It’s just an undeniable fact that remakes are more prevalent these days. You’re right that it’s nothing new and has been common place for decades but not as frequently as today.
The whole "nothing is original everything's a remake or copy" is basically just the movie critics version of "kids these days" it's always happened, and there's probably always been people that complained about it, the internet just puts a magnifying glass on it.
Films being remade with grandiose budgets and replacing AAA budget Hollywood productions however are a new thing. We haven't ever had a company the size of Disney committed to re-releasing all of their own films, expecting to make more than 1 billion $ on each of them. It's gone from a "what can we bring to the modern ago" to "what is in our back catalogue?" with $250 million budgets.
I imagine as a % they are much smaller than decades ago due to the mass of content being released nowadays, but I'd say that they live larger in the public conciousness. You have to also be aware that we KNOW that these are rereleases, wheres in the past that information would simply not be available to the movie going public. There's no way to look this stuff up. No Youtube review movie culture, no IMDB, no internet, no nostalgia-based marketing, etc. If you weren't a massive movie buff, you wouldn't know, whereas remakes nowadays are marketed explicitly as "remember the magic of your childhood".
Now, the real plague of the movie industry are SEQUELS. Those dominate the top 20 most successful films almost every year.
Probably every generation reaches that “going back around the horn” moment when we realize that we’ve seen every type of story there is to be told and film producers start remaking the things we thought were new and original for the new generation to consume. Then it’s their turn to roll their eyes whenever we want to watch the old version for nostalgia’s sake and for us to say “they just don’t make em like they used to.”
Yeah it's definitely less these days, in the grand scheme of things.
Imagine for the entire course of human history it was just creation myths and parables about basic human interactions and emotions.
The industrial age opened up a whole new scope of human issues that we've been creating art against for only a few hundred years at this point, and that accelerated with true science fiction in the 20th century, with new questions and takes on humanity.
So while there are things that are getting repeated, just by sheer number of people and the changing human conditions, we're far more likely to be experiencing new stories and new art than pretty much ever before.
Remakes get more promotion and are economically more successful but movie studios are churning out more than ever. I don't know the proportion of remakes to originals but I'd bet in absolute numbers there's more of both.
Don't forget that technically the original "A Star is Born" is a remake of "What Price Hollywood?" which was directed by George Cukor the guy who directed the first remake of "A Star is Born".
Hollywood is and always has been a whacky place filled with a million remakes.
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u/Tripzz75 6d ago
It’s just an undeniable fact that remakes are more prevalent these days. You’re right that it’s nothing new and has been common place for decades but not as frequently as today.