The Original Movie Rebellion Is Here. The Pope Saw It Coming

Something strange is breaking loose at the box office.

After years in which it seemed Hollywood would be reduced to two surviving theatrical food groups — action sequels and animated tentpoles — audiences are suddenly showing up for something else: original movies, comedies, horror swings, literary gambles, YouTube-born oddities and movies that do not arrive preloaded with a shared-universe homework assignment.

It is not yet a revolution, but it also is not a fluke.

I speak of a growing taste for authenticity and connection — qualities that feel original, honest and human, and not the pro forma boilerplate status quo gobbledygook that we’ve been force-fed with increasing vehemence for a couple of decades now.

And this is not only a movie story. It is visible in cultural headlines, political campaigns and even the tired, tattered business we call our own.

In politics, we see this manifest as a revulsion toward elites in politics and business. The Trump version of that — now, perhaps, the Pratt version of it — is replacing traditional blue blazer elite insularity with the voracious, self-dealing of a new elite, which has only sped up the same trends that brought it to power, as people swallow yet another version of politics uninterested in the broad concerns of the public.

In business and culture, we see growing alarm and furor over AI’s unchecked march forward (more on that below), with no brakes for potential economic consequences or even pausing to note basic public safety concerns. The backlash on AI is becoming so powerful that it is drawing in all the fears of the moment and shaping up to become a mega-force sweeping the landscape.

And, of course, in Hollywood, we’re seeing it.

At the box office, after years of IP mowing down any non-franchise creativity — after a decade when it seemed all that would be left were two genres of filmmaking, action sequels and animated tentpoles — we are finally seeing original films take their place not just as a small and rare niche, but as a major force, outdoing all but the most major of franchises.

I’m not saying action sequels and animated tentpoles have been run out of town yet, but we’re seeing enough successes outside those two categories to call them more than flukes.

You’ve still got Super Mario and Mortal Kombat in there, plus last week’s new swing at Star Wars… but that’s an awful lot of movies that are not sequels. Excluding last year’s Avatar and Zootopia, only five of the top 20 are movies that could be described as part of a “universe” (and Prada 2 may be a sequel in name, but it’s really a different galaxy away from the Marios, Screams and Kombats of the world).

It’s a list that, shockingly, includes comedies! Three of them, in fact! (Prada 2, The Drama — yes, it’s a comedy — and The Sheep Detectives.) You’ve got all kinds of original stories and swings, too, from YouTube breakout Iron Lung to Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights to this month’s unparalleled horror success, Obsession. The second-weekend totals for the Blumhouse movie from Focus were shocking: a 30 percent increase from its opening, an unprecedented show of strength for a movie aimed squarely at Gen Z.

Dare I say that list even looks like the beginning of an ecosystem?

We all know what the era we just came out of contained — the worst era of studio filmmaking in Hollywood history. But for comparison’s sake, let’s look at what we were watching up to Memorial Day in years past. It’s a little hard to get the numbers of what the top 20 were at this point, mid-year, for each year, so let’s look at the films that won individual weekends up to Memorial Day.

For this year, here’s how that list looks (note: doing it this way includes holdovers from the previous calendar year):

Avatar: Fire and Ash, Mercy, Send Help, Wuthering Heights, GOAT, Scream 7, Hoppers, Project Hail Mary, Super Mario Galaxy, Michael, The Devil Wears Prada 2, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

That’s seven movies that aren’t sequels or extended universes (apologies to the Brontë heads).

Compare that to 2022, when you could argue that only one of these movies was truly original (The Lost City) or maybe two, if you want to count The Bad Guys, a kids’ movie adapted from a popular book series:

Spider-Man: No Way Home, Scream, Jackass Forever, Death on the Nile, Uncharted, The Batman, The Lost City, Morbius, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, The Bad Guys, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Top Gun: Maverick.

Or 2023, when just 80 for Brady would qualify as original:

Avatar: The Way of Water, 80 for Brady, Magic Mike XXL, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Creed III, Scream VI, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Fast X, The Little Mermaid.

And this spread wasn’t unique: It was pretty much what the decade that preceded that looked like, minus Covid disruption. 

Here was the list five years earlier, in 2018. Count one true original here (A Quiet Place), maybe two if you want Ready Player One to qualify (a blockbuster book that uses recognizable IP, like the T.rex from Jurassic Park and the DeLorean from Back to the Future):

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Fifty Shades Freed, Black Panther, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Ready Player One, A Quiet Place, Rampage, Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Solo: A Star Wars Story.

You get the idea. You all lived through it.

Now, yes, the summer is young. The studios were slow to get off the mark, and we’re about to be deluged by tentpoles: Toy Story 5, Spider-Man 4, another Moana. So check back in three months and the top of the chart may look a lot more familiar.

Well, yes and no.  

First of all — summer tentpole season happens earlier every year, and, as evidenced from some of those recent years, Hollywood isn’t typically afraid of crooked numbers in January, February, March and April. So that’s no explanation for the dearth in the first half of this year. 

If the explanation is that studios are making less of these, leaving more room for other things, I say, well, that’s the point.

And as for this summer, Toy Story 5 and Minions and Monsters should do just fine (and, for that matter, are sort of the A-list of the animated kingdom). Then you’ve got a couple of original giant films in the mix, Disclosure Day from Steven Spielberg and The Odyssey from Christopher Nolan, the movie I’m betting (theoretically, not on Polymarket) will end up outgrossing Avengers when the receipts are tallied.  

Then you’ve got a couple of films — Scary Movie and Jackass: Best and Last — which are pretty pure comedies, not the bastardized action comedy hybrid that followed Marvel. (Yes, before you ask, they are sequels — the sixth and fifth entries, respectively — but when it comes to theatrical comedies, we take what we can get.) Then you’ve got a few other titles that are question marks as to how they will fare — including another Warner Bros. original (The End of Oak Street), à la last year’s Weapons. 

So, we shall see!

But as I say, the goal of anyone who prays for the survival of the film medium isn’t that giant franchises should just die. It is that they should be part of a mix, not what they have become, which is Hollywood’s path to trying to avoid the fact that this is a business of risk-taking.

Because sooner or later, what seems like the safe bet becomes the riskiest of all.

So what changed in the culture that made audiences suddenly hungry for movies they weren’t trained to recognize in advance?