Anchorhead said:

generalfrevious said:

Yeah but a blockbuster film from 1980 is vastly different to one from 2015 because they still based their films on original ideas. ...... today we have the Internet, so they have to exploit existing franchises to get people off youtube for three hours. And the prequels were one of the first recognizable brands for studios to use.

There have been a fair number of blockbusters in that span of time that weren't exploited franchises. No doubt that's much more the case the past five years or so, but to lump the 90s and 00s in there isn't necessarily fair.

Blockbusters of the 90s are closer to my 1980 conception of blockbusters, especially films like Jurassic Park and Toy Story. Films made in the 00s are basically more similar with present day blockbusters, especially when you factor in the oversaturation of superhero films that really began after the 90s ended, and especially after the Phantom Menace made $450 million domestically. So the problem doesn't start in the last five years, it started in the last fifteen years. So it's been going on for a very long time by now, and is only going to get in worse as Hollywood shifts its focus to overseas markets like China, and they sink more money into reboots to films released a year or two before. By the end of the decade tentpole films could be costing $300-400 million at least.