I think originality is overrated. Hear me out.
Example 1: Star Wars should plagiarize more. Original Star Wars is Hidden Fortress in space, plus a bit of WW2 dogfighting and some car culture flavor. Late period Star Wars has been taking original Star Wars, blending it up, and pouring it back out again. Not enough plagiarism. Top Gun, but make it Star Wars and call it Rogue Squadron. Three Musketeers, but make it Star Wars and call it Three Jedi. Take your pick of old detective noir stories, set it on Coruscant, and call it the The Dantooine Falcon. Stop ripping off Star Wars in Star Wars, and go back to ripping off other properties, and it’s a license to print money.
Example 2: Stop trying to make movie franchises progress forward in time; continuity and originality are overrated. James Bond has been making virtually the same movie for over sixty years, and people still love it! Bond goes to exotic locale meets and beds some number of beautiful women, engages in a bit of extreme sports, foils the plan of some flamboyant villain. The actors are regularly changed without comment. The movie is always set “right now.” Bond has (almost) always been 007 for “a while.” Continuity virtually never spans more than a couple of movies until it gets reset to zero again. And it’s still going strong as a franchise! Pirates of the Caribbean could have used this pattern and just kept making crazy pirate adventure movies forever, but they got wrapped around the axle trying to keep a continuous plot going forward. Should have gone the James Bond route.
Stop trying to make original movies that advance an overarching plot across a franchise. Make movies that have already been made and that don’t take the franchise anywhere. You can’t go wrong.
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
–Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness