America vs. Originality
Everyone says they're tired of Hollywood remakes and spin-offs, but they don't rush out to support new ideas.
I worked at a McDonald’s restaurant for almost three years of my life: one in high school, two while in college. In those three years, there was never a slow night at McDonald’s.
I worked in other restaurants, and we’d occasionally have an off night. The phone wouldn’t be ringing with orders, we might have one or two tables being used in the lobby. There was a lot of standing around and wondering where the people were on those nights, but that never once happened at McDonald’s.
You know what people constantly tell me? “Oh, McDonald’s is terrible. I hate that place.”
You know what I’ve never seen? An empty McDonald’s drive-thru.
Oh, they might catch a few moments in the mid-afternoon or late evening where a car won’t show up for a few minutes, but one will fill the space soon enough. It never ends. From the second the stores open at 6:00 AM (sometimes earlier!) until they close at 11:00 PM, that drive-thru will have constant activity.
If everyone tells me they hate McDonald’s, then who the hell is eating it all the time? McDonald’s had a gross profit of $14.7 BILLION last year. That’s a lot of Big Macs for a country where you hear people constantly say they hate them and never go there.
On the same idea, I’m tired of Disney’s Marvel efforts. I have not rushed out to see Marvel’s Thunderbolts* despite being a MASSIVE comic book nerd and despite the film getting the best ratings a Marvel movie has gotten in a long time. I didn’t see the Captain America movie with Red Hulk in it, either. I skipped Agatha All Along. I did watch Daredevil: Born Again and Deadpool & Wolverine, but I didn’t feel overly compelled to watch either. It was more like going to a family reunion out of obligation rather than desire. Both were very good, but I wasn’t excited about them.
The big complaint about movies and television from a lot of Americans is that Hollywood isn’t original. They just keep squeezing the same fruit over and over again, hoping for one more drop of magical box office juice. The horse is long dead, and Hollywood is out there beating it again.
But is that Hollywood’s fault?
Like any good capitalist system, people vote with their wallets, and while the Marvel movies are not crushing the box office like they did pre-COVID, they are still putting up great numbers in the post-COVID theater era.
Meanwhile, original concepts brought to theaters have lost money consistently over the last 15 years. It isn’t unheard of for new intellectual properties to break out in film and television (John Wick, The White Lotus, Severance), but the public has never really gone after new properties with the same zest and vigor with which they have pursued known and well-established properties.
Of the top 66 movies to earn at least $100 million domestically in the last three years, 71 percent (47 of them!) were part of an established franchise. Only THREE of the top 50 domestic grossers in that span were completely original, non-franchise films that weren’t based on real-life events or adapted from source material. (Elemental, Migration, Nope)1
This trend extends to television as well. Back in April of 2024, CBS axed So Help Me Todd, one of the most original detective/legal shows to come along in a while. Skylar Astin played Todd, a struggling private detective who has to help his super-lawyer mother, played by Marcia Gay Harden. The mother-son dynamic combined with the detective/lawyer dynamic, and a strong writing room and solid backing cast, made So Help Me Todd one of the best new shows to come along in years.
Unfortunately, it was on CBS.
CBS has absolutely dominated the one-hour crime/legal/detective genre for years. So Help Me Todd’s numbers were so good that if the show had been on NBC, FOX, or ABC, it would have been an AUTOMATIC renewal. It was popular!
But CBS only has so much space for shows, and So Help Me Todd was actually at the bottom of their rankings list. The execs at CBS had already committed to another new show, so they couldn’t afford the timeslot or money to keep So Help Me Todd in production, and it got the axe. That’s the reality of the television business.
What great show did CBS have to put on instead of this original detective/legal show?
CIA2, a spin-off of their already-three-series deep FBI franchise.
Damn you, Dick Wolf.3
This is nothing new, either: Hollywood likes spin-offs because they’re easier to market. Marketing dollars are where HALF of any show’s production budget goes. People need to learn about a product before they can invest in it. If the product is already known by the largest possible viewing audience, you’re going to see a greater chance of success with the spin-offs.
The classic TV juggernaut All in the Family spawned five shows: Maude, The Jeffersons, Archie Bunker’s Place, Gloria, and 704 Hauser.
Good Times was a spin-off of Maude. There was a short-lived show called Checking In that was a spin-off of The Jeffersons.
Happy Days had five spin-offs, too: Laverne & Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Joanie Loves Chachi, Blanksy’s Beauties, and Out of the Blue.
If something is popular, you can bet Hollywood will try to mine it for all its worth.
But it’s not their fault. The American viewing audience actually LOOKS for these things. They want familiarity. They want similar products. They want to know what to expect.
