Rational entertainment industry?

The highest-grossing films of all time appear to be almost all either sequels or adaptations of ultra-bestselling books. The ones that aren't, in descending order of gross:

Avatar (formulaic as all hell) Titanic (somewhat formulaic) Jurassic Park (somewhat innovative) Finding Nemo (somewhat formulaic) Inception (very innovative) Independence Day (formulaic as all hell) E.T. (very innovative, I think) The Lion King (somewhat formulaic) 2012 (haven't seen it, hear it's formulaic) Up (somewhat innovative) Forrest Gump (very innovative) The Sixth Sense (very innovative) Pirates of the Caribbean (somewhat innovative) Kung Fu Panda (haven't seen it, sounds somewhat innovative) The Incredibles (somewhat innovative)

I'm not really confident in my ratings, but it does look like big-budget innovative films have a good chance of blowing up (and often creating a franchise).

My theory: a producer who greenlights a big-budget, innovative flop looks like an idiot. A producer who greenlights a big-budget, formulaic flop looks unlucky.

I've been in and around the music industry for a few decades. (As someone who actually likes music, Omega help me.) Whatever it runs on, it's not rationality and only occasionally seems to be business. There's lots of ape politics and towering mountains of BS.

We're talking about something where the product for sale is a subjective feeling in the mind of the listener, so being a skilled enough rhetorician to convince someone else that enough customers will feel the right subjective feeling is enough to get you a very long way, even with a terrible track record (because there's always an excuse, and 10 years' failure is 10 years' experience on your resume).

Rational business practice in the entertainment industry seems in short supply. I have only just-so surmises on why precisely it comes out this way, but it does seem to be the case, suggesting the possibility of an underlying more generally applicable reason or theory.

Why are formulaic productions less likely to be the mega-hits than the high-risk productions?

The two most successful movies I can think of in the past few years are Avatar and Dark Knight. Avatar, as people have pointed out, is basically identical to Pocahontas or Fern Gully in space. Dark Knight is a standard, albeit very well done, Batman movie.

"High-risk, high-reward versus certainty of small reward" is a common payoff matrix, but it might not be the one at work in the movie industry.

Random thoughts:

I suspect that there's a lot more ways to make a bad movie than a good one.

In video games, at least, some of the biggest hits come from simply executing a formula really well.

When it comes to movies, it's really hard to predict revenues, but it's a lot easier to predict costs. If you can make movies cheaply, they don't need to be smash hits in order to make money - and if they do become hits, so much the better. Roger Corman is an example of someone who made money not by making extremely popular movies, but by making extremely cheap ones.

This might be a bit obvious, but is it a safe assumption that in modern Western culture the appearance of originality is an advantage as far as sales are concerned?

Could the also rans function as a sort of practice playground for the actors, producers etc. who are not yet big names? I mean, the only way to learn to make movies is to make movies. But it's not worth investing billions into people, who have no (or at least very little) on their resume. Best to invest a small amount and let them develop their skills. And if, against the odds, the movie turns out to be a block buster, all the better.

Of course, this does not really answer the question why all the plots seem so alike and very few come up with anything fresh. One could try to explain this with making mainstream movies for the sake of practising making them, but somehow I don't even buy that myself.

the also ran's are funded by the same publishers that publish the mega hits. the few smaller publishers do take risks.