Hollywood Has Too Many Franchises

Clint Eastwood wants Hollywood to only greenlight original films instead of relying on sequels and franchise installments. The auteur, who yes, did have his own franchise with five “Dirty Harry” films, clarified that after directing features for decades, he now sees the value in standalone works instead.

The “Juror #2” director told Austrian newspaper Kurier, as translated by Reuters, that Hollywood has to exit the “era of remakes and franchises” to usher in new classics. “I long for the good old days when screenwriters wrote movies like ‘Casablanca’ in small bungalows on the studio lot, when everyone had a new idea,” Eastwood said. “We live in an era of remakes and franchises. I’ve shot sequels three times, but I haven’t been interested in that for a long while. My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”

Eastwood credited the studio system for inspiring his directing career, which began in 1971 with “Play Misty for Me,” in which he also starred. His enduring legacy will continue so long as he can still make movies, the Oscar winner assured. “As an actor, I was still under contract with a studio, was in the old system, and thus forced to learn something new every year,” Eastwood said, “and that’s why I’ll work as long as I can still learn something, or until I’m truly senile.”

He added that he has no plans to retire and will still be working “for a long time yet,” saying, “There’s no reason why a man can’t get better with age. And I have much more experience today. Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”

Eastwood previously told The Metrograph that he doesn’t reflect on past films too much. “If I’m happy with it, that’s it. As far as if anybody else has a different feeling about it, well that’s theirs. I’m sure I’ve had disappointments. If I did, I wouldn’t dwell on them,” he said, adding of his film legacy as a whole, “That would be up to them, to the audiences, to answer. Up to the people on the outside. I just kind of go along. I consider this, again, emotional. It comes upon you. You have a story, you make a movie of it. You have to just go for it. If you think too much about how it happened you might ruin it. I go back and look at films I’ve made, and I could easily ask, ‘Why the heck did I make this?’ I don’t remember! It might have been a long time ago…”