The highest-grossing films of all time appear to be almost all either sequels or adaptations of ultra-bestselling books. The ones that aren’t, in descending order of gross:
Avatar (formulaic as all hell)
Titanic (somewhat formulaic)
Jurassic Park (somewhat innovative)
Finding Nemo (somewhat formulaic)
Inception (very innovative)
Independence Day (formulaic as all hell)
E.T. (very innovative, I think)
The Lion King (somewhat formulaic)
2012 (haven’t seen it, hear it’s formulaic)
Up (somewhat innovative)
Forrest Gump (very innovative)
The Sixth Sense (very innovative)
Pirates of the Caribbean (somewhat innovative)
Kung Fu Panda (haven’t seen it, sounds somewhat innovative)
The Incredibles (somewhat innovative)
I’m not really confident in my ratings, but it does look like big-budget innovative films have a good chance of blowing up (and often creating a franchise).
My theory: a producer who greenlights a big-budget, innovative flop looks like an idiot. A producer who greenlights a big-budget, formulaic flop looks unlucky.
I’m pretty sure it’s not, but it should certainly be on the list.
I remember hearing about some movie displacing it, though I don’t remember what movie. Maybe it was Avatar and I’m just blocking it out because I don’t want that to be true. Back to the Litanies for me...
To me, it seems that Avatar could be taken as a “noble savage” dances with wolves trope on a surface viewing, for sure. But a second viewing really shows it as a post singularity society. Every entity on the planet has a neural up-link as a part of it’s organism. The Na’vi venerate a tree called “Eywa” (AI-wa?) that seems to be able to control most of the planet, and even aggressively “seed tags” a known invader only to later invite the invader into a situation that allows for the AI tree to upload the brain of an invader and seek a solution for the problem of the invasion.
For me, it seems that Avatar could be a good example of what a post-singularity AI might look like if the organism that initiated the singularity relied on a biological technology and symbiosis rather than a non carbon system for artificial intelligence.
the problem presented by the evolution of an up-link like ponytail and the seemingly godlike intelligence of the trees is what lead me to this line of thought, and i think when it is explored to it’s conclusion it satisfies Avatar’s formula better than “Dances with Wolves in Space”.
The highest-grossing films of all time appear to be almost all either sequels or adaptations of ultra-bestselling books. The ones that aren’t, in descending order of gross:
Avatar (formulaic as all hell) Titanic (somewhat formulaic) Jurassic Park (somewhat innovative) Finding Nemo (somewhat formulaic) Inception (very innovative) Independence Day (formulaic as all hell) E.T. (very innovative, I think) The Lion King (somewhat formulaic) 2012 (haven’t seen it, hear it’s formulaic) Up (somewhat innovative) Forrest Gump (very innovative) The Sixth Sense (very innovative) Pirates of the Caribbean (somewhat innovative) Kung Fu Panda (haven’t seen it, sounds somewhat innovative) The Incredibles (somewhat innovative)
I’m not really confident in my ratings, but it does look like big-budget innovative films have a good chance of blowing up (and often creating a franchise).
My theory: a producer who greenlights a big-budget, innovative flop looks like an idiot. A producer who greenlights a big-budget, formulaic flop looks unlucky.
That list needs some serious inflation adjustment; I’m pretty sure Gone with the Wind is still the number 1 in ticket sales.
I’m pretty sure it’s not, but it should certainly be on the list.
I remember hearing about some movie displacing it, though I don’t remember what movie. Maybe it was Avatar and I’m just blocking it out because I don’t want that to be true. Back to the Litanies for me...
Avatar’s huge box office grosses were achieved, at least in part, because tickets for 3-D showings cost more.
Have ticket prices kept up with inflation?
They’ve actually grown faster than inflation.
Jurassic Park was originally a book by Michael Crichton, who was already a fairly well known author at the time. Wikipedia says that a bidding war for the movie rights started before the novel was even published. Forrest Gump was also originally a book, although the article on its author, Groom, indicates that it wasn’t a bestseller when first released, and I’ve heard it’s a very loose adaptation anyway.
Is Avatar really formulaic?
To me, it seems that Avatar could be taken as a “noble savage” dances with wolves trope on a surface viewing, for sure. But a second viewing really shows it as a post singularity society. Every entity on the planet has a neural up-link as a part of it’s organism. The Na’vi venerate a tree called “Eywa” (AI-wa?) that seems to be able to control most of the planet, and even aggressively “seed tags” a known invader only to later invite the invader into a situation that allows for the AI tree to upload the brain of an invader and seek a solution for the problem of the invasion.
For me, it seems that Avatar could be a good example of what a post-singularity AI might look like if the organism that initiated the singularity relied on a biological technology and symbiosis rather than a non carbon system for artificial intelligence.
the problem presented by the evolution of an up-link like ponytail and the seemingly godlike intelligence of the trees is what lead me to this line of thought, and i think when it is explored to it’s conclusion it satisfies Avatar’s formula better than “Dances with Wolves in Space”.
Kung Fu Panda is formulaic as all hell.
this post could use some update with tv tropes. Even formulaic stories were innovative at one point or another.
Good analysis (and on the whole I agree with your ratings—not that I didn’t like Independence Day, but it is certainly formulaic).
And that theory strikes me as having a lot of truth in it.