From the world’s earliest surviving motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888, the film industry has become a powerhouse of entertainment worldwide. American cinema flourished between the late 20th and the early 21st century, with movies like Moonlight, La La Land, and Get Out quickly becoming beloved cult classics—along with Napoleon Dynamite, The Outsiders, and Fight Club. Movies like these have shaped generations and created pivotal moments in everyday life. The Barbienheimer craze in the summer of 2023, the infamous front of the boat scene in the 1997 film Titanic, and Tony Stark’s infinity gauntlet snap in Avengers: Endgame are just a few examples of cinema becoming more than just a movie.
According to The Numbers, a business reporting website, about 800 million tickets were sold in 2023, a 300 million drop from the 1,224,171,958 tickets sold in 2019. The highest-grossing movie in the last 10 years was Avengers: Endgame at $1,010,181,328 (2023 dollars) in 2019. However, this dropped down to $636,225,984 with Barbie in 2023. That’s a 300 million drop in five years. While Warner Bros. distributed Barbie, Avengers: Endgame was produced by Walt Disney, a company that has slowly begun to decrease its yearly income. According to Macrotrends, a research platform for long-term investors, Disney Studios’ annual income in 2023 was 2.354 Billion dollars, a 25.15% decrease from the year before.
It’s easy to blame the consumer–“People just don’t have time to sit down and watch a movie!”–but that’s not the main problem. Movies coming out now lack the novelty that film once had. Major entertainment studios like Warner Universal, Disney, and Warner Bros. only care about milking a popular series out for the easy cash grab. It’s why there are ten Fast and Furious movies with an eleventh on the way and six Scream movies with the seventh in production.
“When I think of great movies, I don’t think about anything from the past 10 years. Everything nowadays is either a sequel, a remake, an adaptation of a book, or a TV show and it’s slowly causing a decline in cinema,” said Nathan Osborn, a sophomore at ETHS. “Part of the reason we don’t have a lot of original movies is that the bigger film studios want a lot of money. They’re greedy, they want to make the most money off of everything they can so they release all this content. It used to be that people would wait on each movie because it would be built up and there would be a long time between them. But when it’s released now, when there’s new stuff released multiple times a year, then it’s not as exciting.”
The lack of originality in movies and the overproduction of the same plotlines with the same faces and tropes are decreasing the value of 21st-century films. Simply put, there hasn’t been an original idea for a movie since the early 2000s, causing the countless additional movies added to franchises. Take Disney, for example, one of the biggest film studios in the world, and what they have released in the past year. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (sequel), Inside Out 2 (sequel), Deadpool & Wolverine (another sequel), Alien: Romulus (sequel), Moana 2 (another sequel), and now the movie Mufasa, an anticipated release for 2025, which is a prequel.
“[The film industry] is a business that is driven by chasing ideas that have already been successful. This is one of the reasons we see so many sequels,” wrote Felicia D. Henderson, an associate professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. “If it was successful once, Hollywood tends to keep making more versions of the story until it stops being profitable to do so. I think one of the changes in the last decade or two has been the ballooning costs of filmmaking, in terms of big, blockbuster films that cost between $100 million and $200 million to make.”
If the film industry continues to operate as it does today, it won’t be long before you see the same actors portraying the same characters with the same film premise—just look at Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Bigger and dominating film studios need to focus on producing content that can accurately reach their target audience, delivering smaller-budget movies with overarching themes that everyone can relate to. That’s what made Barbie such a knockout in 2023—people could see themselves in her character and what she represents. That’s what film is about; telling a story others can view and relate to. Without this element, American cinema cannot flourish like before.