The early 2000 success of movie franchises like Harry Potter, followed by the subsequent success of the Twilight saga, the Hunger Games and the Marvel Cinematic Universe changed the landscape of film media drastically from the creative and intriguing to arguable what is now its most repetitive and derivative form.

Book to movie adaptations have been a common place form of media since the 20^th century with fairy tales being adapted into on screen pictures aimed at children. Seeing as this form of media has existed in the film world for decades, why now do Hollywood and other movie machines seem to have run out of ideas?

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, released in 2001 based of JK Rowling’s late 90s children’s novel of the same name, was the first instalment of a wildly successful franchise. Seven movies followed between 2001 and 2011 establishing the movie series as a commercial success spawning several spinoffs and most recently, the announcement of a television series in the works.

Along side Harry Potter, 2008 saw the release of the first instalment in the Twilight saga. Based on vampire romance novels by Stephenie Meyer the film series also created an industry obsession with the supernatural resulting in several movies following teenage protagonists thrust into fairy tale world laced with angst and love triangles flooding theatres.

2008 also saw the release the first Iron Man movie which launched the on- going Marvel Cinematic Universe which sky rocketed the popularity of super hero films as well the comics on which they are based; all while the Harry Potter movies were still being released.

The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins received the same treatment as the aforementioned adaptations launching an obsession with teen dystopia similar to the ‘Twilight effect’. The latest of which was released in November of 2023 revolving around the antagonist of the main series.

This lays out a very obvious trend as Hollywood bounces from book series, to comic, to book series trying to capture audiences with whatever new obsession has been created by these texts. Effectively ‘piggy-backing’ off of the stand-alone success of the fictional worlds created by the novels’ authors.

This pattern has created a problem in the industry of little to no new ideas being presented. As much as it would be easy to write this off as audiences becoming too accustomed to media based off existing work, the success of films like Everything Everywhere All at Once suggest otherwise.

So why then has the industry fallen into this habit of recycling old content?

The commercial success of these franchises, even with several other franchise failures too many to list, has made the industry far too comfortable with using existing material to capture audiences and gain financially.

This creates a massive issue of creative bankruptcy as writers in the industry then arguably feel the pressure to attach themselves to these big names to succeed rather than inventing new ideas that may not be received as positively by audiences as something familiar; even if they have the potential to do even better.

Faramade Olaitan.