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“I don’t watch movies made before I was born,” my grandson told us a few years back.
So when the husband and I decided to watch “Jumanji”—made in 1995, 10 years before the boy’s birth—this normally sweet kid turned his back to the TV screen.
“Jumanji” is about two kids who find and play a magical board game during which they release a man (Robin Williams) trapped in its jungles for decades, along with many dangers that can only be stopped by finishing the game. It’s a fantastic adventure movie, based on the award-winning children’s book.
For the studio, “Jumanji” was such a hit that 20-plus years later, they made a sequel. And then another.
Have you noticed that nearly every popular movie these days is connected to a previous movie?
In an essay titled, “Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly,” Adam Mastroianni shares his research:
“Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.”
It’s not just movies. Music, books, TV shows, video games … all have fallen prey to this trend, by which “fewer and fewer franchises rule a larger and larger share of the airwaves,” publishing houses, record studios and game manufacturers.
Here are some of Mastroianni’s stats:
· Television: Since 2000, about a third of the top 30 shows are either spinoffs of other shows in the top 30 (eg. “CSI” and “CSI: Miami”) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (eg. “American Idol” on Monday and “American Idol” on Wednesday).
· Music: In his analysis, data scientist Azhad Syed found the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades while the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 has been increasing.
· Books: Using LiteraryHub’s list of the top 10 bestselling books for 1919 to 2017, Mastroianni found it used to be rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year, but since 1990, it’s happened almost every year. (No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998.)
· Video games: In the late 1990s, 75% or less of bestselling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%. At the top, it’s all Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
Mastroianni offers several explanations as to why producers started producing more of the same thing. One is consolidation.
“Maybe it’s inevitable that major producers of culture will suck up or destroy everybody else, leaving nothing but superstars and blockbusters,” he writes. “Indeed, maybe cultural oligopoly is merely a transition state before we reach cultural monopoly.”
Why are “consumers” consuming the same thing over and over? Probably from having too many choices.
Project Gutenberg offers 60,000 free books, Spotify has 78 million songs and 4 million podcast episodes, and individuals upload 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute. It’s easy to understand why we’d want to watch “Groundhog Day” again.
But as Mastroianni points out, if we ate nothing but macaroni and cheese every day we’d end up with scurvy. And watching and listening to rehashes of the same thing over and over will turn our brains to mush.
The answer is to try something new. Read a book in another genre, watch a foreign movie and take a chance on an unfamiliar TV show.
Be like my grandson. Several minutes into “Jumanji,” he began peeking over his shoulder at the screen, then sat up and watched.
In the end, he admitted to loving it.
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