If sequelmania rules the box office and studios are scrambling to remake just about every classic movie ever made while digging up property after property to recycle, right down to classic cartoons (witness the Speed Racer, Scooby Doo, GI Joe, He Man, Thundercats and Transformers movies in just a few years alone), the news is little better from the gaming world as Electronic Arts solidifies its grip on gaming and churns out games based on classic movies like From Russia with Love with Sean Connery or Reservoir Dogs or Godfather, you can’t help but shudder to think of EA picking up Take Two and having them churn out a video game of Waiting for Mr. Goodbar where you stalk women in bars.

Are we really out of ideas or are we just out of executives and producers willing to risk an original idea? The real problem is that at some point executives turned to outright content mining losing any interest in developing new properties and turned the bulk of their attention to churning out sequels, remakes and developments of anything with brand recognition. And the worst part is that the box office has repaid them with billions of dollars. Any movie with brand name recognition tends to do better than it would without it. Even Underdog had a decent opening before it imploded. The two Scooby Doo movies alone would have justified this insanity in purely cash terms.

In gaming, sequels still don’t have the power that they do in marketing movies. While there are plenty of franchises out there, it’s a minor issue compared to what’s going on in the movie industry. And with the added cost of licensing, most game studios are not as eager to dive into the costs of churning out a movie game adaptation willy nilly. And generally speaking those adaptations don’t build franchises or sell well enough to justify the risk.