Over the past few weeks, Hollywood has announced major recent project after major recent project.
The thing is, they’re all old.
Warner Bros. is alleged to be near a deal for a seven-season TV series adaptation of the Harry Potter books … only 11 years after they accomplished a massively popular eight-film adaptation of those self same novels, which a great deal of individuals are still watching.
Disney is planning a live-action version of its musical cartoon “Moana,” which hit theaters in 2016 and is best known for its suddenly threatening song title “How Far I’ll Go.” It’ll star famed Disney princess Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
And — in a galaxy, far, distant that’s turn out to be far, far overstretched — Daisy Ridley is returning to play boring Rey in one more “Star Wars” film, although we were adamantly told that the Skywalker Saga was over back in 2019.
Hollywood is affected by a way more insidious disease than an easy bout of sequelitis. And its symptoms are much worse than those of the Nostalgiavirus. Hollywood is bedridden and incapacitated with Nothing-new-monia.
Briefly, the industry’s totally run out of ideas.
Audiences are stuck watching the identical stuff, only worse than before, time and again and once more. Welcome to the Age of Mental Property, wherein a handful of top entities are greedily recycled, plundered and sapped of heart until we begin to resent their very existence.
In June, Disney and Lucasfilm will provide the masses with an unconscionable fifth “Indiana Jones” movie with the video-gamey title “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” starring an 80-year-old Harrison Ford.
The last entry from 2008, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has a 53% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes — probably since it featured Indy absurdly surviving a nuclear blast by hiding inside a refrigerator.
Who cares? Here’s one other.
And next month comes “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” the thirty second — ?!?!? — Marvel Cinematic Universe film in 15 years. In lieu of unprintable expletives, all I’ll say is “Groot!”
From a business perspective, sad-sack movie studios not with the ability to move on from their sexy exes is smart.
They’re struggling — losses from the pandemic shutdowns and a silly over-investment in unprofitable streaming products have led to layoffs and restructuring — in order that they’re reaching back to happier times after they had huge hits and are essentially repeating those in hopes of the identical consequence. And sometimes, it really works.
Nonetheless, there are signs that audiences are losing interest of infinite repetition.
For example, the last MCU movie, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” got terrible reviews and performed poorly on the box office.
Increasingly, it seems as if regular $1 billion worldwide grosses have gotten out of reach for Marvel unless the title starts with “Spider-Man.” Even “Black Panther: Wakanda Perpetually” got here in below expectations last yr at $859 million.
Disney and Pixar’s attempted 2022 “Toy Story” spinoff, “Lightyear,” was an enormous flop.
And the attempt by Warner Bros. to pull out Harry Potter’s so-called Wizarding World — the “Incredible Beasts” series — has been such a disaster that the ultimate two movies were scrapped before the story was even finished. It’s like ending a TV series without the finale.
Speaking of television, the small screen has, for years now, usurped the cultural and artistic dominance of films largely by (save for just a few examples) embracing exciting, original discoveries.
Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and “Squid Game” and HBO’s “Succession” and “The White Lotus” aren’t based on a comic book book or a Nineties blockbuster, but nonetheless keep viewers talking and drive subscriptions. They’re smart and gripping.
“What should I watch next?” is such a standard query amongst people in search of adventurous, difficult, relevant recent TV shows that The Post’s sister site, Decider, was built around helping them answer it.
Meanwhile, what’s the flicks’ big, hot, groundbreaking idea to lure in consumers? A live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.”
Discuss under the ocean.
