Creativity is Dead

Looking at the list of top 20 movies for the past year I am astounded and slightly heartbroken at the number of spin-offs, reboots or sequels. Out of the twenty, twelve fell into this category. This leads us to the sad realization that the movie industry is running out of ideas and has been for a long time. This is why, I believe, many times they turn to books for inspiration and new stories. Three of the top twenty movies from the past year were based on the novels. I think this has the ability to both benefit and hurt the book industry. On one hand, there are the movies that are based off of books that are already extremely popular, such as the Harry Potter series or the Lord of the Rings series. These books were successful before the release of their movie counterparts, and continue to gain success even today. However, I don’t think those franchises would have been nearly as large and present in pop culture as they are now if there had never been any movies produced. On the other hand, there are movies that end up over shadowing the books they were based on. Sometimes the movies don’t don the same title as the novel or it may not have been advertised that it was based on a book. An example of this would be the movie “Mean Girls.” Despite its success even now in pop culture, despite its release date being ten years ago, it is a little known fact that it is based of a novel which is loosely based off of a Shakespearean play. In this case the book was over shadowed and did not receive the press or praises we see with other adaptations. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I think there are some movies that were put into production solely because they were based on popular books and they knew they would make a large profit. In a lot of situations these movies don’t seem to follow the story as well. There are other movies based on books that aren’t quite as popular but that do justice to the original text. Book-to-movie adaptations should be viewed as a separate entity because it’s close to impossible to find a movie that perfectly follows the storyline of the original novel. So as difficult as it may be for those die-hard fans to watch the movie based on their beloved book without pointing out the things that have been changed, I think its’s something we need to learn to expect and accept from the cinematic world.