You can say you don’t think this is true, but the numbers back this up. The majority of TV and movie viewers look for things they know because trying new things is a gamble. Might be good. Might not be good. Or worse—they’ll invest time and energy in something only to have it get cancelled! An established product gives people a baseline they already understand and raises the chances that it makes it out of the first season and gets renewed.
The publishing industry is no different. When something breaks big, the traditional publishers will rush to write to market and slather the shelves with books of a similar sort of whatever is striking big, because they want to capitalize on that rush of consumer dollars.
When the Harry Potter franchise broke big, there was a slew of similar books rushed to the shelves just after: Landon Snow and the Auctor’s Riddle by RK Mortenson, the Charlie Bone series by Jenny Nimmo, Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo by Obert Skye, and even Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series all followed the same sort of premise of the Potter books.
When Sarah J. Maas exploded with A Court of Thorns and Roses, the publishing industry rushed to capitalize on that, even doing what I like to call the “ACOTARing” of titles to overly labor titles to sound haughty and pretentious like ACOTAR. From this, we got books like Jennifer L. Armentrout’s From Blood and Ash and A Shadow in the Ember. We got King of Battle and Blood by Scarlett St. Clair4 and What Lies Beyond the Veil (Book 1 of the “Of Flesh and Bone” series) by Harper L. Woods. And then there’s The Serpent & the Wings of Night and The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King by Carissa Broadbent. Brigid Kemmerer has A Curse So Dark and Lonely. AM Strickland has Court of the Undying Seasons. Ashley Poston has Among the Beasts & Briars. Anna Bright has The Song That Moves the Sun.
You see where I’m going with this.
I’m not saying these aren’t good books. I haven’t read any of them. I started to read ACOTAR, realized it wasn’t my jam, and bailed after forty pages or so. I’m not that book’s target audience, and I understand that.
But publishers are deliberately mimicking ACOTAR because publishing is a crazy difficult industry, it’s super-competitive (even if the writers aren’t competitive), and anything publishers can do to make people notice their books, they’re going to do.
People keep saying they are tired of the spin-offs, reboots, and remakes, and that they’re desperate for originality. But all evidence points to the contrary. The McDonald’s restaurants of this country, owned by a faceless corporation with billionaires at the helm, are doing just fine…meanwhile, every local restaurant owned by people in your community is just barely getting by. Thunderbolts* has raked in $200 million domestically so far, but many original independent films are going straight to streaming—they’re not even going to try to compete in the theaters. The FBI franchise will probably launch another four or five spin-offs before CBS stops beating that dead horse. (I’m holding out for FBI: Des Moines.) But, a lot of original shows are being pushed to streaming outlets because network TV knows better than to make another So Help Me Todd compete against the big boys.
Do we want originality or not?
Evidence suggests not.
In Other News
It’s been a couple of months since Strange Angels hit the proverbial shelves. It’s not exactly burning up the sales charts, but that’s to be expected, I suppose.
Marathon, not a sprint.
I have gotten a lot of nice comments from people who did read it, though. I’m grateful for that. Hard at work on the second book in that series, and while I can’t promise it will be out anytime soon, I’m determined not to Winds of Winter that bad boy.
Do keep in mind the first one took me eight years to write…
I’m also pleased to announce that the fifth Abe & Duff5 book, Bring the Heat, is coming along as promised. It will be out soon enough. More info on that later.
I will say that I really like this book, and it contains possibly two of the best lines I’ve ever written.
Stats taken from THE DECLINE OF ORIGINALITY IN HOLLYWOOD by Brandon Katz:
For the record, I’m going to watch CIA when it finally airs. It’s going to star Tom Ellis, who was brilliant in Lucifer and was the love interest in Miranda, one of the funniest sitcoms to ever air on British television. Miranda Hart is a goddamned delight, and if you haven’t watched it, you should seek it out.
Nothing against Dick Wolf—the dude is a television god at this point—but doesn’t that name sound like he should be a porn star, instead? Just saying…
Great pen name, by the way. Really sounds like someone who writes fantasy for a living.
Don’t think I’m above being a hypocrite here. While I try to make Abe and Duff as original as I possibly can, they are just a new take on the Holmes & Watson trope, with a little bit of Columbo and Shawn & Gus thrown in for fun. Without Sherlock and the good doctor leading the way, I don’t know that I would write these books…
I really enjoyed this Sean and agreed with pretty much everything. The only thing I’ll add is that many people don’t know what they want until they are TOLD what they want.
Thinking about it through a music lens, remember back in the day when people actually listened to the radio? A new song would come into rotation and maybe you didn’t like it. But then they kept playing it and playing it. All of the sudden you started liking it.
James Bond is another franchise sought out for familiarity like tater tots or your favorite childhood breakfast cereal you occasionally eat for dinner as an adult. A couple are very good, most, beyond the opening stunts, are very much not. But will we get more? Yes. Will they be mediocre? Yes. Will that matter? Probably not.