Chateau Lloyd

Hollywood is apparently not done with strip-mining J.R.R. Tolkien's literary legacy.  A new film is supposedly in the works based on the life of...Gollum.

Which we already know.  I mean, it's in Lord of the Rings, book the book and both the movies.

This is the state of modern filmmaking: tell the same story again and again.  

Presumably audiences will keep coming back to watch something vaguely familiar, thus assuring a reasonable return on investment.

This is largely enabled by the consolidation that has taken place among studios, which are probably more in lockstep than they ever were in the days of the moguls.  Indeed, the signature feature of the Studio System was its innovation - all of the moguls were self-made men who were creating an industry from scratch.  The current executives are third- or fourth-generation legacy hires.

The good news is that this creates an unprecedented opportunity for independent artists to make some huge scores, and we saw this with Godzilla Minus One.

The bad news is that all media has been consolidated, and there is a concerted (and blatant) effort to restrict access to new content precisely because of the danger it poses.

I'm not sure how this will play out, but as with so many other institutions, my sense is that Hollywood will ultimately fall.  Like a vast ship incapable of course correction, it will inevitably crash.  Nothing is too big to fail.