The highest grossing movies of 2017 included Star Wars: Episode 8 ($1.6B), Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2 ($1.1B) and Beauty and the Beast ($1B). Two entries in multi-billion dollar franchises and a Disney reboot. Many believe that originality has been exponentially decreasing in Hollywood movies, while sequels, prequels and spin offs have contrastingly increased in popularity.

According to IMDb, 2017 alone brought 11 superhero movies, 36 sequels/prequels, 12 remakes/reboots, and 26 book adaptations. These being blockbusters with budgets of over 50 million dollars. There’s evidence to suggest that audiences would rather pay to see an existing property, character or world rather than experience a new one.

There’s always been a business-focused side in Hollywood, where studio heads and producers greenlight projects and limit the creativity of filmmakers. While it has always coexisted with artists, it’s only in recent years that business-centered Hollywood has overshadowed its creative counterpart. Filmmaking has become a business machine, where men in suits create products, while dreamers and storytellers’ art become irrelevant and obscure, overshadowed by the big studio pictures.

Loving Vincent (2017) is the first fully painted feature film, made by 125 professional oil painters the film took over 8 years to finish. Many are calling it the slowest form of filmmaking ever devised. The movie has an 83 percent approval  in Rotten Tomatoes yet barely generated 30.2 million dollars at the box office. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) was completed in less than a year, has an 18 percent rating and made 605.4 million.

There are countless cases of movies, smashed by critics, which managed to multiply their budgets, while works of art barely break even. Detroit (2017) had a budget of 34 million and could only recover 25.1, the movie has an 84 percent approval and was director Kathryn Bigelow’s passion project.

Hollywood doesn’t like to take risks, not as much as they used to. They know a 217 million dollar Transformers movie will triplicate its money, and don’t care much for quality of the film as long as it brings in big bucks. They also know that producing a movie like Detroit has no guarantee of making  it’s 34 million budget  back.

Big blockbuster franchises generally follow the same formula as other instalments in the same series, and studios know that it works, yet for every dozen needless sequels there is an original entry in an otherwise dull series of movies. There are examples of big films that take risks like Logan, the original Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool, and a few others, which stray from the formula and aren’t guaranteed to make big money for the studios but ultimately do. Logan and Deadpool specifically proved that audiences are willing to pay and go see more mature R rated stories, which explore concepts and themes previously absent from the usual PG-13 blockbusters aimed at the whole family.

Walt Disney famously once said “we don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make movies.” This quote could not be more relevant today. Original movies are dying out, and the only way to prevent Hollywood art from extinction is to go to the theaters and see the authentic features, the works of art. To pay for the great films, and show producers that people enjoy originality.