Americans aren’t going to see Hollywood’s original movies

…two examples from this past weekend:

• Drop, a Christopher Landon-directed thriller, opened to ~$7.5 million domestically.
• Disney’s The Amateur, a spy thriller adapted from a little-known 1981 book, opened to an estimated $15 million.

They’re not alone. Nearly every movie released by a major studio in the past year based on an original script or a little-known book has been a box-office disappointment, including Amazon’s Red One and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, The Wall Street Journal reports.

One potential fix—more marketing: Theater owners say they welcome more original films—but only if they are backed by robust advertising campaigns, since building buzz for a relatively unknown title in a fractured media environment can prove difficult, per the WSJ. Even franchises with built-in audiences aren’t a sure thing in the age of streaming and content overload (just ask the studio execs who greenlit The Flash and the latest Indiana Jones movie).

The formula for A Minecraft Movie—currently the highest-grossing movie of the year, at ~$281 million domestically—was to combine a built-in audience with a lot of marketing. The havoc-wreaking, Chicken Jockey-featuring film was boosted by the largest third-party promotional campaign in Warner Bros. history.

Looking ahead…Hollywood is betting on sequels like Tom Cruise’s fifty-first eighth Mission Impossible and Avatar: Fire and Ash to save this year’s domestic box office, which over the first three months of the year saw its lowest revenue since 1996 (excluding the pandemic).