In recent years, Hollywood has become a cesspool of unoriginality. Every other movie nowadays seems to be a frame-for-frame remake of everything. It feels like the industry has become less about creativity and fun and more about milking people’s wallets by flash-banging them with nostalgia.
I don’t think people in the industry are entirely to blame for the sudden shift in originality. I think most of the issue is an extreme decline in viewers’ media literacy. In recent years, people, generally speaking, have begun to really struggle to take in new abstract concepts, so Hollywood has adapted by spoon-feeding people the same old concepts.
Take the Netflix adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, for example. Where the original show was full of nuance and strong messaging, the live-action adaptation dumbed everything down and seemed to repeat itself repeatedly. It almost felt like someone made a show out of someone’s elevator pitch of the original series.
This lack of media literacy comes from the rise of easily accessible short-form content. Without trying to sound like a boomer, I think apps like TikTok have truly reduced people’s understanding of media as a whole. As a society, we’ve grown accustomed to having everything right under our fingertips; we don’t have to dig for the deeper meaning anymore.
Most of the time these remakes feel thrown together. To put it bluntly, they aren’t good. Mulan (2020), The Crow (2024), and Flatliners (2017).
On Mulan, Letterboxd user Sarah_Alice said, “You take out Shang, you take out Mushu, you take out I’ll make a man out of you then also make it somehow less progressive than the original by giving her powers because then that would explain how a woman could physically outshine her male counterparts – Yeah I hate it.”
It’s films like these that make me shudder every time I see something I love move up to the chopping block. I knew Avatar: The Last Airbender was doomed, now I fear what they’re going to do to How to Train Your Dragon.
Possibly the worst part of this whole thing is the fact that people agree that there are issues with the constant remakes in Hollywood, however, they always complain about the wrong things.
Fans love to focus on minor changes that don’t impact the source material at all. Primarily, people flip their lids when a character’s race is changed, more specifically when a white character is made another race in a live-action adaptation.
We saw it with Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and now Astrid in How to Train Your Dragon.
To this I say, who cares? Why does it matter? It doesn’t affect the story whatsoever.
Instead of being so focused on how the color of an actor’s skin differs from a literal drawing, focus on the butchering of the deeper meaning of these films.
