The Shadow of the Creator: Navigating the Desert of Creative Ideas in Entertainment
A creative. Someone who makes things. A skilled individual that lets their imagination take the driver’s seat while all other mental processes ride shotgun, except for logic (a.k.a. Freud’s superego) which is unceremoniously kicked to the curb. I like to call myself a creative. Maybe prematurely, but it allows me a quick out from the homogeneity of being a Business major. There’s a speck of truth to it though. As a college senior I am forced to fight the seemingly omnipresent inquisitions about my future, a battle that continuously seems to take its toll on my mental health, but I will have won the war if, in the long run, I am creating. I want to add something permanent to our society that people can look back at and enjoy or question. After all, our creations are the things that teach us.
They are the “vehicle[s] to travel to eras that [we are] both currently living in, but also ones that [we have] long left behind” (Olatunji, Post 1). In particular, the gift to imagine and create art is the greatest quality imposed upon us as a race. Art serves as our universal history book, “it understands us beings better than we do ourselves, learning from us as we learned from it for generations and generations. But as we pass on, art continues to teach what it learned from us in the past leaving clues of what wrongs we have done and cheering us on as we learn from our mistakes” (Olatunji, Post 1). It is for this reason that the creation of photography and then the creation of film were essential to our growth and our understanding of one another. The film is our new version of the spoken, drawn, and painted history which was used to pass down knowledge and heritage from the generations of old to us here and now. It is the moving, living, breathing, art. It captures the small nuances of what life was like at every individual moment we as a people existed in a way that no other format quite can. It paints a picture of everything inside the beautiful mind of the creator for us to have the privilege to bear witness to. I want to be the next great historian. I want to be the creator.
But what does that even mean anymore? Never before did the creator have to answer to anyone. They traveled the world as they pleased making whatever their mind told them was right. Not any longer. They are shackled and leashed leading towards a big green S with a line through it. Creating is now a business and a business only cares about one thing. The car that was driven by imagination has been stolen by stockholders and CEOs and the creator must follow along or be banished from their craft entirely. Hypercommercialization is the name that has been this process has been given and it won’t be going away anytime soon.
The creator has become industrialized, and the act of creating is now a job. The creator is dying. As a creative in the entertainment industry, you now have one responsibility, to make things other people will like. You don’t get to tell the stories that you want to tell, at least not until you have put in years of telling the stories everyone else wants to hear. But how are we supposed to know what people like? Well, unfortunately, art and film taught us that too. The formula to make something that pleases the masses, the recipe for the biggest bottom line, is not to create, but to redo.
They’ve hit the jackpot in Tinsletown. The creator created long ago, the human race lived all that time, and made all of that history, so that we can take their stories and use them again and again. Prequels, Sequels, and whatever the third, fourth, and fifth movies are called.
It seems almost almost like we are running out of ideas. But we’re not. So why do the songs we here on a day-to-day basis all sound so familiar? Why does watching movies feel like watching a story we have seen before? Has the entertainment industry become hand-cuffed by the business that runs it? Or is the entertainment industry itself the jailer? Why tell a new and untested story when I can tell one that I already know will make me hundreds and millions of dollars? Why build a new world with new characters when I already have built one with a huge abundance of fans anxiously waiting to buy a ticket to the next movie?
The current business model of the entertainment industry “places a premium on big-budget blockbusters and franchises that have a proven track record of success. As a result, studios are more likely to invest in sequels, remakes, and adaptations of popular books, comics, or video games rather than taking risks on untested ideas” (Wion). Don’t get me wrong, it’s smart. We live in a capitalist society, with investors and stockholders breathing down the necks of every CEO and top decision maker in the industry. It would make no sense for them to place all their financial weight behind risks when they know they have surefire hits. So they take the creator, who at this point will do anything to get a chance to imagine anything, even if it comes from the imagination of another, and they make them tell the story that will make their investors happy.
And what about when the creator does everything they are told in the hopes of one day being able to make something real? Well, if you are lucky, you may have just the opportunity, and it better do well. However, if you retell one of these stories, making it exactly to the specifications of those paying, and it flops, you may never have the chance to create ever again. As was the case for Lexi Alexander. Alexander was tasked with directing Punisher: War Zone, the studio she was working with wanted her to make a Hard-R movie and she did exactly that. However, when the film was released and met with mass criticism her career was ruined. 15 years on from the movie and Alexander has only directed one more film while she was in the process of producing another as recently as last year, that film has also gone through a severe setback as “Netflix will no longer distribute the film, while Blumhouse is no longer attached as a producer” (The Wrap).
Pixar was a special case. The creator’s last hoorah. Prior to selling the company to Disney, Steve Jobs knew that the creative culture at Pixar was the company’s value, so he “needed a guarantee that the vision would survive” (Slidebean). And it did. For almost 15 years after Jobs sold the company, Pixar continued to create one masterpiece after the other. Creating characters and stories out of concepts that only the best imaginative minds could think of. But even they were a partial casualty to the need for money that remains in the industry.
As the big bad pandemic, hit the entertainment industry, the one Pixar rule that remained in place was broken and a Pixar movie was released on the streaming app Disney+. At the time the excuse for doing such a thing was the pandemic, but since then we have seen many Pixar movies have been sent straight to streamers. The last pillar of creativity and ideation is now but a fleeting scroll on a list of other titles within the app.
