“The Emoji Movie” is the most unoriginal and despicable trash to ever be smeared on the silver screen. It is not just another Hollywood mistake, it is the result of a rapidly growing problem that we have chosen to ignore. As a culture we don’t care about creative and original entertainment, we only care about being entertained. We no longer value good entertainment, and Hollywood is taking full advantage of it. Eventually this kind of laziness and lack of originality can create movies such as “The Emoji Movie.” The movie is so embarrassingly horrible it should be a wake up call to us for sitting back and allowing it to happen. If we become more vigilant in our support of good content, we will stop lazy cash-grab motives such as this from being made. We cannot allow another “Emoji Movie” to happen.

Movies have been on a bit of a nostalgia trip in the last few years as anyone could see by the copious amount of reboots and remakes, but this comes at a great risk to original entertainment. Remakes and adaptations are no new topic in Hollywood, but the growing amount of them is distressing. Reusing old ideas and stories is a recipe that doesn’t call for creativity, and if we’re not careful, entertainment suffers. Nostalgia has outranked fear as the strongest emotion a movie can evoke. People will see anything as long as they remember how much they enjoyed the original. “Poltergeist” and “Robocop” are just a few examples of lazy remakes that rely solely on the originals’ fame and follow the originals’ story almost completely.

However, this doesn’t mean we should renounce adaptations and remakes. “The Dark Knight” is an amazing movie about Batman, a character already featured in many movies. It creates its own amazing story, but it doesn’t rely on just the character. Superhero movies are the most guilty of this. Marvel and D.C. announce their movies five years in advance and wonder why some of them don’t turn out well. They rely solely on the well known comic book characters for their movies, rather than writing a good story that involves the character.  The movie, “Suicide Squad,” turned out horribly because they announced it years before even knowing if they had a good story for the characters. We need to demand creativity, and stop feeding these lazy adaptations and remakes.

The lack of interest in smaller and less well known movies is also due to the way the film industry has changed. An epic such as “Spartacus” or “Ben Hur” used to be huge risks for studios to make because of how large the production is. Now, studios can afford to have several multimillion dollar movies in production at once. This has lead to much bigger movies, but it has also created a large divide between studio blockbusters and smaller art-house films. It is hard for smaller or less action packed movies to gain traction with audiences because of how entertaining these big movies are. Even if their story is more interesting, big movies just seem more entertaining.

Now anything less than “Transformers” is seen as an art-house film. Our standards for big entertainment have been heightened, but our standards for quality have lowered.

Good entertainment is so important because it offers a creative outlet that we all desperately need. The escapism and creativity that a good movie or show provides for a person is an amazing thing. Through the help of the filmmakers, the viewer is made more open to the human experience, educating them on philosophies and ideas. When this kind of effort is not appreciated by the viewer, the importance of it begins to dwindle. The less we care about the creative passion behind our entertainment, the more things will deteriorate. Movies like “Baby Driver” are original projects, and they are undervalued by audiences. It is an amazing, original film that the studio took a gamble on. It is so much safer for studios now to go with a remake or reboot, that this incredible movie almost never hit theaters. Even though it doesn’t seem like it, movie watching is an active experience. We need to choose original content with good writing and new ideas.

It seems that we stand at a crossroads of entertainment. Either we can choose to start caring about what we watch, or we continue down this slippery slope of laziness and risk losing good content for the sake of ease.