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After writing the most of this essay, I watched a sequel, a new film with famous actors, and a competition film with fresh cast and crew. The sequel is ok, the new film with famous actors is the worst film I've seen in a few years, and the competition film is the best I have watched in the last three years.
A non-sequel can absolutely hit a bigger jackpot, but it runs a greater risk for you either as a producer or an audience.
I f**king hated sequels for years. They were nothing more to me than a sure way to milk money from moviegoers.
What's the point of sequels, beyond helping a few Hollywood executives pull the trigger for project fundings? Some execs don't even watch the sequels. I felt my time being stolen discussing it in a film production class.
It is like doing software updates. You can't entirely eliminate the previous productions' flaws, because the story needs to be backward compatible. For the same reason it can't be too exciting hence breaking out of the characters or plots. If you make a sequel that sucks, you get all the blame for ruining the original. And then as an audience member, you can readily predict what might be the theme of the sequel, which might get boring.
But I start to discover the value of sequels (under disguises) outside of the movie business.
Now more than ever as a film audience, I start to search more often at what I enjoyed watching, and actors whose works I enjoyed. I want to watch something after a tiring day, so I want to pick a film that I know I would enjoy in less than one minute, rather than going down a rabbit hole of searching for 15 minutes and ending up with a new production that I regret.
This is when it clicked for me.
The key for a while to sell an iPhone is not how advanced the chip it is, or how fancy some functionalities are, but simply it works. This is the exact psychology when someone picks a sequel over a new film, and picks a well-known actor over a new star.
"Past performance is not indicative of future results," but why would people put up the past performance on the prospectus? It is simply that we feel more comfortable with seeing the past and hoping that it would repeat itself. Maybe the future is not as promising, but we do feel like we're curbing downside risk because the history offers a baseline for expectations.
Imagine if you're making a decision to watch a film for 2 hours, and you too busy to spare much leisure time. You can spend 20 minutes to research on a film and feeling tired from the process, or pop open a sequel in 5 minutes. If you decide to pick the film yourself and have made a wrong decision, you become both disappointed and tired from the selection process. On the other hand, if the sequel is terrible, at least you are not tired.
Like a chemical reaction, where an activation energy is required to induce it, the film selection process also takes an activation energy.
Satisfaction after watching the film = Gained satisfaction from the film - Activation energy spent from selection - Time cost of watching
Add expectation and probabilities to it:
E(Satisfaction after watching the film) = E(P(Gained satisfaction from the film, Activation energy spent from selection)) - E(Activation energy spent from selection) - Time cost of watching
The time cost of watching is a constant, so to maximize the E(Satisfaction after watching the film), we need to maximize the derivative of E(Satisfaction after watching the film) with respect to E(Activation energy spent from selection). This means the d E(P(Gained satisfaction from the film, Activation energy spent from selection)) / d E(Activation energy spent from selection) must be greater than 1 to make that positive.
Note that the probablistic distribution of P(Gained satisfaction from the film, Activation energy spent from selection) also has a long tail, meaning it is quite rate to find a great film, and very likely to find boring films.
When some one watches a sequel, they effectively have a good estimate on Gained satisfaction from the film, without spending Activation energy spent from selection.
All this is to say, logically speaking you will usually get dissappointed selecting a non-sequel film, and in rare cases get a film that you enjoy 10x more than average.
It is needless to say that it is easier to run a sequel. People have set a baseline performance for it and your job is to improve the product. As long as the product is above the baseline expectation, it is a win-win situation for you and the audience.
When you run a new concept, you still need to make sure the product doesn't flop. But more importantly, because people do not have an expectation of it, you have to also lower the E(Activation energy spent from selection) for people, ideally to 0. Otherwise nobody will dare to even try it out.
As I have seen more and more of both cases, neither feat is more glorious than the other, both are just different stages of a product.