Hey, have you been watching Love and Death on HBO Max? Does it sound like a familiar story? It should, because you probably watched Candy on Hulu last year. It’s the same story. I mean, the SAME story. Not like, the plots are similar, more like these are both an adaptation of the exact same true events.
What about White House Plumbers? It’s streaming on HBO Max too. Does it seem a bit familiar as well? Maybe that’s because you watched Gaslit last year on STARZ. Both series look at the Watergate breakins from two different points of view, but a lot of the content is the same.
Sometimes it seems like the entertainment industry is a snake eating its own tail, incapable of producing really unique programming. That’s a pretty harsh thing to say, but it isn’t completely wrong either.
Not that this is a new phenomenon
Remember back in the 1990s when Antz and A Bug’s Life came out at the same time? What about Deep Impact and The Core? These kind of duplicate productions have been happening forever, as far as I can tell. At one point in the distant past I have to imagine that there were two caves with largely identical paintings of animals on them. It probably does go back that far.
The real issue isn’t the lack of ideas. It’s hubris, plain and simple. It’s that persistent feeling that it doesn’t matter what anyone does, you’re going to do it better. Of course the people making Love and Death knew that Hulu would beat them to the story by a year. They just didn’t care because they thought their version would be the authoritative one. (I hate to admit it but they may be right.)
Studios announce projects years in advance and so everyone knows what everyone is doing. They willingly move forward on duplicate projects when it seems like the smart thing would be to cancel one thing or the other. They delude themselves into thinking that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness has a different audience from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. And so they continue on making things that are essentially the same until someone makes something transformative like Everything Everywhere All at Once which is essentially the same movie but so so much better.
It sounds like I’m picking on HBO Max again but I’m not
Really it’s an industry wide issue. And it’s not going to be solved. The only way we’d see something like this solved would be if everyone actually acted in concert to ignore one project or another. The exact opposite seems to happen. When a duplicate project makes it to streaming (or to the theaters, if you’re still into that), there’s a lot of buzz about how it’s a duplicate and people check it out to see if it’s better or worse. This just rewards the studios for this kind of behavior.
It’s this kind of thinking that leads people to say, “there are no new stories anymore.” Well, not to be bitter, but there are no new stories. Back in 2004, Christopher Booker published The Seven Basic Plots and he had been working on the book for 34 years apparently. I remember being told there were only about four different story types when I was in high school, a zillion years ago. There are only going to be a certain number of relatable story arcs. The real question is what you do with them. Once you accept that, you begin to see where the real creativity lies.
“High concept”
The term “high concept” is a sarcastic one, and it refers to a movie plot so simple that you can describe it in two parts: its similarity to something else, and a short modifier that makes it unique. For example, “It’s Top Gun, but this time he’s older.” “It’s a Bond film, but the spy is a woman and the man is a coward.” High concept films are a big part of our entertainment landscape precisely because people crave some sort of familiarity. This leads precisely to the studios making identical movies. As I said, people seem to actually like it.
Which leads me to…
I have an idea for a movie. A group of people who have been doing heroic things independently come together because there is a global threat that they can’t do by themselves. Except this time, the people are all sanitation workers. I plan to develop the idea twice so I can hopefully sell it to two different studios. Seems like a sure-fire hit!
