I just want to have a discussion about this. All of the remakes and reboots hollywood has done throughout its history have always been a way of just making money by putting all the money on “sure” bets, things that producers already know people like because they were successful before, but there’s something exceptionally soulless about the Disney reboots.
There seems to be no true desire to introduce a new generation to stories they weren’t familiar with, but instead a desire to just rewrite disneys entire catalog to be presented in a new aesthetic. It’s a homogenization of film to a single set of techniques and looks. Capitalism is directly strangling creativity and it’s being successful enough that it’s seemingly never going to stop. I mean. They’re rebooting movies that aren’t even 20 years old yet at this point. There are people in college seeing promos for reboots of movies their parents took them to as kids.
It’s creating this environment where we’re all stuck in this moment that already passed. The media we consume now was written in response to events that happened already, have passed us by, and can no longer be addressed. Any attempts to make new media that meet our current moment are stifled by studios who just… Don’t care.
I feel like this is definitely what’s happening to video games, which I consider to be an artform just like film. Everything is made to attract the widest possible audience, and A/B tested until it’s soulless altogether.
Making art as a group is stupid hard, and at scale it just seems nearly impossible. So unfortunately scale / growth at the cost of everything else is gonna make bad art.
But even if it’s bad art, it can still sometimes make lots of money. And company execs will throw billions away for a shot at the big payout, and then rarely pay the price when they inevitably fail - just sacrifice the workers (who probably knew shit was bad to begin with but had no power to do things different).