How Hollywood Makes Movies That Cannot Fail No Matter What

Movies get popular when there are other reasons for seeing it, things that go beyond word-of-mouth reviews and your feelings for the actors playing the leads. Those things may be enough to get a movie into the low-to-mid 8 figures but they won’t make for a massively powerful box office juggernaut. 

The real reasons movies make money is when the potential audience is curious and afraid. Curious about how something looks, like special effects, or afraid of not being among the knowledgeable on Monday morning. There are other things, like previous connections with the franchise, perhaps from being a collector of certain comic books or action figures on which a new movie is based. In these cases people feel obligated by their brand-loyalty to go see the film. If they don’t see it then they don’t get to claim to be a true fan. Such claims are important in forming an identity, something for other people to use to tag you with (hey, look! It’s the Batman guy!) For those of you who wonder why your favorite childhood cartoons and comics keep getting raped by Hollywood, this is it, because they are your favorites, collectively. Important to you and many like you. You will go because you are already connected. It’s like seeing a girl you once dated in search-results, you will click the link.                                                

Hollywood needs previous connections to make for a marketing success, so not only will they constantly, shamelessly, openly revamp and re-make that which has already been made without trying to improve, they will do it covertly as well. Every single movie in the 2008 US box-office top 10 has elements of the familiar whether they plainly state it or not. This year’s successes, the “surprise” ones like District 9 (Alien Nation) and the ones that were always going to be success like The Transformers 2 (toys from the 80s) all of it is about memories, nostalgia, recycling. 

What they are doing is holding your memories hostage, using the things that you already feel positive about to lure you into the theaters. Think of it as you being John McClane and they are holding your wife hostage in the Nakatomi Plaza high-rise. You have to go get her. 

As much as you want to hate what Hollywood will do to your favorite comic-book stories like casting an Australian metrosexual as Wolverine, or turning the Indiana Jones franchise into something more childish and absurd than The Mummy franchise, you will still see the films, just because you can’t afford not to. It would be like turning your back on your parents just because they are old and senile. The only present link you have to the good years of your childhood might be incontinent and burdensome, but it’s still a link.