The general definition of insanity is that a person will continue the exact same actions and expect different results from after every action.
Well...maybe on the quantum level. But neither that nor work properly in the matters of Hollywood.
You gotta love it when the Editor In Chief at a genre news website posts on his Facebook and Twitter accounts how he's laughing at how a studio's press release now openly compares the movie they're comparing to other past blockbusters.
Now this A + B = C formula plays out in, as far as I can tell, two different fashions: the first is for promotional means, but it's never before been this bad when they're flat out admitting to the population at large this new project is just two movies (or more) shoved into a blender to produce this new concoction.
Behind the scenes, this "It's This Meets That" means of pandering is the secret means of promoting a project to jaded Hollywood execs who only understand "This Is Popular, That Was Popular, Together They'll Be Three Times As Popular" reasoning.
Did I just refer to that line of thinking as "reasoning?" Hell, it's spreading faster than H1N1.
It's not reasoning, it's marketing which, of course, is the opposite of reasoning.
I once was writing a script called "Dip Your Wings," a fantasy about a guardian angel who was made half mortal...and so on. I was about 25 pages into it, and told a female friend about it.
"Oh," she said, "that sounds like 'City of Angels,' and 'What Dreams May Come.'"
The second movie I'd heard of, but the first I had not. So I wrote it down on a piece of paper, headed to Best Buy, and started searching the aisles.
I found it, picked it up, read its synopsis, and became disgusted. I sat it back down, left, and never touched that screenplay again. Saying it was "this" plus "that" killed my project, because I absolutely detest the comparisons.
This Plus That stifles creativity. It strangles originality and free thinking. Recycling of movies and storylines is not an effective means of green production (as in greenbacks.)
The other place this formula comes into play is in the audience, who is (sometimes) smarter than the studios think they are. "Twilight" debuts in theaters and the howling of emasculated fanboys cried out into the night about how it was a ripoff of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Yeah...no, not seeing it.
As a rip off of "Romeo And Juliet," well that's a more feasible argument. Shakespeare's story of star crossed lovers has been raped and left for dead as many times as "A Christmas Carol."
Everyone's got a remake of "Christmas Carol," even that god awful "Ghosts of Girlfriend's Past." Michael Douglas should know better.
If given the chance, Hollywood would continue to feed off itself until it's all homogenized and it's an equal shade of gray across the color spectrum.
Some would argue that is precisely how it looks now. The need to snap the spectrum back into differing wavelengths isn't fast approaching, it's here.
When everyone is doing exactly the same thing, and remixing the exact same shades together to get a fresh coat of gray, then someone needs to come from left field with a palette of pastels and primary colors to put the zing back into creativity.
The Moral Of The Story -- If everyone is doing (or redoing) the exact same thing, do something wildly different. Streaks of red, green, and violet will get the attention of the population who was forced into color blindness.
