Posted by
Darth Duke on Tuesday, June 05, 2007 8:04:36 AM
Spider-man 3, Rocky Balboa (AKA Rocky X... or is it Rocky VII, whatever), X-Men 3, Shrek 3, etc. etc. What's up with the sequelits these days? Some stories are so deep and rich that they need sequels in order to tell them in the theater without making the audience sit for over six hours straight. Take Lord of the Rings for example, with three movies running over two hours each, they still had to leave out a lot such as Tom Bombadil and just about all the songs and poems. But what's up with most of these sequels? Do we really need to see the green ogre do some more puerile gags? Not me.
There are plenty of people out there who have written screenplays, some of which are excellent, who's work will never see the light of the marquee. Why? Because they don't have a marketable household name behind them like Bay or Spielberg or Gibson or something. Also because Hollywood studios are blowing their budgets to make these multi million dollar sequels instead of doing more lower budget, unique films.
Every so often, a new director, producer, writer team manages to squeak in there to bring us something fresh. Take M. Night Shamalan for example. When he came on the scene with The Sixth Sense, it blew our minds. All of his movies have some refreshing twist to them that makes them different from the status quo. Even Unbreakable, a super hero movie, was way different from your typical Superman or Batman movie. Or take The Blair Witch Project. I don't care for that type of movie personally, but it was nice to see a truly indie film make it to the big screen despite having no bankable actors, directors etc backing it up.
Unfortunately, breaths of fresh air like those are few and far between. What fills up the marquee on any given month? More sequels. I guess the business model of Hollywood is "If movie A makes any profit, then that means the public wants more of the same so let's make A2 and A3". Like I said, some stories need to be told in parts. Most of them don't need to be drug out that much.
I sure wish we'd get more unique films in theaters. Fortunately, there is a growing market out there for indie movies on DVD and the internet. More of them are showing up for rent or sale at places like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Since more and more people have broadband (high speed) internet connections and huge multi-gigabyte hard drives these days, downloading a movie is getting to be a more and more viable option.
It may be that in the future, a lot of would be Hollywood writers, actors, directors etc have to settle for trying to get people to download their work instead of going to theaters. That's kind of a shame though because there will always be some people who won't have a powerful computer and a high speed internet connection who will miss out on some great new movies. Hopefully, the trend of indie movies on DVD will continue to expand as well.