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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Six terminators, Seven transformers, eleven Madea films, and nine aliens films. If the strategy is to waterboard us with progressively more pointless sequels, no ML in the world is going to improve the outcome when the writers have clearly checked out.

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Here [1] are the box office results from 2018. Looking over the top 20 highest grossing movies I count 13 sequels/franchise movies, 3 standalone adaptations of existing IP, 2 remakes, 1 movie based on a well known true story, and only a single completely original movie. A company like 20th Century Fox is trying to make money and not necessarily make art. It is clear the best way to make money is through sequels and existing IP. Blame your fellow moviegoer for the repetition.

[1] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2018&p=.htm

A Quiet Place outsold Mary Poppins Returns? This can't be right!

At least these are "sequels". Reboots are even worse in my book.

It could be argued that the latest Terminator movie was an attempted reboot, since they created several new timelines, of which many completely invalidated the timeline from the original movies.

(And iirc it tanked.)

Don't forget Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which already established multiple overlapping timelines, with people in the present from different futures.

Reboots can work well. Batman Begins, Casino Royale and Dredd come to mind.

I think the issue is when remakes happen in quick succession. When generations go by magic like The Fly, Oceans 11, and the greatest remake of all time, The Thing, happens.

I... don’t think any of these movies have remakes?

If by the thing you mean the 2011 film, that was a prequel. It had few redeeming qualities, but thing it did unreasonably well was faithfully reproduce specific elements that were shown to have occurred previously in the first film.

The 1960 film Ocean's 11 does have a remake.

Those are all remakes. 1982 "The Thing" is a remake of the 1952 "The Thing from Another World".

They'll make money anyway. People will pay to watch those, so they have no incentive to do otherwise.

Like with every product that people refuse to go without no matter the quality.

Yeah, it feels like a little kick of novelty is way better than not going to the movies at all.

Why the need for a writer? The ML should be able to produce scripts of equal quality.

I would love to feed GPT2 with movie scripts when it's completely open source.

Why the need for actors? The ML could be trained on millions of hours of existing movies and produce fake, convincing personas. Why the need for spectators? The ML could analyse the movies and produce fake, convincing reviews.

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