Sources: BoxOfficeMojo, worldwide top-grossing films by year since 1978.
Tools used: Excel, with a fair bit of manual data entry, so the usual warning there.
I've seen a few charts on this theme, but I felt they often missed some subtlety. Many visualizations on this topic aim to put originals against sequels, when there are more categories than that.
So, I’ve included more fields on my chart. The yellow area is for remakes or re-releases, which includes Disney's recent live-action films, as well as the company's peppering of its old cartoons throughout the 80s.
The orange segment is for "instalments"; these are films that may not be narratively related to each other, but are clearly from the same universe and therefore not original in the truest sense. In practice, this means films from the James Bond, Muppets, and Marvel franchises (until those instalments get their own sequels).
The grey segment is for any other non-new IP film. There's a few edge-cases that don’t fit into the above, but again aren’t original. In practice this usually means reboots (like the various Spider-Man reboots from the last decade), or films that share source material, but aren’t remakes of each other. For example, three films might all have different takes on A Christmas Carol, but it feels wrong to count them as original.
From 2017 non-original films take over originals, and the only thing that’s caused them to stabilize in 2019 is the fact that Chinese films, which are less likely to be sequels, can now compete better with American ones.
By this metric the most “original” year was 1996, where the only true sequel in the top 50 was a Star Trek film. But on the other hand, around this time you have the big disaster/blockbuster films, films like Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact...the whole Jerry Bruckheimer stable, basically. Having put this chart together, I’ve become more and more convinced that the obsession with sequels can be a bit misplaced. At virtually all times of Hollywood’s history, the most successful films are written to a kind of formula. The biggest difference has been in the past few years is that Disney (and its subsidiary Marvel) are much more explicit about it. Whenever you’re looking at the top 50 films in a given year, you’re going to find films that play it very safe at a given point in time.
It's not that Hollywood lacks creativity, but that investors want more predictable returns. Sequels, prequels, remakes, adaptations, and "spiritual successors" all have a baked in % of revenue. They rarely bomb as badly as an original venture.
It's also due to declining star power. In the "Golden Age" of Hollywood, a movie was guaranteed a certain amount of success so long as it had one of the big stars. This allowed studios to take on more risk knowing that there was a floor to how little they can make if it turns out to be a flop.
But some big time bombs in the 1990s and early 2000s made it clear that star power alone wasn't enough. So studios started relying on nostalgia and the power of existing brands.
![image showing [OC] Hollywood's Vanishing Creativity? Proportion of Original Films in the Worldwide Top 50 Grossing Films, 1978-2019](719c5c81-7dc5-515d-87cf-97ca8ea3f16d.jpg)
spicer2 on September 7th, 2020 at 08:43 UTC »
Sources: BoxOfficeMojo, worldwide top-grossing films by year since 1978.
Tools used: Excel, with a fair bit of manual data entry, so the usual warning there.
I've seen a few charts on this theme, but I felt they often missed some subtlety. Many visualizations on this topic aim to put originals against sequels, when there are more categories than that.
So, I’ve included more fields on my chart. The yellow area is for remakes or re-releases, which includes Disney's recent live-action films, as well as the company's peppering of its old cartoons throughout the 80s.
The orange segment is for "instalments"; these are films that may not be narratively related to each other, but are clearly from the same universe and therefore not original in the truest sense. In practice, this means films from the James Bond, Muppets, and Marvel franchises (until those instalments get their own sequels).
The grey segment is for any other non-new IP film. There's a few edge-cases that don’t fit into the above, but again aren’t original. In practice this usually means reboots (like the various Spider-Man reboots from the last decade), or films that share source material, but aren’t remakes of each other. For example, three films might all have different takes on A Christmas Carol, but it feels wrong to count them as original.
From 2017 non-original films take over originals, and the only thing that’s caused them to stabilize in 2019 is the fact that Chinese films, which are less likely to be sequels, can now compete better with American ones.
By this metric the most “original” year was 1996, where the only true sequel in the top 50 was a Star Trek film. But on the other hand, around this time you have the big disaster/blockbuster films, films like Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact...the whole Jerry Bruckheimer stable, basically. Having put this chart together, I’ve become more and more convinced that the obsession with sequels can be a bit misplaced. At virtually all times of Hollywood’s history, the most successful films are written to a kind of formula. The biggest difference has been in the past few years is that Disney (and its subsidiary Marvel) are much more explicit about it. Whenever you’re looking at the top 50 films in a given year, you’re going to find films that play it very safe at a given point in time.
Medical_Officer on September 7th, 2020 at 08:57 UTC »
It's not that Hollywood lacks creativity, but that investors want more predictable returns. Sequels, prequels, remakes, adaptations, and "spiritual successors" all have a baked in % of revenue. They rarely bomb as badly as an original venture.
It's also due to declining star power. In the "Golden Age" of Hollywood, a movie was guaranteed a certain amount of success so long as it had one of the big stars. This allowed studios to take on more risk knowing that there was a floor to how little they can make if it turns out to be a flop.
But some big time bombs in the 1990s and early 2000s made it clear that star power alone wasn't enough. So studios started relying on nostalgia and the power of existing brands.
malsomnus on September 7th, 2020 at 10:01 UTC »
If that's just the top 50 grossing films, it might indicate something about moviegoers' preferences rather than "Hollywood's vanishing creativity".