Copy-paste culture has taken over cinema
All too often, I find myself turning on the TV to the same movie. Except it’s not. The plot is practically identical, the characters are the same cliche archetypes and I still find myself on my phone halfway through. Cinema’s level of apathy when it comes to plot and the only clear motive being box office profit is frankly concerning. It leaves me wondering how much creativity there is in the director’s chair, or if they are simply recycling stories that have made money in the past. It is blatantly obvious that it is the latter.
When I was younger, I had a constant list of movies I was excited to watch in my local theater. We have all experienced the lights dimming while enjoying a bag of hot, buttery popcorn and sipping a soda in anticipation of the film you have been counting down the days for. Now, the new releases go over my head as I see posters that are in competition of who can be the best mimic. Furthermore, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, theaters seem to be more focused on profit and keeping concepts familiar to attract viewers because they had not had audiences for so long.
There have not been original new releases but only sequels and reboots. For example, movies like “Freakier Friday” and “M3GAN 2.0” follow essentially the same storyline as the originals and get viewers interested simply because it is familiar. Furthermore, films that hope to offer a continuation of an original plot such as “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2” are not accompanied by movies that offer a new story in theaters. This issue even spreads into TV shows such as the common trope of the love triangle but done in a very similar way, as seen in “My Life with the Walter Boys” to “The Summer I Turned Pretty” with two brothers fighting over a family friend.
While it is possible for original storylines to have success with both audiences and economic gain, seen with “Weapons” and “Stranger Things,” these ideas are seen as out of the ordinary compared to the copy-paste culture that has taken over cinema. It seems more often that the sentiment of copying over creativity has overwhelmed the screen.
