Will Hollywood Make Animated Versions of Live-Action Remakes of Animated Movies?
Exactly what will they do for new content in 2050?
Over 15 million people a year visit the famed Roman Colosseum in Rome. All of them should ask themselves a question: what happened to this thing?
Why wasn’t it preserved in such a way that it could last as long as natural forces allow?
The answer is that, over the centuries, people scavenged it. They ripped it up and knocked parts of it down, as if it were a quarry for their own building materials.
Once again I was reminded of this while enduring Mission: Impossible 8, the lamest M.I. movie in awhile. That’s partly because the movie scavenges its own franchise, repeatedly showing us honorary montages of the previous seven films so as to play up its own lore.
It decides, moreover, to use all of the old Mission: Impossible stuff once again. There are two nuclear bombs to be diffused. There are three different countdown clocks. There’s an extended fight scene that involves Tom Cruise jumping from one flying machine to another.
Nothing in this movie could be considered new or fresh. It scavenged parts from its former films.
Moreover, during the previews for MI8, we were treated to more film scavenging. Next week, Karate Kid: Legends debuts, with 60+ year-old Ralph Macchio rehashing the role of Daniel Caruso that he played in the 1985 film. 1980s action movie star Jackie Chan, age 71, is also featured prominently.
Likely, Legends will rehash “wax on, wax off” — I have put a massive bet on it.
And there’s more: another attempt at a Fantastic Four movie, a reboot of the Naked Gun series, another Jurassic Park movie that returns to the island of the 1993 original, and a live-action version of the 2010 animated movie How to Train Your Dragon. Also, our theater was next to the one playing a live-action remake of Lilo and Stitch.
This has been going on for years. I noted last year that almost all the major money-makers at the box office were sequels and franchise fare.
It’s the Age of the Rehash. This new Lilo and Stitch is being called the “best live-action remake ever,” but to me that’s like praising reheated fast-food leftovers.
Maybe we should call it the Age of the Scavengers, who are the Hollywood deep-pockets, producing almost no good, new stories for our times, but instead just repeating what’s was cool in the 1980s, ‘90, and 2000s.
The thing is, the deep-pockets should not be the ones scavenging. They should be innovating. They have the opportunity to be patrons of the arts, in the richest moment in the history of the world, and yet the movies they are foisting on us are pieces of their old Colosseum, often reconfigured into something much worse than the original.
I should pause to note something. It is true that perhaps all stories ever are pieces of older stories. Academics might call this “intertextuality,” or a patchwork-quilt theory of art. The most “original” work you’ve ever encountered can be traced back, through a kind of lineage, to older works.
But the Age of the Rehash is not the same as common intertextuality. Taking pieces and ideas from older art and remixing it into something fresh and alive . . . that is quite different than taking something old and just presenting it again as “Part 8.”
It’s the difference between beneficial development and stagnating imitation. Michelangelo innovated over the Renaissance artists he stole from; today, the knick-knacks sold of his sculptures are cheap, pathetic imitations.
The latter is what Hollywood, by and large, has been and still is selling to us.
(I note that a preference for stagnating imitation may be one of the main features of our own Zeitgeist. Today’s widespread promotion of A.I. is arguably one massive attempt at scavenging and stagnation, since “A.I.,” or pattern-recognition algorithms, depends on already-made datasets, repeating the average values of them as outputs.)
These days, Hollywood is almost completely interested in doing an imitation of itself from the last 45 years. I don’t read minds, yet I assume this is all in the service of making money.
It won’t last. It can’t. There will be nothing left to scavenge, eventually. There’s only so many blocks and pieces of metal that comprise the Colosseum. You cannot tear it down forever to make your new products.
So that brings us to a question: in the year 2050, what in the world is Hollywood going to do, if it even exists?
Will Hollywood be making Twisters 5? The 2024 Twisters surely is at the limit of the number of destructive tornadoes you can possibly show.
Will there be yet another Alien movie? How about Inside Out 9? Kung Fu Panda 13?
Will they make a live-action version of the animated version of the live-action version of Moana 4?
What they are saying — and I disagree with this to an extent — is that the 1980s were a ridiculously productive artistic period for film.
By contrast with today, that’s true. The Karate Kid and The Naked Gun were fresh stories then. Today, they are both old-man franchises — and I know, since I was there for their inception, and I speak as the old one now.
I’m almost convinced that if Pauline Kael, or Siskel and Ebert, were alive today, they might just quit. They routinely trashed retreads and franchise fare 35 years ago. Now, that’s all they would be seeing at the movies.
There is almost nothing fresh being made in the 2020s that the Hollywood of 2050 can strip-mine for franchise fare, reboots, sequels, and cash grabs. They have no long-term plays. They have no vision of their own future prosperity.
That’s why I say they are scavengers, by and large. With nothing new to present, with no artistic vision for aesthetic development, they are tearing down old stuff just to “survive,” or keep their companies in the black.
In 2050, they will have to scavenge what has already been scavenged.
How does reheated leftovers that have been refrigerated, reheated, and refrigerated again taste? That’s what movies in 2050 will be like.