Hollywood Needs To Stop Playing It Safe

USA Today reports that attendance at the box office is down 4% from last year. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that surprising at all. How many re-makes, re-boots, re-imaginings, sequels and prequels will we have to endure before Hollywood gets the message?

The decline of theater attendance has been attributed in part to the rise of DVDs, Blu-ray and home theatre sales. However in 2009, a report from Adams Media Research followed the movie-watching habits of consumers, and found that people were much more willing to leave their homes to watch a movie than they were to watch a movie in their home theater. This resulted in a 13% decrease in DVD sales from 2008. So we have declining sales at the box office and declining sales at home. Maybe the real crux of the problem is the types of movies that are being made.

We're bored. We want to see something else; something new, something exciting and different. I know there's no such thing as an original idea in this day and age, but movie-goers are getting tired of seeing the same movies re-tread over and over again.

The last movie I went to see was Avatar. I went to see it is because it sounded like it was going to be different. While I did find the animation and 3D special effects to be amazing, the story is something I’ve seen only too often. Americans invade another country or territory, or in this case planet, to steal resources and oppress others. And conveniently one of the invaders is sympathetic with the oppressed, becomes involved with them, and then turns against his people to defend the oppressed.

Hollywood is playing it safe, afraid to take risks in this poor economy and produce movies where the title doesn’t end in 2 or higher. How many Robin Hood movies are going to be re-made, Predator movies, vampire movies or King Kong movies? To me, if you’ve seen one King Kong movie you’ve seen them all. Re-makes seldom capture the magic or the intent of the original movie and sometimes (I know this is hard to believe) even pale in comparison. I think it’s time for the Hollywood execs to start sifting through that pile of rejected scripts and find something different. Be daring, take risks. Stop treating us like mindless movie-goers without freedom of choice and expect everything to be hunky-dory at the box office. Don’t expect us to be standing in long lines waiting for the first showing of Dracula 10 or the King Kong prequel sequel. It’s time for us “mindless movie-goers” to exercise our right as consumers and let Hollywood know how we feel. I’d like to call for a moratorium on movie re-makes for at least the next 5 years.

Let’s vote with our dollars and find something else to do with our time and money other than watch a movie that’s been re-made over and over again.