The paradox of homogeneization… The more the industry trends towards chasing what’s considered to work and be safe, the more room it leaves for the truly bold like these guys to be successful by doing what’s considered to not work anymore.
Always beautiful to see.
It’s true. Kevin Feige (of the Marvel movies) once said something like, “People love chocolate ice cream, but if that’s all you offer them every day, they’ll start to hate it.” and for a time, it seemed like he and Disney / Marvel understood that, which lead to such a wide range of movie genres for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the breakout successes… but now I feel like they’ve forgotten that, and now we get the formulaic “Marvel Movie” template shoveled out, and now they’re slowly starting to fail.
And for good reason. People need variety, and it’s because entertainment producers don’t understand this need that so many major studios are flailing. Hence the recent purge at Pixar for example, and why Ubisoft is struggling lately, etc. It’s not just game publishers that have this issue, it’s movies, tv, and comics too. Like the recent “Death” of Ms. Marvel which is eerily similar to all the extremely temporary crap that happened to Peter Parker’s Spiderman in the past, like the “death” of his aunt, or his “marriage” to Mary Jane.
Adding onto this, it also doesn’t help that executives go “hey, this movie/game/show has proven to work in the past and generated X amount of money, let’s do it again but slightly different,” which also contributes to everything feeling the same and formulaic due to corporate entities wanting their investment back on a “creative” entertainment product.