Variety has reported 2025’s box office has failed to improve on 2024’s. And once again, right on cue, comes the spiraling in film circles, from our Facebook group to Reddit, TikTok, X, and pundits of all levels of notoriety. Is the problem streaming? Is the problem cell phone use in theaters?
And yet one general scapegoat keeps rising to the top: “Theatrical films now are all sequels, adaptations, and franchise junk.” Even Variety’s own article opines “Clearly, the theatrical industry can’t thrive on sequels and spinoffs alone.”
Honestly, the instant dismissal of a movie just because it’s based on something else has gotten exhausting. It’s a lazy critique that ignores how movies have actually been made since the dawn of film. Originality is not a magic shield that makes a movie good; it’s just a label.
Take this year’s box office. The current #1 domestic film, A Minecraft Movie, is obviously franchise fare. Before Jack Black ever put on the blue shirt, there were games, books, merch, the whole industrial complex. No one’s confusing that for an indie original.
Conversely, 2025’s biggest “original” hit is Sinners. But that’s a vampire movie so…is it original? Yes, it’s not Dracula, but it’s still leaning on a character trope hundreds of years older than film itself.
And once you start pulling that thread, everything unravels.
Is Wicked: For Good a franchise movie? People were already sharpening their knives because it’s a sequel to last year’s blockbuster (which was based on a stage musical, which was based on a novel, which is an unauthorized sequel to The Wizard of Oz, turtles all the way down). So what is it exactly: a Franchise IP? A remix? Big budget fan fic?
If you go back far enough, even the “original” of that series, 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, was “just” an adaptation of a 40-year-old novel (and not the first telling of that story, so a remake as well). The line drawn in the sand seems totally arbitrary, and when you start splitting the hairs of “how original is original enough,” the entire idea collapses upon itself.
Film history is basically built on adaptations. If you look at IMDB’s Top 250, nine out of the top ten movies didn’t even start as movies. The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, and Schindler’s List, and the rest of the top nine all came from elsewhere. Most were books, but The Dark Knight was a comic, and 12 Angry Men was a play (based on a TV broadcast).
The funny thing is how certain gatekeepers will totally hand-wave Schindler’s List or 12 Angry Men as “not franchise” just because the source material wasn’t the kind of thing you’d find on a Hot Topic lunchbox. But the second you bring up Lord of the Rings or The Dark Knight, they’re suddenly “evidence” that cinema is dying. It’s such a weird, arbitrary double standard.
Is the barometer of originality merely the popularity of the source material? By that logic, Uwe Boll’s abhorrent Postal is original, as the video game was not a smash hit.
Now look ahead. The biggest movie of 2025 will probably be Avatar: Fire and Ash. It’s the third Avatar film, so yes, it’s part of a franchise. But Avatar itself was wholly original when it came out in ’09. Does continuing the story retroactively make it less worthy? Is Avatar 3 inherently worse than Avatar 1 by definition, before anyone’s even seen a single frame?
At Now Playing Podcast, we cover film series, and yes, diminishing returns are real. We know parts eight and ten are rarely better than part one. And of course, some adaptations exist solely to vacuum cash from your wallet by being toyetic and selling more merch than tickets.
But sometimes adaptations can be individual works of art that are more than corporate cash grabs.
Stanley Kubrick is routinely held up as the gold standard of cinematic originality, yet he rarely told “original” stories. 2001. The Shining. A Clockwork Orange. Dr. Strangelove. And, as Stuart pointed out in our reviews of those movies, they are all adaptations. Yet no one calls those failures of imagination.
Same with A History of Violence. Road to Perdition. and Gone Girl. Those are thoughtful, adult films that started on the page. Are they somehow lesser than Sinners because filmmakers were inspired to make these by what came first on a page?
And the gatekeeping gets even stranger. Are adaptations of bestselling books like Jurassic Park, It, The Hunt for Red October, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter considered “junk,” while Jaws and The Godfather are revered as classics simply because fewer people read the books first?
This whole argument is tired because it’s aimed at the wrong target.
Franchises, remakes, sequels, and adaptations have always been part of the cinema landscape. They aren’t killing the box office in 2025 any more than they did in 1915, when Sidney Olcott’s Madame Butterfly (based on a short story and the opera) was released.
In a world where theaters are barely hanging on, getting snobbish about anything familiar becomes self-defeating. Superman. Jurassic Park 7. Lilo & Stitch, whether they’re based on books, cartoons, comics, or cave paintings is irrelevant. People want to see them.
As film fans and enthusiasts, we shouldn’t accept subpar films, but we also shouldn’t write off a movie (or trash the entirety of cinema) just because it’s based on something else. These “the sky is falling because of franchises” proclamations are either knee-jerk reactions, lazy clickbait, or poorly thought-out half-arguments. Originality isn’t about whether the idea existed before. It’s about whether the movie does something worth a damn with it.
Because if “original” just means “never seen before,” then fine, we must all simply agree Freddy Got Fingered just leapfrogged No Country for Old Men.
At the end of the day, a bad movie is a bad movie, whether it came from a cocktail napkin or a comic book. If we keep rooting for “originality” as a concept while ignoring the actual quality on the screen, we’re going to end up with a lot of “original” movies that nobody actually wants to sit through.
I’d rather have a great sequel than a boring “original” any day of the week.
