Why do publishers and film studios come up with new material?
Kind of baffling!
It’s one of my life’s ambitions to write a novel, and I’ve often practiced by writing short stories. In one, I had the narrator/author say ‘the only reason to publish a novel is vanity’. The sentence is pretentious and pompous and probably goes a long way towards explaining why I’ve not published anything, but it is, I think, basically true: there’s an almost inexhaustible supply of books - more than anyone can read in their lifetime. If you’re publishing a new book, you’re suggesting people should read that instead of all the other books out there (including those in the same genre).
The same is true with cinema - there’s more films to watch than hours in an average lifespan (according to one estimate, 500,000 films have ever been made; a person who lives 80 years will have ~470,000 waking hours). Arguably, there are fewer good films than there are good books, but even so, there are more good films out there than most people can ever watch.
Vanity then explains why aspiring artists churn out new novels and films* - but why do capitalist, profit-oriented companies publish them? Why don’t they just re-release masterpieces from their archives? For books, this could take the form of new bindings and collections; for films, you could have cinemas play old films.
I’ve asked this question to many people, and I’ve not been fully satisfied with any of the answers. In this post, I explain why, and invite further discussion.
Note that many answers take the form ‘new material sells better’, which is a non-answer - the question then becomes, why does new material sell better; and while as we’ll see in detail in the sections below, I accept that audiences often do have prejudices against old things, I challenge how justified these prejudices are, and I wonder whether they cannot be overcome through marketing and engagement.
Audiences don’t relate to old material
The Smiths sing in Panic:
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life
Is it the case that old films and books say nothing to us about our lives? Is this the reason for consuming new art instead of old art?
I seriously challenge this idea. The things that move us, the emotions we experience, haven’t changed all that much throughout human history. This is why we can still enjoy art from thousands of years ago.
Besides, people do read old books, watch old films, admire art of centuries or millenia past, see the same old plays in theatres, &c &c. And, it’s not like most books and films have new subject matters - the majority is a lazy, dull rehash of worn out cliches.
Innovation attracts audiences
People are generally attracted to novelty. Avatar is a boring, meh film, but broke box office records thanks to its visual effects; stylistic innovation cemented the reputations of authors such as Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace.
This is a more convincing argument than the previous one - it’s not that the subject matter of past art is outdated, it’s the style that’s aged and lost its lustre. But though I grant people may feel this way, I don’t think it’s actually true. Few films break new ground in anything except visual effects - and is it really the case that the latest CGI justifies the production and consumption of so many boring films? Do we really need a fifth (or whatever number we’re on) Transformers film? And do improved effects really increase film enjoyment?
Surely this prejudice against outmoded styles could be overcome if studios diverted their massive production and marketing budgets to promoting gems from their archives. It only takes watching one good film to realise that a story well-told is just as compelling if it relies on old-school directorial approaches as it is when it employs the latest technology. (Not to mention that classics are classics for a reason - Hitchcock’s films build suspense regardless of how old (or young) you are.)
What about fashion? What if people don’t want to watch actors who look nothing like them? But, a) we watch period dramas all the time!, ,b) the fashion in lots of genres is independent of the time of when it’s filmed (sci fi, fantasy), and c) fashions come and go - I think most of us actually enjoy seeing the fashions of times gone.
And if all this is true of film, it’s much more so in literature. Very, very few books are innovative in writing style. Granted, language and manners of speech change somewhat over time, but I’d bet a decent sum that if I picked passages from various books, most people would struggle to say what decade they were written in. It seems very unlikely to me that dated prose is the reason some people prefer to buy the latest best seller.
New material is easier to market
There’s something in this argument, too: if you make new films and publish new books, you can use the star power of the actors and authors to drum up excitement. But I wonder how big the impact of this is: how much do talk shows and premieres and galas move the needle? How many people are on the fence about going to the movies, and the thing that tips the balance is that they saw Tom Cruise on Graham Norton?
