…is never the Last Big Thing.
Hollywood is a place that monetizes imagination. Which makes one wonder why at the very highest levels, imagination is always in such short supply.
As the Last Big Thing wrapped up at HBO right before the pandemic, it was with predictable ineptness that every big streamer and studio tried to find a knockoff that would never see the same level of success. Amazon paid ridiculous sums for a sliver of Tolkien’s world. HBO looked to GoT’s past for its financial future. Meanwhile, a former comedy writer and script doctor, who had most recently blown away viewers and critics with his reenactment of the Chernobyl disaster, was quietly working on what would become the Next Big Thing.
THE LAST OF US is a triumph of storytelling, acting, production, design, costume, makeup, art, everything. It’s the rare show that I’m watching for a second time before the finale even airs. It’s generating memes galore, has us in love not just with its protagonists but also its side characters, and it’s doing it against all trends. Videogame adaptations have never been media darlings. Fantasy is where all the viewers were supposed to be. What’s predictable is this: studios will look to other game franchises and horror backgrounds, and they’ll miss the Next Big Thing while overpaying for the Last Big Thing. It’s always been this way.
My writing partner and I talked about this a year ago, while we were creating a new show for AMC. The big genre hits are cyclical. Fantasy will be king again, and probably in another cycle or two. But as much as we love whatever is huge in the moment, we need a breather. A big science fiction epic will probably be next (and no, I’m not talking about SILO, which is more post-apocalyptic than sci-fi). I’m thinking something more like LOST or THE EXPANSE. I’d put a big bet on something with a Western vibe (though maybe YELLOWSTONE just burned through the demand there).
If studios were smart, they’d stop chasing and overpaying for what’s popular NOW and look back ten or twenty years. What was a big hit that has worn off? There are new viewers around now who missed that experience, and old viewers have shuffled off or grown nostalgic. Does SUCCESSION have some of what made THE SOPRANOS so good? Is SEVERENCE tapping into the mystery of LOST?
Publishers often make the same mistake of thinking a sub-genre is “dead” when it’s really in hibernation. I remember when urban fantasy was considered a goner, but tell that to readers of the genre today who continue to gobble it up. What’s popular is often like a bitten bystander in Last of Us: it’ll look dead, but only for a moment. Then it’s back up and moving faster than ever.
The problem with studios and publishers is they are impatient in the wrong ways, unable to see the cyclical nature of what readers and viewers want. They are also unimaginative in the worst ways, assuming that what’s popular today will be what we crave tomorrow. The truth is that we are predictable … but we need a break. When Hollywood figures this out, we’ll get more of what we love without it feeling like the same thing, over and over. And they’ll get to pay a lot less for it.
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