Can You Repeat That?
Filmmaking is an act of gambling. Like roulette there are safe bets and then there are higher stake bets, which can reward handsomely if you win. Producers and studios are hesitant to take risky gambles that have a greater chance of failure, especially when large, multi-million dollar sums are involved. There’s no guarantee to a film’s success, but there are trends producers look for and seek to exploit in the search for profitable returns.
Since the emergence of film as popular entertainment producers and investors have attempted to seize on others’ success by copying and outright stealing their stories and ideas. Their duplicates exist to capitalize on the audience’s presumed desire for similar material — where one leads others will follow. Consequently film culture experiences fads with certain stories and themes being repeated until their popularity and financial returns begin to wane. By the time one cinematic trend fades producers are on the search for the next.
These cinematic copycats are viewed by studios and producers as safe gambles. Where an originator takes the larger risk, its imitators can reap the residual fortune.
Nothing in contemporary filmmaking can be said to be wholly original. Being influenced by those who have preceded us is expected and to an extent necessary — cinematic language is informed by the experiments and conventions established and challenged throughout film’s history. The problem, however, is that the mainstream film industry is less concerned with innovation, adopting a ‘more of the same’ methodology. These cinematic duplicates are motivated by financial incentive over audience satisfaction or artistic intent.
Adapt or Engineer
When a film finds box office success one of the earliest questions asked by derivative producers is the source of the material. Was the script an original concept intended for the screen, or was it adapted from pre-existing material?
Novels, comic books, video games and TV shows have all been adapted to film, and certain trends influence studios about which properties to license. These trends are largely genre driven and are prone to dips and resurgences over years and decades.
In the 2000s, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series were the two most successful film franchises in the world. In the years following their monumental box office and popular acclaim, rival studios were quick to buy the film rights to the biggest fantasy novels they could get their hands on. CS Lewis’ Narnia series was developed by Walden Media into a film franchise as a direct result of The Lord of the Rings’ runaway, multi-billion dollar accomplishment. Films like The Golden Compass were adapted with the intention of capitalizing on Harry Potter’s box office domination. To producers, the potential of having another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings-like franchise was irresistible, though few of them attained similar heights.
In the mid-2000s young adult, female-oriented speculative fiction became the latest hot ticket for producers and studios. Stephanie Meyer’s series of Twilight novels saw great success making the transition to the big screen, and like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings before it, other studios sought to license and adapt thematically similar properties, including Meyer’s other YA novel The Host.
In the 2010s, the passive female protagonists of series like Twilight and I Am Number Four lost ground to the active female protagonist Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games franchise. Changing with the tide studios once again sought to profit by exploiting similar properties — adaptations such as the Divergent series and The 5th Wave were the by-product of The Hunger Games’ lucrative popularity.
Original screenplays not adapted from pre-existing sources are also subject to being copied, in an attempt to draw audiences back with the promise of being the same, but bigger and better. Screenwriters are specifically hired by studios with the intention of duplicating the narrative structure, aesthetics, and tone of recent popular films. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, released in 2000, was credited with reviving the long-forgotten ‘sword and sandals’ action sub-genre for the 21st century audience. Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy, Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur can attribute their existence to Gladiator’s financial, critical and award-winning success.
Large and Small
Budget is not an obstacle to producing doubles of popular films. Whether it’s Hollywood or the lower end of the film market, both are liable to copy the work of others in the hope of earning their share from the latest trend. Differences arise in which movies that big-budget studios and smaller production companies choose to reproduce, and how blatant the inspiration appears to audiences.
Hollywood studios present themselves as creators of art and entertainment, and play down the accusations of emulating the work of others. These studios and their producers do not want to appear as opportunists following another’s blueprint, but the truth is that Hollywood will follow any template that has a proven audience and the potential for box office success.
Disney and Marvel’s series of interconnecting comic book adaptations is commonly referred to as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, MCU for short, and has given rise to a renewed model of franchising in Hollywood — the shared universe. Warner Bros. has joined with DC Comics to build their own Extended Universe, called the DCEU. Paramount and Universal are hoping to create shared universes for the Transformers series and Universal’s gallery of monsters, respectively. Valiant Comics is being tapped by Sony to join the ranks of Disney and Marvel, Warner Bros. and DC. Studios are planning a decade in advance for their latest cash cows, and as long as such movies continue to earn billions of dollars worldwide producers will follow Disney and Marvel’s business model.
On the other end of the film budget spectrum, smaller studios and producers are less concerned with years-long business models. Instead, they look to hop on the immediate bandwagon, producing derivative films that can be made fast and cheap. They have similar titles, similar plots and are targeted at less discerning straight-to-DVD, video-on-demand and streaming audiences. Erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct, teen sex comedies like American Pie, found footage horror movies like Paranormal Activity — endless clones of box office hits have been made over the decades. And they’re not afraid to appear as transparent copies — in fact they depend on it.
A market also exists for low budget rip-offs of Hollywood blockbusters. They are often tongue-in-cheek, deliberately poorly made bad copies with terrible acting, small production values and cheesy visual effects. People watch these titles for the purpose of ironic entertainment.
This leads to a another problem with cinematic imitators.
Misdirection
As an audience, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see a new release that strongly resembles a past film — people will gravitate towards certain stories and genres. Who knows, maybe the opportunistic cash-grab will be a pleasant surprise. But what if the duplicate isn’t a duplicate? What if the film we’re expecting to see isn’t the film we saw promoted in the marketing campaign?
Sometimes a film’s marketing is designed to mislead us. Any resemblance to another film is merely superficial. The film is knowingly being sold to us by deception.
Titles can be repackaged to look like more popular films in an attempt to draw a larger audience, when in reality they have few to no similarities with one another. A notorious example involves the 2007 children’s book adaptation Bridge to Terabithia. The promotional material presented a story of children having encounters with magical woodland creatures in the vein of a fantasy adventure. In reality, the film was a grounded story dealing with themes of abuse and grief following a tragic death. Audiences and critics were rightly incensed about the studio’s misleading advertising campaign.
Adaptations are also subject to studio intervention. Stories have been reconfigured and distorted until they are unrecognizable from the source material, all in order to more closely resemble an already popular film, while alienating their literary fans in the process. If producers and studios want the next Harry Potter, Hunger Games or Guardians of the Galaxy they’re better off adapting similar stories rather than radically altering or lying about an original property.
Much of contemporary mainstream film is derivative, but derivative doesn’t have to mean bad. Talented filmmakers in and out of Hollywood have shown their ability to work in the film industry and preserve their creative voice. A powerful voice can subvert and elevate derivative fare into something distinct and in its own way original. Many of the great films that others have copied and appropriated from contain simple stories — the artistry and care put into the storytelling is what makes them great.
Derivative doesn’t have to mean redundant. Familiar stories are always being rejuvenated and repurposed. Creativity can prosper in the face of adversity, and money-driven producers may just be surprised by the results.
Coming soon: Those Wonderful Toys
