“I don't watch movies made before I was born,” my grandson told us a few years ago.
So when my husband and I decided to watch Jumanji, which was made in 1995, 10 years before this little boy was born, this usually gentle boy turned his back on the television screen.
“Jumanji” is the story of two children who find and play a magical board game, during which they free a man (Robin Williams) who has been trapped in the jungle for decades, but who is unable to complete the game. There are also many dangers that can only be prevented by doing so. This is a great adventure film based on an award-winning children's book.
For the studio, “Jumanji” was such a hit that a sequel was produced more than 20 years later. And one more thing.
Have you ever noticed that almost every popular movie these days has a connection to a movie from the past?
In his essay titled “Popular Culture Has Become an Oligopoly'', Adam Mastroianni introduces his research as follows:
Until 2000, approximately 25% of top-grossing films were prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes, reboots, or expansions of the film's universe. Since 2010, that percentage has exceeded 50% every year. In recent years, that percentage has approached 100%. ”
It's not just movies. Music, books, TV shows, video games, and more are all falling prey to this trend, with publishers, record studios, and game makers saying that “fewer and fewer franchises will dominate the share of broadcasters; It's getting bigger and bigger.”
Below are some of Mastroianni's stats.
Television: Since 2000, approximately one-third of the top 30 shows have been either spinoffs of other top 30 shows (e.g. “CSI'' or “CSI: Miami'') or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g. : “CSI”). “American Idol'' on Mondays and “American Idol'' on Wednesdays).
· Music: Data scientist Azhad Saeed says his analysis shows that while the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades, the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 is increasing. I discovered that.
· Books: Using LiteraryHub's list of top 10 best-selling books from 1919 to 2017, Mastroianni notes that previously it was rare for an author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year, but since 1990 I have found that it is rare after 2013. ™ occurred almost every year. (Until Daniel Steele did it in 1998, no author had ever had three books in the top 10 in one year.)
· Video games: In the late 1990s, less than 75% of best-selling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it has exceeded 75% every year, sometimes as high as 100%. At the top are Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto.
Mastroianni has some explanations for why producers started producing more of the same thing. One is integration.
“Perhaps it is inevitable that the big producers of culture will suck up or destroy other companies, leaving only superstars and blockbusters,” he writes. “Indeed, perhaps cultural oligopoly is only a transitional state before reaching cultural monopoly.”
Why do “consumers” consume the same things over and over again? Probably because they have too many choices.
Project Gutenberg offers 60,000 books for free, 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 see why we'd want to watch “Groundhog Day” again.
But, as Mastroianni points out, if you ate nothing but macaroni and cheese every day, you would get scurvy. And when we see or hear the same rehash over and over again, our brains become mush.
The answer is to try something new. Read a book in a different genre, watch a foreign movie, or try an unfamiliar TV show.
Be like my grandson. A few minutes into “Jumanji” he started looking over his shoulder at the screen, then sat up and watched.
In the end, he admitted that he loved it.