Awhile back I saw a list by some writer that complained about how every film being was a sequal or based upon a comic book or a sequel to a movie based upon a comic book. Certainly there have been no lack of posters here complaining about Hollywood being less orginal.

I just got done watching the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In fact most silent films I could think of that I've seen were, you know, based upon books or previously known stories, such as Faust.

This got me thinking about the most famous, iconic, or most highly regarded films of yesteryear, or films that won best picture and how many were based upon previously established material. I also looked at the Sight and Sound poll as well, so not all of these are Hollywood.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Dracula and Nosferatu
Frankenstein
The Godfather Trilogy
The Wizard of Oz
All Quiet on the Western Front
Cimarron
A Farewell to Arms
Gone With the Wind
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Grapes of Wrath
The Maltese Falcon
The Lost Weekend
Hamlet (1948 best picture winner)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Around the World in 80 Days (1956 best picture winner)
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Jaws
The Quiet Man
A Streetcar Named Desire
Alfie
Dr. Strangelove
Carrie
The Shining
The Exorcist
Blade Runner
Miracle on 34th Street
12 Angry Men
Ben Hur
Vertigo
The Searchers
The Rules of the Game
Raging Bull
Apocalypse Now
The General

On top of that, most musicals in their heyday of the 1950's and 60's were first seen on stage such as The Sound of Music (which I left out due to their vast numbers).

Plus while looking over the list of Best Picture nominees over the years, I noticed a lot of find pictures that were: a) based upon a historical event or figure or both such as The French Connection or Patton. Citizen Kane is often thought to have been based upon the life of William Randolf Hearst.
b) based upon the craft filmmaking and Hollywood culture, such as Sunset Boulevard.
c) based upon the filmmakers direct experiences (Platoon)

Then there's examples like Star Wars or Indiana Jones that could be considered original but obviously are heavily influenced by previously told material (Greek legends, movie serials, and so on).

So can it really be said that Hollywood is getting less original? Or are we just more aware of it's influences?
-Jeremy

Couple nitpicky things first...

2001: A Space Odyssey was an original story. Sure, it borrowed a couple broad ideas from Arthur C. Clarke's short stories (ancient aliens visiting prehistoric Earth, finding an alien artifact on the moon), but to use his analogy, those stories are to 2001 as an acorn is to an oak tree.

And I personally would not qualify fiction that borrows from the events of history or from the lives of public figures as adapted/non-original works. That logic doesn't have to be pursued very far before the distinction becomes meaningless.

Anyway, if you're looking for a quantitative link between the passage of time and the predominance of adapted material, you won't find it just by gathering up a list of famous titles. It's easy to back up an argument with examples, just as it's easy to weaken an argument using counterexamples, but ultimately none of it will prove anything. It's all anecdotal evidence, incomplete, and ultimately inadequate. Your best bet is a heuristic approach: look at the roster of movies today and weigh the amount of original material you see against the amount you'd like to see.

The alternative is to gather up a complete list of movies, separate them into groups of original material and adapted material, and graph them over time. As this does not sound fun at all, I would not recommend it.

I am going to get all theoretical up in this question and say that movies are indeed less original, going strictly by the economic imperative. As the cost of making movies goes up, as the sales of tickets go down, as financing for art house fare becomes more scarce, and as the ever-shortening timeline for theatrical success becomes even more dependent on expensive marketing campaigns... you see where this is going.

Original material gets riskier. Known quantities, especially known quantities that can be established as an ongoing brand, become more appealing to financiers. Once again, I know that's purely a theoretical argument, but it's a very tempting one to make when every theater from this college town to the next college over is showing The Dark Knight Rises, yet I have to travel farther than that if I'm ever going to screen Searching For Sugar Man in a theater.

I think it's beyond doubt that mainstream Hollywood is suffering from the culture of risk aversion. We all know that films are produced according to set formulas whose primary aims is bums on seats before all else.

There are 2 things that can save us from this creative heat-death -

1. The movie-going public transform their collective consiousness and begin to reject the warmed up tripe that Hollywood has been pushing for the last decade

2. Technology advances to the point that very expensive looking films can be produced for next to nothing, which means the big (and by definition risk-averse) studios no longer have the monopoly on "epic" productions.

"1" won't happen any time soon. "2" could.

I can't see "2" happening anytime soon either, it'll be a long while before technology like that comes along.

Adapting movies from other media is really traditional and as Thered47 points out, isn't really being done more today than before. Douglas Fairbanks, for instance, did versions of Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Mask of Zorro (adapted from a short story), Don Q: The Son of Zorro (adapted from a novel that pre-dates Zorro as well as the Zorro stories and movie), as well as originals like The Gaucho and The Thief of Baghdad (although the latter could be viewed as a riff on the Arabian Nights).

