Nathan Rabin over at The Dissolve wrote about how people should stop saying that their childhood is being detrimentally plundered by a litany of mercenary faceless corporations intent on making a dollar based on your nostalgia. The overused and extremely gross metaphor ” you’re raping my childhood” should be immediately put to bed (simply because the rape metaphor is extremely unbecoming of the user). But, Nathan’s point isn’t that rape metaphors have no place in modern discourse. His point is that if corporations are going to plunder the entertainments that you enjoyed as a child, you should remember those entertainments were also sub-par entertainments from corporations trying to sell you a toy. The subtext of Rabin’s point, and one that was espoused by Chris Hardwick on @midnight, is that when corporations do something, you should just take what’s coming to you.
The context of this rant is over the “uproar” that started because the Ghostbusters reboot/remake/sequel/spin-off/whatever is finally cast. Before this week, Ghostbusters seemed to be just a pipe dream in some marketing asshole’s imagination. For the longest time, Ghostbusters was going to be a sequel starring the original cast. Many people, remembering the last time there was a Ghostbusters sequel, shunned this idea as both terrible and a blatant cash-grab. Years ago, people were celebrating that Bill Murray was being the holdout on Ghostbusters because he wanted a good script and not just to grab some money.
That was then. In the interim years, Harold Ramis died, taking with him the original cast idea. But, the reboot of Ghostbusters was not to be denied! Instead, they got a new director and floated the idea that Ghostbusters would have a new all-female cast. But, still, Ghostbusters remained a pipe dream occasionally spewing pieces of news turdlets that would periodically float down the internet stream of marketing. Such is Hollywood, really. Many movies get marketing through the stream of development news turdlets. Ghostbusters, one hoped, would eventually die.
This week, the cast of Ghostbusters was announced. It was confirmed that the main stars were all female, actually hiring some very funny comediennes. The problem? This changed the shitty pipe dream of another entry in Ghostbusters into a reality. Thus many cries happened on the internet. Of course, the internet being what it is, many of these cries were “why all women?” which got picked up by the progressive blogosphere as being women-hating. This idea made it into @midnight, The AV Club, and The Dissolve (just to name a few of the sources). Some of these organizations lumped in the sexist “why all women” complaints with the “Not another franchise,” thus making the all-female cast a marketing coup.
In the same vein that The Interview and American Sniper became symbols for free speech and patriotism, Ghostbusters is becoming a symbol for progressive ideas. Which is shitty. Women can’t even have original IP on which they can take a stand. Instead of allowing people to dismiss Ghostbusters as yet another shitty reboot, we’re now being told that you can’t complain about Hollywood going through your childhood for its own nostalgia marketing.
We’re in an unprecedented time for the sheer density of big budget blockbuster nostalgia films. This year, we have 11 movies based in nostalgia properties as either reboots or remakes. There are an additional 20 sequels set for this year. And that’s not including the non-sequel franchise movies like Ant-Man. If it feels like Hollywood is flooding the market with retreats of the same source material it’s because it is.
Remakes and sequels are nothing new. Hitchcock made the same damn “innocent man” movie over and over again, with The Man Who Knew Too Much being a direct remake. The Ten Commandments was made a few times over. Of course, those were before the invention of VCRs and DVD players where we could rewatch the movies at home. Now, things are being remade because there’s money in remakes. Last House on the Left was remade because the original was notorious, but the new version offered no new ideas. Straw Dogs similarly got plundered, but it was updated for even more confusing politics. Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Star Wars, all are getting sequels or prequels or whatever. But, we can rewatch the originals at home on our DVD player.
Our desire for new IP always creates a gamble in Hollywood, which is notoriously focused on profit for its business model. In the bonus features of Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky goes on an extended rant against the number crunchers who run the Hollywood studios, saying they’re in it for the cash and not the art. He wanted to make movies that lost money because new ideas always lost money. Hell, not even the stars are behind all of their movies. George Clooney said that he did Batman & Robin so he could do whatever the hell he wanted for the rest of his career.
And, it’s not like most of these reboots are actually any good. Christopher Nolan’s Batman series and the Planet of the Apes reboots have been the closest to good that any of the reboots have gotten. But, for every Planet of the Apes, we have 5 Star Treks, and for every Batman, there are three The Amazing Spider-Mans. When we see Star Wars Ep 1-3 be crappy, Superman be crappy (twice over last decade), Spider-Man be crappy, Star Trek be serviceable at best, Indiana Jones be crappy, and any number of crappy comedy reboots/remakes/sequels (The Pink Panther, The Out-of-Towners, Blues Brothers 2000), then the audience does have a right to rebel and withhold our ticket dollars. We do have a right to bitch and complain about a dearth of original IP.
Hollywood is feeding us on a steady diet of shitty sequels and remakes, many based in banking on nostalgia marketing. If they’re going to give us substandard and unoriginal programming, we can bitch about them if we want to. Otherwise, we’re basically just Oliver Twist being fed gruel and begging for more. Adding very tasty cinnamon onto the gruel doesn’t make the gruel that much more appealing, and adding a female cast onto a reboot doesn’t make the reboot any more desirable.