The Big Picture

to many foreign moviegoers, that response is somewhere between condescending and confounding—the equivalent of complaining that there aren’t enough modern art installations at Disneyland

movies that appealed to audiences in Russia, Brazil, and China. These consumers weren’t likely to understand the cultural subtleties of an American drama or to consider people talking or even running for their lives to be adequate bang for their buck on an expensive night out. They expected spectacle, particularly if they were paying premiums for an IMAX or 3D screen, and they wanted stories that made sense to a villager in China, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, or a teenager in Kansas City.
Transformers, in other words. And The Avengers. And Jurassic World and Fast and Furious and Star Wars

Of the top fifty movies at the global box office between 2012 and 2016, forty-three were sequels, spinoffs, or adaptations of popular comic books and young-adult novels (five of the remaining seven were family animation, the sole genre in which originality still consistently works)

People say they want new ideas and fresh concepts, but in reality they most often go to the multiplex for familiar characters and concepts that remind them of what they already know they like

William Goldman’s maxim, true for many decades: “nobody knows anything.” No other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so little foreknowledge of whether they would be any good. The only feasible business strategy, it appeared, was to sign up the best creative talent, trust your strongest hunches about what looked likely to appeal to millions of people, and hope you ended up with Back to the Future instead of Ishtar

“Tokyo finally believes this is a business, which, if run in a disciplined way, can be a sound business,” boasted Stringer.

new players from Silicon Valley and countries on the other side of the world are reshaping Hollywood and creating a very different future for the movie business. Amazon, Netflix, and would-be media moguls in China are simultaneously a threat to Hollywood as we know it and, perhaps, a savior for the types of films that studios here don’t make anymore.

Most important, big media conglomerates want movies that generate long-term value. Despicable Me, in 2010, wasn’t just a hit—it also launched many millions of dollars in merchandise and video-game sales

These companies also want to tell Wall Street investors that they will deliver profits with the highest possible degree of predictability, another argument for franchise-driven sequels over risky original productions.

Why is there nothing to see at movie theaters for people like me, who are interested in more than sequels and superheroes? What the hell happened to Hollywood?