This is no reflection on Wonka specifically, but...
FFS: Invest. In. New. Stories.
The last 30 years have seen remake after remake after reboot after prequel after spin-off.
So much of mainstream culture has become creatively timorous yet rapacious in its goal to milk intellectual properties dry.
Modern mainstream culture sometimes feels like a karaoke bar. Actually, an ouroboros in a karaoke bar. A never-ending cycle of consuming and re-consuming itself.
@Richard_Littler It's money-driven, innit? TV costs £0.5-3M/hour of running time to produce; movies are more like £50-100M/hour. So *nothing* gets made until the accountants green-light it, and they won't approve of anything new that isn't focus-grouped to hell, and recycling an IP with a proven track record is a safer bet than trying something new.
(FX: weeps over a pile of non-existent TV rights residuals after ~20+ years of media rights to 30+ books going nowhere.)
@cstross @Richard_Littler Gen X bias alert but what was different in the 80s when we saw original stories get made? Is it the corporatisation? Seemed like that started then with big conglomerates buying movie studios. Of course the 80s was the beginning of franchises and sequel-a-gogo too.
@bobthomson70 @cstross @Richard_Littler
I think it's about attempting to guarantee a return, this means very little new is risked, unless it's stuff like Sandman, or twee stuff that's cheap to make.
@bobthomson70 Lots of hits means lots of misses. Misses mean you get fired by the monez.
@francis it's just kind of wild to think of the massive hits of the past that were original scripts. Maybe it was easier to land such a hit in past decades than now.