alt Disney is a company which seems to have been around forever, everybody knows at least one Disney film, if not more, no matter their age. It is one of the biggest mainstream film companies in the world and is widely popular among young children and families. They produce many films which usually centre around a key theme such as friendship. However, despite all their success, this company can be criticized for a lack of creativity.
Within recent years, Disney have remade a variety of 'classic' films of theirs such as 'The Lion King' and 'The Jungle Book' and have been criticized for being solely prioritized on earning a profit. This has become a controversial issue for people considering by just remaking the same films over and over again this could lead to a homogenised world. Whilst remaking films proves to be a strategy which is working for big companies like Disney, as you can see from the chart below which shows that one of their remakes 'The Lion King' was the second top grossing film of that year, meaning that they still earned a huge profit. It doesn't benefit the audience as by being shown repeats it makes the film industry seem boring and unoriginal.
The reason why big film companies continue to make reboots other than the obvious profit driven idea, it because they know that it is a safe option. They are more likely to put out a film which they deem as 'safe' in the sense that they know people are going to like it as they already have a large audience established. Big film companies would prefer to do this than to take a chance on a new film which could be considered controversial and prove difficult to gather such an audience.
Disney doesn't solely focus on making reboots of their old films, they also continue to work on franchises such as Toy Story which can be seen ranked 5th below, and sequels such as Frozen II which can be seen ranked 4th below. Their reasoning is the same as for releasing remakes, the well established audience which leads to a larger profit. As you can see from the below image Disney made 7/10 of the highest grossing films last year which just shows how popular their films are with the modern day audience.
James Curran and Jean Seaton argued that the media is controlled by a small number of companies that are purely driven by profit and power. And that media concentration generally limits creativity. This statement can also be proven by the below image as it shows that 7 of the highest grossing films were made by one single company. Two of which are remakes, one which is a sequel and 4 which are part of different franchises. This proves that one they know they have a mass audience, big companies will continue to use the same characters with slightly different plots since they are aware of the fact that they will gain a profit from this. Furthermore, all of the films off this top ten list come from the biggest production companies which further proves that the media or at least the film world is dominated by a small number of companies.
This is very hard to disagree with - and your image of the 2019 Box Office is proof if proof be needed of just how lacking in originality film is. Particularly Disney - and whilst I think it is a fair criticism to slate Disney for doing little more than re-booting, re-imagining, sequeling, prequeling, threequeling etc I would aso take the argument further and ask the question that you don't often see: Has Disney ever shown any originality?
All of the films that won the plaudits in the past & became engrained in our psyche as children are all films made from old fairy tales and folk stories - from Snow White in 1937 Disney made their first original film…