What’s happened to Hollywood’s creativity?

From Mary Poppins to The Grinch, Hollywood is raiding its own tombs, and the film world is developing a musty aroma.

Mary Poppins Returns and Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch have hit cinemas this summer. Picture: Supplied

This Christmas, Hollywood is pinning its hopes on Mary Poppins Returns, a lavish reboot of a film made when Lyndon B Johnson was president. It’s the latest, ghoulish example of a rising tomb-raider trend in entertainment.

Three of the top five box-office hits in theatres today are Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch, based on a story that appeared in 1957; Creed II, the latest instalment of the Rocky series that kicked off in 1976; and Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic about a band that became famous in the mid-1970s. It’s as if film studios in the 1940s decided to reboot Buster Keaton’s silent films instead of making Casablanca. Luckily, they went ahead and made Casablanca.

The remorseless excavation of the past by the nostalgia-industrial complex is visible everywhere. CBS has resurrected Magnum, P.I., a series that first saw the light of day in 1980 when, for reasons that have never been made clear, only men sporting bushy moustaches could hope to corral villains. Popeye the Sailor Man has resurfaced in a series of YouTube videos, this time with “a youthful appearance and a more eco-friendly position, growing spinach on the roof of his diesel-punk style houseboat.” There’s nothing like eco-sensitive houseboat-based spinach farming to get today’s kids excited. Nothing.

Michael B Jordan, left, and Sylvester Stallone in a scene from Creed II. Picture: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures/Warner Bros.

In another sign that it’s hip to be square, one in five game consoles sold this year are retro plug-and-play devices, allowing 12-year-olds to play games that were popular when their parents were 8. Considering the computer power available today, this is a bit like using a mainframe to play Chutes and Ladders. Meanwhile, the musical King Kong just opened on Broadway, in a real-life echo of the original movie in which King Kong opens on Broadway. (Neither spectacle turned out so well for the audience.) As William Faulkner famously put it: The past is not dead. It’s not even past.

Exhuming fragrant old corpses from the crypt isn’t a new development in entertainment, of course. Two millennia ago, Virgil’s The Aeneid was essentially a reboot of Homer’s The Iliad, written 700 years earlier. But at least in olden days, such plundering was relatively rare. Sure, Shakespeare sometimes repackaged other people’s work, but his public generally demanded thrilling new material and wouldn’t put up with derivative knock-offs like Young King Lear or Two More Gentlemen of Verona.

Rami Malek in a scene from Bohemian Rhapsody. Picture: Twentieth Century Fox

Not so today. Now, our cataleptic culture is divided into two broad areas: things that never really went away (the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Star Wars, Madonna) and things that keep coming back (Halloween, Madonna). Because so many things refuse to die or refuse to remain in the crypt, American culture now has a musty aroma. Did we really need a reboot of MacGyver? Wasn’t one time enough for One Day at a Time?

Nostalgia-phobes like me do not unilaterally dismiss past glories. There will always be a place in our lives for the work of Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Austen, Suzanne Somers. That said, we fear the past because of legitimate horrors that are hiding there. Where Mary Poppins lurks, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cannot be far behind. If there is money to be made off a film about Freddie Mercury, there is money to be made in a film about Freddie and the Dreamers. After the $35 million spent on the King Kong musical, there is plenty of room for a $45-million musical about Godzilla. And perhaps even Mothra.

It is often said that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. This is not true; the darkest hour is usually right now. Still, there are signs that yesteryear’s legends may begin to haunt us less. The Front Runner, a film based on the disgraced 1988 presidential hopeful Gary Hart, has bombed. Things look bleak for the reboot of Murphy Brown. While A Star Is Born was reborn yet again, First Man, yet another film about the 1960s space program, barely achieved lift-off. Some things that are dead need to stay that way.

The Wall Street Journal