Editor's Note 1/29

On Tuesday, it was reported that director Paul Feig, known for his popular female-driven comedies like Bridesmaids and The Heat, had finally cast his upcoming 2016 reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise. According to reports, frequent Feig collaborators Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig will join current Saturday Night Live cast members Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones in the roles made popular in the 1980s by Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson. In many ways, this is welcome news. The new cast members are some of the funniest comedians currently working today, and the energy they will bring to the film should be a treat to watch. At the same time, I question the necessity of the project as a whole. While I am optimistic that the new Ghostbusters movie will be at least solid, the rise of reboots and unnecessary sequels have shunted originality to the background as more and more people await cultural properties that they have already seen.

2015 is a banner year for reboots, remakes and sequels. In the past month alone, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death and Tak3n have opened to moderate box office success despite damning critical reviews. The coming months bring films such as the live-action SpongeBob: Sponge Out of Water, Disney’s reimagining of Cinderella, the long-gestating Mad Max: Fury Road and Jason Statham-less The Transporter Legacy. These properties carry various levels of hype around them: this year alone brings both a new James Bond and Avengers movie, two durable franchises on account of consistent quality and immersion in the popular conversation. I have high hopes that these movies will continue in the tradition of excellence set before them. That being said, most of these films seem rather dire. Did anyone want a third Taken—in which no one actually gets taken? Who is actually excited about Hotel Transylvania 2? And who, for the love of all that is good and pure, is clamoring for a sequel to Paul Blart: Mall Cop? Someone must have. It comes out on Apr. 17.

Pop culture evolves slowly, but surely so, centering itself in a common mainstream. This is not a radical thought. If we take a look at Top 40 music over the past 15 years, things have largely hewed to the same basic artistic templates of sensitive singer-songwriters, bubblegum pop, R&B club-bangers and EDM-influenced dance-pop. That is not to say that Top 40 music is unoriginal or boring—there are many innovators who are storming the charts with fresh and skewed takes on common tropes—but the roots remain. Even someone as lauded and talented as Charli XCX is merely a few steps away from a Hilary Duff song.

Another common trend that has become most prevalent in recent years is a sort of pop “revivalism,” by which the sounds of decades past are exhumed to give these pop templates a blast of retro nostalgia. For example, Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” would not seem out of place on a ‘60s jukebox, and the current number one single in the country, Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” is practically a facsimile of ‘70s funk songs. These songs are catchy, but they suggest that pop is content to recycle sounds ad infinitum in order to make money, leaving little room for the true originals. It is telling that “indie-pop” has become its own separate genre in the past few years, a space for the non-commercial and original to make their own music.

Film has it even worse, privy more to a stagnation than a slow evolution. According to Grantland’s Mark Harris, there will be 25 sequels released in 2015 alone, with 21 the year after. DC and Marvel currently have 32 films on the docket until 2020. That does not even take into account the ensuing multitudes remakes and reboots of preexisting properties. The rise of the franchise leaves original movies in the dust, not just financially, but conceptually. Generally, sequels, reboots and remakes do good business—only natural, given that the reason such movies exist in the first place was because people ostensibly liked the first version. This scares off directors with original ideas because going head-to-head with movies of this ilk often leads to a bomb at box office and a stunted career. Pitching an original idea in today’s market is a crapshoot, as major studios are only willing to produce pitches that appeal to cinemagoer’s hearts and wallets. Directors and screenwriters are often forced to prolong their careers by joining the franchise mill rather than honing their own personal artistry. It’s hard to find one’s voice in the limited studio system.

If we look at the top twenty movies at the box office for 2014, only five movies aren’t sequels, reboots, or remakes: The LEGO Movie, American Sniper, Interstellar, Gone Girl and Neighbors. The LEGO Movie, though utterly delightful, originated as a crass cash-in on the beloved children’s toy and has a sequel forthcoming. Gone Girl and American Sniper were based on wildly popular books, and Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn has already expressed interest in filming another chapter of the Dunne family saga. Of these five movies, only Interstellar and Neighbors are truly original properties based off of original scripts. This sends a telling message to Hollywood—base your movie off of a preexisting cultural entity, or else.

Films originating from fresh ideas aren’t entirely uncommon. We just don’t hear about them through the clamor of the staler films fighting for their place in the common mainstream. With a new or old franchise hitting theaters literally every other week in 2015, it may be tough to see through into the wild, uncharted territory of original film. To be fair, I’m very excited about some of these movies. As a longtime devotee of James Bond, SPECTRE’s November arrival cannot come soon enough, and Jem and the Holograms looks like a future cult classic. But I wish the system were a little different, that there were original properties being promoted by the studios in a continuous loop much like how franchises are. Originality exists, but Hollywood is doing its best to hide it.