Has Hollywood lost its originality? The writers and directors of Hollywood no longer produce new ideas: they create movies for profit, instead of for audience entertainment. In adapting modern versions of old books and movies to the big screen, Hollywood’s lack of originality seems evident.

These movies are uninteresting and seem to increase in similarity. At this rate, they will end up creating identical plot lines in different movies: some could argue that this is already happening. Hollywood seems less interested in their audiences, and more interested in the money they collect from them. People still go to the movies for a number of reasons, such as general entertainment and the opportunity to connect to different stories, but ultimately, the focus of modern moviemakers seems to depart from both the story line and the idea of making a compelling film.

After the movie The Hunger Games came out in theatres, several other dystopian-themed movies emerged on screen. Yet unlike the groundbreaking The Hunger Games, these unoriginal dystopian societies all seem to have similar plot lines. When resorting to producing remakes or imitations of books, Hollywood still makes the same mistakes.  For example, when Hollywood created a film version of the well-known book series Beautiful Creatures, audiences found the result outrageous. Morgan Trewhitt ’13, who has read all three books and seen the movie, commented: “[Hollywood] turned it into an intergalactic caster battle when the beauty of the story lies in the simplicity of the characters’ emotions. While there were dramatic battles in the book, they altered the focus [from the characters’ emotions to the details of the battles] in the movie.” The “epic” battles that Hollywood tries to create are getting old and it’s time to think of something that hasn’t been done before. All in all, Hollywood is falling apart at the hands of our current directors and writers, and they must stop producing the same plot over and over again and instead think of something new.