Is Hollywood turning stale?
In recent times it seems that the film industry in Hollywood has done nothing but regurgitate old plot lines, or remake old films that did financially well or were considered cult classics.
Examples of this recently are the new Dracula film 'Dracula Untold' which according to critic consensus on film site rottentomatoes.com is "Neither awful enough to suck, nor sharp enough to bite, Dracula Untold
misses the point of its iconic character's deathless appeal."
This film re-treads the story of Vlad Dracula's relationship with his wife as was told in the 1992 film 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' starring Gary Oldman.
Once again, as with many of Hollywood's new output, the critics have
praised the effects and the performance of the lead, but have criticised
the story and script as being weak.
The same can be said for the remake of 'The Thing' which purported to be a prequel to the 1982 film, but subsequently ignored the plot details of that film and thus contradicted it.
It would seem that the producers of such movies are so preoccupied with making a guaranteed profit out of the cult followers of these previous films that they have forgotten to make sure the stories make sense if it is to be seen as related to the other film.
Where can the trend for this be seen to have started? One can look to the early 1990s, perhaps, for the answer. With the film 'Alien 3' , 20th Century Fox decided to begin shooting this sequel without a script! David Fincher, who directed this film and later had his name removed from the credits as he was so disgusted with it and his experience making it, has said that Fox studio executives told him that you 'could film someone pissing against a wall for two hours and call it Alien 3 and people would still go to see it.'
Therefore profit would seem to be the only motive, and the art of making a good film seems to have gone out of the window.
This worrying trend has continued over the years, with the abysmal Star Wars prequels, the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull debacle, Terminator 3, Aliens Vs Predator films, a toned down version of Robocop, and the latest Star Trek into darkness film which recycled the plot of computer game Wing Commander 4.
Successes in this vein have been the Batman films of Christopher Nolan,
which took the franchise back to its dark origins from the campness of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, and the latest Superman offering 'Man of Steel' 
which offered a grittier take on Superman.
which offered a grittier take on Superman.
If Hollywood studio bosses can learn from these two successful remakes then there maybe some hope for them.
In terms of script-writing, one can find more adult oriented writing in the films of France and Eastern countries, while Hollywood seems to be intent on writing for the lowest common denominator all the time, in a quest to make their films appeal to the most amount of people in order to make as much profit as possible. All this does is sacrifice the actual art form and reason one has to go and see a film. We sincerely hope that Hollywood will take a step forward into making films that are not totally dumbed down, money driven, culturally irrelevant escapades.
