Film

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of live-action remakes of classic Disney films including Cinderella (2015), Maleficient (2014), The Jungle Book (2016), and Beauty and the Beast (2017). The trend is ongoing, with Disney planning many more adaptations in the coming years. Can the popularity of live-action remakes be reduced to nostalgia, or is it reflective of a lack of creativity on the part of studios? On the other hand, do live-action remakes offer something new to viewers, and does the genre provide opportunities for filmmakers to explore new themes?

Is the new Chronicles of Narnia film doomed for failure? Discuss the struggles of making the film slated to reboot the franchise almost 7 years after the last movie (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and 3 studios later (was Disney then Fox and now the new studio). Will it do as well as the original trilogy or has it lost its momentum?

Known as the "maverick" or "auteur" era of American film, the 1970's represented a unique era of American film-making, perhaps the most experimental since early silent ear. Traditional musicals, melodramas, and epics were no longer drawing in audiences, and, desperate, studios began giving money to fledgling directors often fresh from the brand new film schools cropping up, leading to far more daring and unusual films, such as Taxi Driver, the Godfather, and Star Wars. Well documented as this period is, take some time to examine the period just preceding, and how it enabled these films to exist at all.
That is, look back, first at the Paramount Decision in 1948, which ended the studios monopolies on theatres and film distribution and enabled independent filmmakers to gain foothold in the American film landscape, and the rise of television in the 1950's, which forced to make going to the movies far more of an event, with big-budget epics, full color, and features such as 3-D and widescreen. By the late 1960's, the mediocre performances of the anachronistic Hello, Dolly! and plodding Cleopatra rendered tried and true money makers impotent. Examine how changing audience expectations, over saturation of the market, and other such factors allowed movies like Bonnie and Clyde to set the scene for the New Hollywood of the 1970's. If the studio system hadn't failed, would the 1970's era of film-making ever been allowed to happen in the first place?

Despite its popularity in the written world, fairy tales are notoriously difficult to adapt to the big screen, especially live-action film. While the fantasy epic can see great success (though even that took decades of box-office failure), why is it so rare for a live-action fairy tale film work while animated fairy tales are among the best movies studios like Disney have ever made?
Analyze both the successes and failures, and discuss: why do fairy tales fare better in animation (such as Disney films) then they do in live-action? How is that a fantasy epic like Lord of the Rings succeeds while the Hobbit, by and large, fails? Address the curious case of the Narnia films, beginning strong with the relatively faithful Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, before crashing and burning with Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Is there something about animation that lends itself better to the relatively smaller scope of the fairy tale, as opposed to the more expansive world of an epic?

There have been several productions of the same genre or universe in the past years. Be it superhero movies, the stretched out story of the Hobbit, or the current bombardment of Star Wars films. When does a genre or a story overstep its zenith? How do the financial aspects of the film industry interfere with storytelling (profit vs quality)? What are some of the counterexamples? What makes a franchise become successful in the long run?

Write an article about "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House," a Netflix original. It's format and creative choices in story telling, narration, and cinematics, leaves viewers surprised. It isn't what most expect to find, as many have become accustomed to jump-scare and gore films when it comes to entering a movie with the mentality "this will be scary."

Someone please write an article that not only examine the director's choices and how it differs from other modern films (more resembling the re-telling of an old abstract horror short story) but an article that will also contextualize it. Does it have literary ties to another work or was it made simply to resemble such? How and which literary elements did it adopt and to what effectiveness?

Be it Coca Cola in Jurassic Park or FedEx in Cast Away, product placement is an important component of the advertisement and film industry. It might be interesting to look at the effects such product placement has on the production of a movie. How are the products placed? Does it change the storyline? Has the production team compromise creativity for the product?

With every new economic downturn, recession, depression, American pop-culture tends to churn out a new slew of cultural products that deal with the impact of these shifting economic conditions. The material reality is what matters here, the impact on everyday life, it also tends to produce interesting film, television and art. The most recent film to do this is out in theaters now, "Going Out in Style." Discuss a few cultural products, from ideally a few different periods of economic strife in America (there are plenty), from the Great Depression (1929-1941) to the Recession of 2008-9, analyzing what they have to say about these periods in American history and the harsh realities they portray.