Blog: Hollywood Remakes and the Death of Creativity

When I was still in elementary school, I mostly wrote fanfiction for creative writing assignments. Often, many of my stories were retellings of fairy tales or had something to do with Barbie. The two stories I remember the most were 1). Frog and Toad meets the Barbie Spy Squad where Frodo and Sam were working as well and 2). Han Solo and Barbie fly through the galaxy in the Millenium Falcon to get McDonalds. I’m not kidding; this is the type of stuff that I wrote and if I can ever find these stories, I will dedicate several posts to them so you can cringe and laugh with me.

While I don’t write such copius amounts of fanfiction to turn in for school assignments anymore, writing such things would teach me something about how Hollywood works today. The reason why I would choose characters that were already popular and well-known (other than the fact that I was obsessed with them myself) was because they needed no character growth/development. The people who had created them had done all the hard work for me. All I needed to do was put them into a world of my own imagining and make the story entertaining. Since then, I have stopped doing that and can create my own characters with their own story arcs, but when I look at Hollywood – a place that used to be the bastion of creativity and original stories – all I see is people who are doing exactly what I used to do, but the thing that seperates them from me is they’re making money by writing corporate fanfiction.

At this point, you might be wondering what corporate fanfiction is and what the difference is between that and regular fanfic. Corporate fanfiction is a genre that is written solely to make money while Fan-fanfiction is written by people who just want to pay homage to the world that they love (in fact, some of the best episodes of the original Star-Trek were based off of fanfiction that the fans sent in). There is no soul in Corporate fanfiction, it often relies heavily on romance, subversion, remember-berries from whatever it’s ripping off, and cheesy action sequences, and the only reason why it might become successful is because it floats like driftwood on the success of the original book. Some examples of corporate fanfiction are Divergent, Rings of Power, 50 Shades of Grey (a book I’ll never read), Song of Achilles, The Sun and the Star, etc. While it used to only be written by authors who couldn’t come up with anything original, it has sadly spread to Hollywood.

To answer why this is, I’ll have to quote Professor J.R.R. Tolkien when he famously said: “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have made.” Am I saying that Hollywood has become evil? Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying here. Just look back to Hollywood’s Golden Age. Movies such as Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, etc. were booming. While some of this can be attributed to the novelty of movies at that time, it can also be attributed to the fact that Hollywood was happy to present Judeo-Christian values as a good thing during that time. As time went on and we started going downhill, movies started going downhill. They wanted to draw in the new crowd and so they started pushing more socially transgressive messages. Hollywood started becoming woke, but unlike today, they weren’t blatantly Satanic. Sure, you would get a show or music video here and there that portrayed Satanism as a good thing, but it wasn’t as obvious as today. Today, Hollywood is all about destroying Western values and returning to a time where we were worshipping either ourselves or statues.

Now, you could argue that paganism won’t influence art drastically. After all, the Greeks and Romans were pagans and they created beautiful works of art that stand in museums today. While this is true, compared to what Christian civilizations would create centuries later, I would say Christian art is much better. Christian art doesn’t seek to glorify oneself, it seeks to glorify God, the higher being that created everything. That means people will put more effort into creating good art. If you’re just creating art to glorify yourself, it could be the ugliest piece of crap you’ve ever seen, but you’ll still see it as “good” because it would be hateful to you if anyone said otherwise. It is this selfishness that is destroying good art.

Lastly, I will point out how in Hollywood’s quest to destroy creativity, they seem highly insecure about what they’re making. Recently, when the photos of Disney’s live-action Snow White and the Seven Intersectional Drug Addicts, Disney denied that they were real, then flipped and confirmed they were real photos and tried to seem proud of it. During the Rings of Power premiere, instead of focusing on how amazing they thought the show was, Amazon instead focused solely on the intersectionality politics and called Tolkien fans racist. And there are many more examples of this. This is a sign that Hollywood knows what they’re making is crap. They know that they’re destroying art and have run out of creativity, but they have built their own coffin and now must lie in it. This is how Hollywood is going to die and unless they go back to being a force of good in the world by bringing back Judeo-Christian tradition, they are going to implode.

Until next time,

M.J.