk, in his own right, is basically just the main attraction of a monster movie; and isn’t Blade’s whole thing just the buy-in for a vampire movie – where you first grant that vampires exist, and then figure the unborn child of a woman they attacked would grow up with (a) inhuman strength and speed plus (b) a grudge against them?

(In the shock-to-no-one department: THE INCREDIBLES is getting a sequel.)

49

Pearl White did the serial The Exploits of Elaine in 1914. It killed. She did The New Exploits of Elaine in 1915, closely followed by The Romance of Elaine.

The big difference between then and now is that franchises were considered to be formula for b-movies. There are hundreds of western and mystery and horror and comedy series with anywhere from a half dozen to a hundred movies about the same character(s). Most of them are forgotten because they were never intended to be good. They were cheap filler for unsophisticated audiences. They didn’t have A-level stars or Hollywood glamour. Even The Thin Man was more or less a B movie but elevated to an A when it was a smash.

Charlie Chaplin had one character he starred over and over. So did The Marx Brothers, Mae West and W. C. Fields. Bob Hope and Martin & Lewis (and Jerry on his own) made whole careers out of sequels. But those were the days when people followed a star from picture to picture and expected more or less the same thing each time.

What happened in the 1970s is that the star system died and Hollywood had to figure out a way to give people the same certain pleasure without hanging it on a star. Most people say that Spielberg started it with Jaws.* (Jaws 2, 3-D and The Revenge followed. Never saw them.) That was a year before Star Wars. And most people didn’t expect *Star Wars *to be a franchise or ever have a sequel. Both had casts of non-stars. When they succeeded, the executives realized that the sequels didn’t have to be good. You didn’t need the same director. You didn’t even need the same stars. You just needed the title and the marketing.

That’s why it “took so long.” It didn’t. It’s been there from the beginning. Only the hook changed to accommodate the times.

  • You could argue it started with Dr. No and have a good case.
50

[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
What happened in the 1970s is that the star system died and Hollywood had to figure out a way to give people the same certain pleasure without hanging it on a star. Most people say that Spielberg started it with Jaws.* (Jaws 2, 3-D and The Revenge followed. Never saw them.) That was a year before Star Wars. And most people didn’t expect *Star Wars *to be a franchise or ever have a sequel. Both had casts of non-stars.
[/QUOTE]

And in between JAWS and STAR WARS, an unknown starred in the movie that promptly won Best Picture – and man did Stallone follow up ROCKY with a lot of sequels.

51

Yeah. People forget there still are some stars - or at least names - that people will follow from movie to movie. Stallone was for a while, until he wasn’t. So were Burt Reynolds and Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today we have Adam Sandler and Tyler Perry. Franchises didn’t replace stars; they added a new revenue stream. Well, not new. Universal did the same thing with monsters in the early 30s and then again with new management in the 1940s. But their leading grossers were Abbott and Costello, making the same movie every year. The two approaches fit together neatly and always have.

52

Let’s not forget that Tom Cruise has been plugging away at his signature franchise for like twenty years. (And he’s got a JACK REACHER sequel coming out this fall.)

53

Mission Impossible is a franchise. Tom Cruise is not a star, at least not like he used to be. Only Edge of Tomorrow has (barely) hit the $100 million mark in the last decade other than the MI franchise. His numbers are a bit below Matt Damon’s and about even with Ben Affleck.

54

Another early Hollywood franchise was the Dead End Kids -> Bowery Boys groups.

7 films in the first iteration, 12 + 3 serials in the second, 21 in the third, and 48 for the main Bowery Boys group. That’s 88 films with overlapping cast and/or characters.

Several of the studios in the 1930s remade silent films for sound.

I’d say that Hollywood had the sequel/remake thing down pat by the mid-30s at the latest.

As to a Kane sequel: There’s his son Charles Foster Kane III. A bio of his life could have some interesting tales. E.g., maybe his daughter could be kidnapped by terrorists and ends up joining them.

Showgirls? :wink:

55

Ironically, Jack Reacher and Edge of Tomorrow were actually great films.
Well, maybe not great, but they were a lot of fun.

56

I love The Adventures of Captain Marvel, but I must respectfully disagree. Republic’s mannequin on a zip line is every bit as cringe-inducing as Columbia’s animation.

