I hear people complain all the time about how movie studios are not making enough original movies. And, are only making sequels, remakes and movies based on books or plays. 

But when studios do make original movies people don’t go see them in theaters. The 15 highest-grossing movies of 2024 year are all non-original movies. 

The money for movie studios is being made because of sequels. So why make an original movie if it won’t make money?

People who want original movies need to show it by going to the theaters and watching them, but they don’t, so studios are not incentivized to make them. Somewhere along the way in the past five years or so people stopped going to see original movies. 

Let’s look at the movie “The Cell,” a movie with some big names such as Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn. “The Cell” was the 45th highest-grossing movie of the year 2000, grossing $104 million worldwide on a budget of $33 million. So, the studio made $71 million.

Now, let’s look at the 45th highest-grossing movie of 2024, “The Substance,” a movie starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qually. This movie grossed $56 million on a budget of $17.5 million, earning nearly $40 million. 

The way I see this is, yes, both movies made a lot of money, but in order for “The Substance” to make as much as it did, it needed a way smaller budget and grossed nearly $40 million less than “The Cell.”

Grabbing the 45th highest-grossing movies of the year does not prove much, so let’s compare the years of 2000 and 2024 based on how much the top 50 movies grossed. 

In 2000 the highest-grossing movie was “Mission: Impossible II” which grossed $546 million. The 50th highest-grossing movie was “Romeo Must Die” grossing $91 million. 

In 2024 the highest grossing movie was “Inside out 2” grossing $1.6 billion, while the 50th highest-grossing movie was “Back to Black” grossing nearly $51 million. 

Now looking at those numbers I am amazed at the differences. The range between the highest-grossing movie of the year and the 50th highest-grossing movie is so much larger in 2024 than it was in 2000. 

The way I see it  now is that studios want to make the movie that makes them a billion dollars and the movies that do are sequels and remakes. 

So as consumers we need to go see original movies if we want more of them. Studios need to make money from them so they can continue making them. If that doesn’t happen then sequels and remakes will continue to be made even if it is not what people ask for.

Owen Daniels can be reached at orionmanagingeditor@gmail.com.