And, as with the previous arguments, whatever effect these marketing drives have for films, it’s even less pronounced than for books - how many people attend book signings, really?
People read and watch things because of the ‘buzz’
Barbenheimer is a thing not just because Barbie and Oppenheimer are good films, but because everyone is talking about them - you don’t want to be left out, so you go watch them too. And, some people have argued that you need new things to create a buzz.
Unsurprisingly by this point, I don’t buy this either. It’s true that most things that become cultural phenomena, that it’s not clear to me that this has to be so. It seems to me that it’s perfectly conceivable to create buzz through rediscovery.
Copyrights
Copyrights guarantee their holders a time-bound monopoly, and monopoly increases profits; if everyone relied on past masterpieces, whose copyrights expire after 100 years, there’d be multiple editions of the same novel, which would suppress profitability for each publisher. On the flipside though, distributors of novels and films (bookshops, cinemas, streamers) would benefit from the disempowerment of copyright owners. So it can’t be the case that the desire to procure copyrights to new novels and films is what’s incentivising their proliferation.
Sales are driven by a small minority
Here’s a conundrum: I have two competing intuitions about film and book sales. The first is that the majority of sales is driven by a small minority of readers and cinephiles: most people read few books a year (the median number of books read in the US is 4, apparently), but there are some people who read dozens or even hundreds of books. Surely they account for the bulk of sales? Similarly, it looks like pre-COVID, there were ~175m cinema tickets sold per year in the UK - this is equal to ~3 films watched in the cinema per year per UK citizen. This seems very low, so again I imagine that a small number of people who go to the cinema weekly account for most tickets sold.
The competing intuition is that best sellers and box office hits account for the bulk of sales. The top 10 films in 2022 accounted for almost 60% of the US box office, and I imagine the same is true with books.
The truth is probably in-between: best sellers and box office hits do account for a disproportionate amount of sales; but there is still a long tail of books and films, consumed by ardent biblio- and cinephiles that makes up a decent chunk of revenue. So then, because these enthusiasts do consume a lot, they’re likely to have read and watched a lot of old material - not everything ever printed and filmed, of course, but all they consider worth consuming. And so, studios and publishers come up with new things for this audience.
But again, this is somewhat unconvincing: certainly in the film industry, it feels like big budgets are put behind the mass-appeal box office hits, not the kind of films designed to sate committed movie-goers.
Empirical evidence & conclusion
I posted this question in the Astral Codex Ten open thread; someone replied that studios did tend to re-release films in the past, but that this approach took a hit with the advent of home media. And even before then, re-releases were never as profitable as the original run. So it certainly seems to be the case that, irrational or not, audiences do prefer new things.
Yet, this isn’t the case with all kinds of media. Folio seems to have a successful business publishing classics in nice editions. The Mousetrap is still going strong, 70 years on. People still see plays first performed over two thousand years ago. The same is true with classical music, ballet, opera, &c (another weird thing: opera singers become famous by performing old material; I can’t think of a single pop-singer who’s A-list famous for doing covers).
So what gives? Selection bias - that the kinds of people who like theatre and opera are less prejudiced against old stuff? But again, personal experience suggests otherwise - I have plenty of friends and colleagues who can’t recognise any films made pre-80s, who love going to the theatre.
So I don’t have a satisfying conclusion here. People seem to like new things. I can’t see justified reasons for this. I don’t see why studios and publishers don’t invest more in promoting and re-releasing their past work (to be clear: I know this happens! I’m not saying there’s zero investment in archives, I’m saying archives are badly under-utilised). And whatever merit some of the above arguments have for the film industry is greatly diminished for the book one.
I’d love to hear more views on this. But please make them thoughtful - don’t post something that simply moves the question to a different level, like some people have done (‘people like new stuff, duh’).
*To be fair, I’m sure there are artists who readily acknowledge their art is inferior to what’s been done before, but who enjoy their work and figure that since they can still eke a living from it, why not do it.