Hollywood’s Copy-Paste Problem
So here we are again, folks — the multiplex marquee is a graveyard of originality. Another summer, another round of Spider-Man: Now He Has Feelings or Superman: The Emotional Reckoning, followed by three sequels nobody asked for and a “gritty reboot” of a movie that wasn’t even out of theaters yet. Hollywood isn’t making movies anymore — they’re making content.
And the thing about content? It’s safe. It’s predictable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of cold pizza: technically still food, but no one’s writing sonnets about it.
Let’s rewind the VHS tape a bit. There was a time — and I swear I didn’t dream this during a Miami Vice rerun — when Hollywood rolled the dice on weird.
Teen Wolf: a teenage werewolf playing basketball while also navigating puberty and a crush on the girl next door. That actually happened. That got financed. Someone wrote a check for wolfman dunks on rival high school team. And you know what? It worked.
Or take Mannequin. A young, good-looking guy falls in love with a department store mannequin that comes to life. Sounds like something cooked up at 3 a.m. in a basement (hey, no judgment), but that thing made bank and gave us Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, which still slaps by the way.
And then there was Overboard: poor handyman pretends to be the husband of a rich woman with amnesia, basically catfishing her into cooking and cleaning. Morally questionable? Absolutely. But audiences loved it. Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell turned questionable ethics into box office gold.
You think any of those movies would get financed today? Forget it. Some junior exec would run it through the Algorithm™ and get back a PowerPoint slide that says Risk: Too High; IP Potential: Zero; Spandex Quotient: Lacking.
Because now it’s all about the franchises. Superheroes, sci-fi universes, cinematic “multiverses.” Hollywood has turned into a strip mall where every store sells the same thing: explosions, quips, and CGI so fake it makes video game cutscenes look like Citizen Kane.
Look, I get it. Superheroes print money. Sci-fi worlds sell merch. Disney owns half the planet and needs another Star Wars spinoff every fiscal quarter to keep the stock price high. But man, doesn’t anyone want to take a weird gamble anymore? A teenage werewolf playing basketball was a risk. A rom-com about a mannequin was a risk. Even Bill & Ted was a risk — two stoner dudes time-traveling to save the future with the power of rock and roll? Try pitching that today. You’d be escorted off the lot by security before you finished your Mountain Dew.
The real tragedy? Those weird 80s movies stuck with us. They became cult classics because they weren’t engineered in a boardroom. They were clumsy, awkward, often ridiculous — and alive. Now everything feels like it was test-screened into bland perfection, designed to offend no one and inspire nothing.
So will Hollywood ever gamble again? Hard to say. Maybe some rogue indie studio will slip through the cracks and give us the next Teen Wolf or Weird Science. But for now, it’s just Spandex and sequels, baby. Same plot, new logo, bigger budget. The algorithm has spoken.
Then again, there’s nothing new under the sun because we all remember where we were in life when - Barbie Got A New Hat.
So tonight, Basement Barney will be here, watching Mannequin on VHS, waiting for the day Hollywood grows a spine again. Which ironically would be a gnarly 80’s movie plot.
Basement Barney writes from the underground—literally. A self-proclaimed cultural archivist and full time mid-level employee, Barney delivers high-voltage commentary from his parents’ basement.
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