57

Why’d the film world take so long? I’d say GREED. When a movie is a hit it’s almost like they already start planning the sequel and the masses coincidentally ask for it. They wanna milk the cow for all she’s got before she dries out (I’m not a farmer I just made up that little dry bit and don’t know a thing about lactating cows). Maybe it’s a thing of the time, I don’t know what’s up with this generation and why everybody’s so… hurried and greedy and frazzled.

I also noticed that when it’s been years upon years before a sequel (not a fan of remakes if I hadn’t seen the original) make for a bigger BOOM! I guess that’s a tactic that’s lost in time.

58

  1. Producing a lot of remakes requires a lot of original movies existing in the first place.

  2. Many classic movies are of a sort that rather rule out a high-quality sequel. Sure you could tell a story about Rick & Louis fighting the Nazis, but that would miss the point of CASABLANCA, which wasn’t really an adventure story; it was a romance and character story about Rick deciding to take a side. A sequel would miss that. IMITATION OF LIFE wouldn’t profit from a sequel either (though obviously it could and was remade). Likewise THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. The story was over; a sequel just wouldn’t work.

  3. Most movies today AREN’T about comic book characters, A lot are, sure, because there was long-term demand built up due to special effects being inadequat to bring comic books to film But if you look at a list of all the movies released this year, you’ll find most are on other topics. You’re just experiencing confirmation bias.

59

Well, domestically, sure. But JACK REACHER is getting a sequel is because it made $218 million worldwide, just like KNIGHT AND DAY made $261 million worldwide and OBLIVION made $286 million worldwide: like VALKYRIE, they all failed to make it out of the double digits hereabouts but all cleared hundreds of millions globally.

Well, like I’ve noted before, the weird thing about Cruise is – you said the last decade, right? If we go back to '06, Damon was top-billed in movies that failed to even break even, like GREEN ZONE and PROMISED LAND; and never mind the stuff that failed to double its budget, like THE GOOD SHEPHERD or THE INFORMANT.

And what did he star in during the decade before that? Again, leaving aside ones that failed to double their budgets, like THE BROTHERS GRIMM and STUCK ON YOU, he was top-billed in ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and TITAN AE, which failed to break even.

And we can’t go back a third decade, because Damon wasn’t top-billed in anything before '96; by contrast, every single thing that Cruise has been top-billed in has more than doubled its budget if you go back those ten years to '06 – and twenty years, to '96 – and thirty years, to '86, with TOP GUN.

Cruise has a three-decade hot streak as a leading man in films that more than double their budgets – but I can’t go back to '06 in Affleck’s filmography without first noting how THE COMPANY MEN failed to break even, and I can’t go back to '96 without first noting how GIGLI died on arrival likewise; and I can’t go back any further, because he wasn’t a top-billed movie star before '96; I can only mention how he failed to break even heading up REINDEER GAMES and SURVIVING CHRISTMAS.

(And, again, that’s leaving aside all the Affleck star vehicles that fail to double their budgets: BOUNCE and PAYCHECK and JERSEY GIRL and FORCES OF NATURE all fell short of that the way Cruise hasn’t, but at least they didn’t stink up the joint.)

60

…and I kinda got carried away there and forgot to drag this back to the point of the thread, which I’d like to try for now: granted, Cruise has gotten tons of mileage from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE sequels, but franchises don’t just happen, y’know?

Someone upthread mentioned the PHANTOM movie that came out the same year as, well, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE; they’d signed Billy Zane for multiple sequels, but those never happened because the first movie bombed. At that, Matthew McConaughey was out to start a franchise with SAHARA, but when it failed to break even that plan died faster than you could say REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS.

Antonio Banderas admittedly scored a hit with MASK OF ZORRO, and promptly got a sequel – and they changed the ending to that sequel, in order to set up a third film. But the second film died, so there wasn’t a third after all. THE WHOLE NINE YARDS was a hit, but then THE WHOLE TEN YARDS failed to break even. SIN CITY was a hit, but then SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR failed to break even. And so on.

It’s not like you can just declare victory by declaring a sequel; some franchises keep audiences coming back for more, but some of 'em wither on the vine.