As someone who wants to create it is a bit discouraging. We are no longer celebrated for taking risks. The entertainment industry isn’t looking to recognize something new they are just looking to sell something. Our art is now a product. The content of the piece no longer matters as long as it sells. The film industry began as the place for artists to make art and tell their stories. The fame and then the money that came along with it was just a happy coincidence. The actors and creators of old did it for the love of film, and the reverence of the art form just like the other artists that we cherish today. Some today, however, don’t value the art in that same way. The repetitiveness of the film industry has made it a place to come for a quick check and leave. The artists no longer eat sleep and breathe the art, they have been forced to succumb to the cash cow.
There is blood on our hands. We are the ones who buy the movie tickets and buy the streaming subscriptions. But what could we have really done? As soon as the streaming model came into the mainstream all the big studios created their own services. However, you can’t have a service without content, and the streaming model forces the had of studios to churn out that content fast. The streamers are a machine and they need content like a train needs coal or a car needs gas. True art cannot be formed by a machine, and based on the quality you can tell.
I don’t think everything is lost though. The creator’s chest still rises and falls. The paradigm is shifting. And it starts with the creatives. Even as recently as a couple of years ago I never understood why the original Avengers cast didn’t want to make 30 more movies. They were practically swimming in money by the time Avengers: Endgame was released. However, even though they are huge stars they are also artists, and some of the best at their craft. They want the opportunity to explore the different stories, faults, and characteristics of different people fictional or not that make us who we are. This shift back to original stories is heavily dependent, not only on the success of these original stories but also on the push from creatives to make them. A new generation of creatives is coming along and the older generation is beginning to steer the ship back to where it belongs. With movies such as Killers of the Flower Moon and The Creator, I believe that we are starting to tell the stories that matter again. The stories that raised me, and taught me what it means to be human. Personally, “creating something that [has] no expectation or desire to be taken seriously [is] extremely freeing. It [is] another piece of me that I [can] share with the world.” (Olatunji, WP2). I believe with this love of creating I can be part of the solution in creating more of these representative stories.
I believe that it is my responsibility, and the responsibility of other creatives like me to really understand the history behind this art form and continue to reshape it into a new space where the art and ideas that are produced are not only celebrated but but on a pedestal. It is very easy to say that people will not like all this new original content that they are not familiar with, but how will we really know unless we put it in front of them? “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student’s creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed” (Freire). By keeping these original stories and ideas off of the big screen, by shackling the creator to the dollar, we are doing the job of the oppressor for them. One of our best teachers, our bank of ever-flowing knowledge becomes obsolete.
I believe that will be the true driver of people back to theaters, new stories that share something about the human race or even about themselves that they previously didn’t know. If we continue to come up with great ideas people will line up to see them, but first, you must let the creator do what they do best regardless of the monetary benefit or loss. Unfortunately, this is one of the only industries in which the U.S. is behind, other places in the world such as South Korea, Japan, and Nigeria celebrate creativity within film and promote their filmmakers in a way in which their imagination is used to push the boundaries of what is thought to be possible.
Although they remain battered and bruised the creator is not dead, but rather asleep waiting to be awakened by the next generation focused upon bringing the value of art back to where it once was. Once again, money makes the world go round, however, the only reason that the entertainment industry is seen as something that can make money is off the backs of the hardworking creatives that came before this period. I believe that for the industry to remain as profitable as it has been it needs to return to the creation of art and storytelling that it is based in. The fear of celebrating new ideas hurts us more than it helps us. Although we all think that we are the best movie critics, I believe that it is important to let new ideas and stories flourish and develop so that we can learn more about both the people that came before us and the people that we share every breath with now. It is our responsibility as consumers to change the tide of where the art we appreciate is going. If we continue to support the prequels and sequels, we guide the handcuffs to the wrists of the creator. However, if we continue the new revolution of propping up our filmmakers and their new stories and imagination we will only grow as a society as our art gets back to the ways of teaching, as opposed to being a product, it is a piece that is appreciated by all as the brainchild of creative who thought it was a story worth telling.
Works Cited:
“Is Originality Dead in Hollywood? Why Studios Are Ditching Original Movies for Reboots and Sequels.” WION, www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-is-originality-dead-in-hollywood-why-studios-are-ditching-original-movies-for-reboots-and-sequels-583722. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
Lambert, Harper. “Netflix and Blumhouse Suddenly Drop Lexi Alexander’s Already-Shot ‘Absolute Dominion.’” TheWrap, 4 Nov. 2022, www.thewrap.com/netflix-blumhouse-drop-lexi-alexander-absolute-dominion/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
“The Steve Jobs Pixar Story: How He Almost Went Bankrupt.” Slidebean Founder Platform: Create Your Pitch Deck & Raise Funds, slidebean.com/story/steve-jobs-pixar-animation-history. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.
Olatunji, Dami. “That’s the Joke.” Medium, Writing 340, 31 Oct. 2023, medium.com/writing-340/thats-the-joke-11ab5e1dc2c3.
Olatunji, Dami. “Writ 340: The Lives of Bohemians Response.” Medium, 24 Aug. 2023, medium.com/@olatunji_94636/writ-340-the-lives-of-bohemians-response-977a9d87d02c.
Olatunji, Dami. “The Glorified Labelmaker.” Medium, 18 Sept. 2023, medium.com/@olatunji_94636/the-glorified-labelmaker-e97c2bcd9865.
