You don’t have to be an expert movie buff to realize that most of the popular movies of recent years are a remake, a remake, a sequel, a spin-off, or an expansion of the cinematic universe of some saga. In 2021, only one of the ten highest grossing films, the film starring Ryan Reynolds FreeGuy, it was original. There were only two originals in the top 10 of 2020, and none in 2019.
Whose fault is it? Some argue that Netflix and greedy studios are responsible for this trend. Others, that we have simply become dumber and are running out of ideas. And another group claims that there is nothing new in this. Well, while these reasons are wrong, they may also contain some truth. And the truth is that this phenomenon is not only happening in the cinema, but in all areas of culture (television, music, books and video games).
A shrinking lineup of superstars is claiming a larger share of the market. We are witnessing a cultural oligopoly. A great change that has been happening for decades and everywhere.
At the cinema. At the top of the charts, the original films have died out. The writer Adam Mastroianni analyzed for an essay on the topic the 20 highest-grossing films since 1977 and coded whether each was part of what film scholars call a “multiplicity”: sequels, prequels, franchises, spin-offs, expansions of a cinematic universe, etc. The change is gigantic. Until the year 2000, 25% of the highest-grossing films were multiplicities. Since 2010, it has been more than 50% each year. In recent years, it has been close to 100%. The original movies are no longer popular, even if they are still being made.
Top movies have also recently started to grab a bigger slice of the market. Mastroianni took the revenue from the top 20 movies and divided it by the total revenue from the top 200 movies, going back to 1986. Those movies absorbed about 40% of all revenue until 2015, when they gobbled up even more.
on tv. Thanks to streaming, there is much more on television today than there was 50 years ago. So it would make sense if a few shows dominated the early decades of television and now new shows consistently resurfaced at the top of the ratings charts. Instead, the opposite has happened. Studying the 30 most-watched TV shows from 1950 to 2019, fewer and fewer franchises are ruling a larger and larger share.
In fact, since 2000, about a third of the 30 most watched shows are spinoffs of other shows that are among the most popular (for example, ITUC Y CSI Miami) or multiple streams of the same program (for example American Idol on Monday and Wednesday).
In the music. Many believe that in the past few bands ruled the charts: The Beatles, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, while today all can reach the top. It is not like this. Data scientist Azhad Syed conducted an analysis and found that the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been declining for decades. And since 2000, the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 has been on the rise. A smaller group of artists top the charts. Music has also become an oligopoly.
In the books. In the literature the trend is the same. Using LiteraryHub’s list of the top 10 best-selling books for each year from 1919 to 2017, we see that the oligopoly has reached book publishing as well. There are a couple of ways we can look at it: First, the percentage of repeat authors in the top 10, that is, the number of books in the top 10 that were written by an author with another book in the top 10. I used to be quite rare for an author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it has happened almost every year.
No author had had three top 10 books in a year until Danielle Steel did it in 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson each had two books. We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 who were already famous (who had a top 10 book in the last 10 years). That too has increased over time. In the 1950s, just over half of the top 10 authors had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.
In video games. If you stop to track the top 20 best-selling video games of each year from 1995 to 2021 to see if each belongs to a pre-existing franchise, you’ll also notice a similar phenomenon. In the late 1990s, 75% or less of the best-selling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it has been above 75% every year, and sometimes it is 100%. At the top of the charts, it’s all Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty Y Grand Theft Auto.
Why? To explain the rise of the pop oligopoly, two questions need to be answered: why did producers start producing more of the same, and why do consumers consume it? Software and the Internet have made it easier than ever to create and publish content. Most of the stuff hobbyists do is “garbage” and nobody uses it, but a small proportion are very successful. This could lead to media giants choosing to produce and promote things that independents never could, like a movie from the avengers. This can’t explain why oligopolization started decades ago (YouTube launched in 2005, for example, and most didn’t have broadband until 2007), but it might explain why it accelerated and continued.
The law of the strongest. It is survival. Big things like to beat smaller things. That is why, over time, the giants should grow and the tiny ones should die. In fact, movie studios, record labels, television networks, and book and video game publishers have all consolidated. It is perhaps inevitable that the major producers of culture will absorb or destroy everyone else, leaving nothing but box office superstars.
In fact, perhaps cultural oligopoly is simply a transition state before reaching a possible cultural monopoly.
Missing answer to a question. Bottom line: Why are people more open to experiencing the same thing over and over again? As the options multiply, choosing becomes more difficult. We have talked about this phenomenon in Magnet. It’s impossible to evaluate everything, so you start relying on clues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “if I liked Red Dead Redemption, I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II”, making it less and less likely that you’ll choose something unknown.
That is, more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to a lower tolerance for risk. When the only way to see a movie is to choose one of the seven that are projected on Antena 3, you can take a risk with something new. But when you have a million movies to choose from on Netflix, choosing a safe and familiar option seems more sensible than going for an original.
It could be happening across the culture. Movies don’t just compete with other movies. They compete with all other ways to spend time, and those ways are endless and growing. There are now 60,000 free books, Spotify says it has 78 million songs and 4 million podcast episodes, and humanity uploads 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute. So yeah, you were right, maybe the Tom Hanks movie seems like a good fit.
Graphics: Adam Mastroianni