Scraping the bottom of the franchise barrel

The marketplace rewards artists for making things that remind them of other things.

But this doesn’t mean originality is dead, nor that our culture is creatively bereft.

It’s just that there’s not as much money in originality. Similar to prevention in the healthcare world, not enough people profit from new ideas to warrant giving them the green light. Better to prescribe a daily pill than try to change people’s eating habits, right?

The most obvious offender of identity inversion is contemporary commercial cinema. Look at the top movie openings from the past two decades, and they’ve all been sequels and reboots and adaptations. Everything is a multiplicity of something else, using repeated and exploited texts, images, narratives and characters from earlier properties.

This shouldn’t be surprising, though, if you’re thinking about art from a business standpoint. Hollywood, just like music, sports, digital media and all other massive entertainment industries, sticks with familiar brands for a reason. They’re economically incentivized to make money, rather rather than telling quality stories and creating iconic characters.

Today’s audiences aren’t not catered to, they’re marketed to.

And so, let’s not fault the businesses for that. Getting mad at companies for prioritizing revenue is like getting mad at dogs for barking. They’re just being who they are.

But if you’re an artist, somebody who believes that your uniqueness is your greatest weapon, my recommendation is, keep doing your thing. Keep elevating all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent, simply because it makes you feel like you.

That alone is enough of a reason to do it.

Just try not to get disappointed when your originality is ignored or rejected in favor of something that reminds audiences of something else.

It’s infuriating and unfair, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Rogers, the father of humanistic psychotherapy, said it best in his famous book about becoming a person:

Perhaps the most fundamental condition of creativity is that the source or locus of evaluative judgment is internal. The value of the product is, for the creative person, established not by the praise or criticism of others, but by himself. Have I created something satisfying to me? Does it express a part of me, my feeling or my thought, my pain or my ecstasy? These are the only questions which really matter to the creative person.

Next time you go to the movie theater and see artists scraping the bottom of the franchise barrel, remember this.

Just because nobody notices how special your art is, doesn’t mean you should stop creating it.

In the end, there’s only one audience member who matters.

What is the unique song you’re supposed to be singing?