Hollywood, We're Bored: It's Time to Stop Playing It Safe and Make Something Genuinely Surprising

Opinion | BuzzScreen USA

I want to tell you about the last time a movie made me feel something I wasn't expecting to feel.

It wasn't during a Marvel film, though I've seen most of them and have opinions about all of them. It wasn't during a sequel to a beloved property, though those can be fine, occasionally even great. It was during a movie that had no business being as strange as it was, no business swinging as wildly as it did, and absolutely no business making as much money as it made — and yet there it was, defying every expectation the industry had for it.

That feeling — of genuine surprise, of a story doing something you couldn't have predicted — is becoming dangerously rare at the multiplex. And I think we should all be significantly more upset about that than we currently are.

The Numbers Don't Lie (And They're Saying Something Uncomfortable)

Let's talk about the box office, because Hollywood speaks fluent money and sometimes that's the only language worth using in this argument.

The 2023-2024 theatrical landscape told a fascinating and contradictory story. On one hand, franchise fatigue is real and measurable. Multiple high-budget sequels and superhero entries underperformed against their enormous production and marketing costs — films that cost $200 million or more to make and market, returning numbers that looked fine in isolation but represented genuine disappointments against studio expectations. The superhero genre, which once seemed invincible, has shown consistent signs of audience exhaustion. Viewers are not leaving cinema. They are leaving certain kinds of cinema.

On the other hand — and this is the part studios seem to be selectively ignoring — original and unexpected films keep punching wildly above their weight. Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards and grossed over $70 million on a production budget of $14.3 million. The Holdovers, Past Lives, Oppenheimer (which, yes, was based on a biography but was by no stretch of the imagination a safe commercial bet) — these films found massive audiences precisely because they offered something the franchise machine couldn't: genuine surprise.

The data is not subtle. Audiences aren't avoiding movies. They're avoiding predictable movies.

The Franchise Trap: How Hollywood Got Addicted to the Sure Thing

Understanding why studios defaulted to sequels, reboots, and extended universes requires a moment of genuine empathy — because the logic, viewed from inside a boardroom, is impeccable.

A recognized IP reduces marketing friction. Audiences already know the characters. The brand awareness is pre-built. In a fragmented media landscape where getting people off their couches and into theaters requires overcoming significant inertia, a familiar title feels like an easier sell than an unknown quantity.

The problem is that this logic, applied consistently across an entire industry, produces a theatrical landscape that feels less like a creative ecosystem and more like a very expensive greatest-hits album. And even the best greatest-hits album gets old when it's the only thing playing.

The superhero industrial complex — and I say this as someone who has genuinely enjoyed a significant number of superhero films — has calcified into a content delivery system rather than a storytelling vehicle. When you can predict not just the general shape of a film but its specific emotional beats, its third-act structure, and the approximate location of its post-credits scene before you buy your ticket, something has gone deeply wrong.

We're not watching stories anymore. We're watching brand maintenance.

The Counterargument (And Why It's Wrong)

Somewhere, a studio executive is reading this and preparing the following response: We make what audiences want. If they wanted weird, original films, they'd show up for them.

This argument has two problems.

First, audiences do show up for original films when those films are made with genuine ambition and marketed with any degree of creativity. The box office examples cited above are not anomalies. They're a pattern that the industry keeps treating as anomalies because acknowledging the pattern would require changing behavior.

Second, and more fundamentally: the relationship between studios and audiences is not purely reactive. Studios shape taste. Decades of superhero dominance didn't happen because audiences spontaneously demanded it — it happened because studios invested billions in building that appetite. The same investment, directed toward original storytelling, would produce different appetites. The industry has more power over cultural taste than it wants to admit when it's using audience preference as a shield against creative risk.

What "Bold" Actually Looks Like (It's Not That Complicated)

When I argue for more original, risk-taking cinema, I'm not arguing for difficult, alienating art films that play to empty theaters in major cities and nowhere else. I'm arguing for movies that trust their audiences enough to be genuinely surprising.

Barbie — which, let's remember, had every reason to be a cynical, hollow brand exercise — worked because its creators were allowed to be genuinely strange with it. It was a $145 million existential comedy about the nature of womanhood that had no business being as philosophically ambitious as it was. It made over $1.4 billion worldwide. Audiences were not confused by the ambition. They were delighted by it.

Jordan Peele's entire filmography exists as a standing rebuke to the notion that original, genre-bending cinema can't find a mainstream audience. Get Out cost $4.5 million and made $255 million. The industry looked at that number, nodded approvingly, and then largely continued making sequels.

Original doesn't mean inaccessible. It means trusting a story enough to let it be genuinely itself, rather than sanding down every interesting edge until it fits a proven template.

The Call to Action (Yes, This Is Where We Rally)

Here's what I want from you, the person reading this at lunch or on the subway or wherever you consume your pop culture opinions: use your money like it means something.

See the weird film. Show up for the original story. Give the strange, ambitious movie your opening weekend dollars, because opening weekend is the language studios actually speak. When Everything Everywhere All at Once won its Oscars, studios paid attention. When Peele's films print money, studios pay attention. Your attendance is a vote, and right now, too many of us are voting for the sequel while complaining that nothing original ever gets made.

And to the studios — the actual decision-makers with the actual greenlight power — I'll put it simply: your audiences are not stupid, they are not risk-averse, and they are not asking for the same story in slightly different packaging for the fifteenth consecutive year.

They're asking to be surprised. They're asking to feel something they didn't expect to feel when they sat down in the dark with their overpriced popcorn.

Give them that. Give us that.

We're not asking for the moon. We're just asking for a movie that makes us forget, for two hours, that we've seen everything before.

Is that really so much to ask?