When people complain about lack of originality by Hollywood, they're generally talking about remaking movies (or reusing source material that has already been filmed) or making sequels, and that seems to be more common--or is it? Series of films also go way back: think of the Tarzan, Andy Hardy, Blondie, Ma and Pa Kettle series. Those generally don't seem to be intended as "A" films, while today the big movie of the summer seems often to be the fourth or fifth in a series.

I finally drew the line with the Spider-Man reboot.

Thus raising the question: when we ask the question posed in the title, where does our implicit timeline begin? Less original since...?

Well, people who complain about a dearth of orignality, never really give a time frame either, so I didn't feel compelled to either.

Technically, a decline can start anytime, but I presume people mean the past decade represents the low point of creative thinking.



Since the argument is pure conjecture I don't think I can offer a good rebutal. But I will anyways.

"Risk averse" does not mean "less original" in the strictest sense of the word. "Original" material is no more going to bomb at the box office any more then an adapted work. Plus, with an adapted work, you have to pay for the rights *and* hire a screenwriter, thereby increasing your costs anyways.

Furthermore, consider Lord of the Rings, which New Line took on huge risk in adapting, cost huge amounts of money to produce, and if the first one had tanked at the box office, they would have been screwed. The fact that it was based upon a popular fantasy novel was no guarantee that it would do well, as the height of the books popularity was the 70's. No matter how who slice it, adapting Lord of the Rings was a risky move. Consider as well, The Golden Compass or Battleship, both of which did tank at the box office. Now compare that to Pan's Labarynth, which was an original work, and did very well for itself. Where was the risk involved with Pan's Labarynth?

The point being is that risk is inherent in any big budget whether being done with an original screenplay or an adapted work. In fact, Battleships failure was probably due to it being so obviously generic. To be truly risk averse, avoid big budgets altogether.
-Jeremy

I don't mean to imply that you should have. But I do think that while we're generally talking about the same stuff, different people might have different ideas of what originality means, what it means for originality to be in decline, and when originality was in a better state. Those differences in understanding might mean that we end up arguing at cross-purposes.

1. Original material may not be more likely to bomb, but that also isn't necessarily the concern of the movie executive. Inception was a smashing success, but the odds of that success were not as predictable as the success of, say, The Dark Knight.

2. It is true that licensing is an additional cost, assuming that you don't already own the rights. (Example: Time-Warner is the corporate parent of DC Comics; therefore, Warner Bros. has access to DC's stable of characters.) But consider this: there are additional costs to developing and pitching original works that don't apply to pitches for an adaptation.

Say you come up with an idea for a fantasy adventure story. You go around to all the studios and tell them all about it. Nobody wants it. When you talks about it, people's eyes glaze over. The scenes, places, and characters you're describing are too esoteric for the studio representatives to envision up on the screen. You can't pitch this movie unless you can demonstrate them what this stuff is supposed to be like.

So you hire a painter to meet with you, go through your notes, outlines, and script, and do visual designs of all this stuff. It looks great, better than you ever imagined. You take this stuff around. People are impressed by it, but it looks expensive to make. Most of these people are unwilling to sink a lot of money into this thing that has no track record and is different from anything else in the public consciousness at the time. That isn't to say that nobody wants to take a chance on it, but the only ones receptive to what you're showing them are ironically the ones who don't have the resources to handle the production.

So you go around, make connections with the big special effects movie guys, and find out who all the young up-and-comers are--the ones who don't have the longest resume, but have the cutting-edge expertise that a movie like yours will demand. They also don't work for free, but once you've got these guys in the pocket, the studio will accept your pitch. Your new company of guys and your armful of concept paintings are already racking up a budget before it's even guaranteed that the movie will be made.

Now imagine that your idea is already an existing property--say, a video game. The process is a little different. You bring it in, you show the executive some gameplay, and say, "This is what I want to do. This is what it's going to look like. It's made by one of the most competitive companies in the business and this is one of their top-selling titles."

Maybe it will cost money to license the property (and maybe not), but that's the price of an idea that arrives in ready-to-pitch form.

That's both an oversimplification of how it works and an overlong way of making a point: original ideas might not be subject to licensing costs, but that doesn't necessarily make them cheaper.

I actually don't think it will. If you see what programmes like Apple Final Cut Pro can do for a few hundred dollars per package you may revise that opinion.

Anyway, this is our only hope.