Film franchises have always been a part of the movie industry going as far back as the “Universal Monster” movie sequels a hundred years ago. In 2024, it has gotten to a point where nearly every blockbuster or widely advertised film is either a sequel or a remake.

Studios believe them to be safe films to promote for their big box office hits. The 10 highest-grossing films of the year are all sequels or remakes, so it would make sense for studios to keep promoting films like this over new, completely self-contained films.

One problem with this is that by nature of most sequels, it can tend to be more of the same. For sequels with a longer history, often called legacy sequels, they can tend to recycle whole ideas from several films within the series.

Within the past few years, there have been numerous legacy sequels with there being multiple “Ghostbusters” and “Alien” films. The recent films from these series can represent the best and worst of what these types of sequels have to offer. The last two entries from each series listed have plenty of callback lines referencing the original films.

“Alien Romulus” for example, uses callback lines in a way that can feel very forced, almost like a studio mandate forced the directors and scriptwriters to include them in an otherwise fantastic film. The film itself had similar ideas to those of some of the previous films, but many of them were done in very different ways which helped to elevate the film. It is definitely one of the best legacy sequels listed.

The same, however, cannot be said for the two most recent “Ghostbusters” films, which at this point, are just rehashing the same ideas as the first film, in that they bring back the cast of the first film, use callback lines used in the trailers, and have a complete misunderstanding of what made the original film as great as it was. The first film was a comedy, and part of the comedy was from the main characters being extremely cynical as well as being very profit-motivated.

Creativity in Hollywood is less valuable at this point because while companies like A24 are able to promote independent films, the vast majority of studios look for hits from their existing intellectual properties (IPs). IPs in this case are the various film franchises or films owned by studios such as Disney owning the “Star Wars” and Marvel universes. Unless there is a director with a large amount of accolades or they are otherwise able to get people in seats, brand-new films are often not given the green light.

There have been creative, great, stand-alone films over the past few years, but they need the right names behind them, now more than ever. “Oppenheimer” was one of the highest-grossing films of last year, and it was a nearly three-hour historical drama. This was in part due to the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, but even if that had never happened, the film still would have made a lot of money simply because of the names attached to it.

Creativity and stand-alone stories can work and make a profit, but since they are their own entities, they are more of a risk compared to safe sequels or remakes. Studios know what they want, and pulling from existing IPs is the way to make money. The problem that stems from that is that it cuts off creativity and makes it so people who want to see something new or who haven’t seen the previous movies of a series are lost.

Overall, the industry as a whole is trying to prioritize what they know will work even at the expense of creative new films. This is an awful move from the industry because while it prioritizes short-term profits, there will be long-term damage that can already be observed by most sequels from Marvel and DC over the past couple of years not performing as well as the studios had hoped, and theaters around the country are shutting down from low profits. While the latter has other factors at play such as streaming services, the fact is that people eventually grow tired of the same ideas being thrown at them over and over again. Allowing for more creativity to flourish in an industry that was built off it can lead to a new, prosperous era for the film industry.