I'm confused as to why these are being redone so early. I mean it wasn't too long ago that Toby's series ended and honestly i thought those were good.
This has been covered in the past but I'll lay it out again because the common narrative that Hollywood has lost its creativity is actually wrong.
The problem is that the six major film studios have become incredibly risk averse over the past 10 years or so. Movie making is an increasingly expensive gamble with no guarantee of profit. In fact, for every major hit that's highly profitable, there are often a dozen that don't even break even. On top of that, the DVD market utterly collapsed around 2010, which was their main source of long term profit. Because of this, the film studios have taken steps to reduce their financial exposure and a major part of that strategy has been to seek out corporate welfare in the form of tax subsidies and similar incentives. This race to the bottom by other States and countries like Canada & the UK has been a financial windfall for the studios, basically having taxpayers pick up the tab for up to a third of the upfront costs. And it's a race to the bottom because as soon as another State or country offers higher tax subsidies, the studios leave their current locations and start shooting in the new one. This is precisely why from 2000-2010, a lot of films (and TV) were shot in British Columbia, but over the last few years easily half of that work has moved to Montreal, which is offering a higher subsidy. The same goes for the UK, which has been destabilising the field since the advent of the "Harry Potter" films. To the point where not only do the film studios get an unheard of 35% tax break, but a significant portion of the salaries of local workers are covered by the tax payers. It's pretty much a pay for jobs situation and what none of them seem to realize is as soon as those subsidies go away or are exceeded somewhere else, the work will leave with it.
So is it any surprise that the studios have settled in to doing mostly sequels, remakes and franchise reboots? This is, again, hedging their bets as much as possible. If you want to see where creativity can really be explored and risks taken, then look no further than the premium networks like HBO, Showtime and AMC, for example. Is it any wonder why television lately is full of amazing shows while we get so many shit movies?
