Today, I’m checking in with the data behind a question I get asked often. Almost every week, a reader or journalist asks me why modern movies aren’t as original as they used to be.
So I turned to the data on almost 60,000 movies to find out where their scripts came from.
We have to start by defining terms. When I say a film is an ‘Original’ movie, I am purely referring to the provenance of the script. There is an adjacent topic about how unoriginal movies can be despite being ‘Original Screenplays’ (I’m lookin’ at you, Rebel Moon), but today, we’re focusing on whether the filmmakers had to license a preexisting piece of work in order to get their film to market.
