Now that the television season is over and there's no more Lost or American Idol to drool over, Jessica and I have been TiVo-ing (I hope there's a consensus on how to spell that soon) older shows and I'm reminded that there is probably an enormous number of fantastic series and movies that I've never seen. I rarely go see movies in the theater anymore because they're pretty boring, and I wonder if we're reaching the limit of what new stories can be told in 30 - 120 minute chunks. Just about everything -- except news and reality shows -- are simple repeats of what's been done before. (And some say that even history repeats itself.) Why bother spending millions to recreate what already exists? Just to do it in HD?
Eventually human civilization will have a large enough library of visual fiction and efficient enough indexing and retrieval that there will be no need to create new content for mass consumption. I'm sure some artists will continue to create for the sake of their own vanity, but just as creation and distribution costs get cheaper, the market for new material will continue to shrink because there will be so much great, old material that's still new to huge swaths of the population and available cheap or for free.
They'll still remake movies and shows because they become dated. Many audiences don't like seeing the cars, telephones, clothes, hair, etc. more than 20 years old. New plots become possible due to new technology, and old plots often turn on details rooted in obsolete technology. If you strip away technology and fashion, then you can claim that nobody has written an original plot in over 1000 years.
We're a very, very long way away from the time when we hit the limit on creativity. There will always be a market for the hero story. Yes, we might have a million war movies doing things in every conceivable way but we won't have a lot of war movies about the war going on then. We'll never run out of inventor movies because celebrations of Einstein, Tesla, Edison et al aren't going to say anything about today's wunderkind. To say it shorter, current events movies will never go away.
Another thing that will likely keep the creatives busy is filling in the backdrops. When movies become immersive worlds, there's going to be a tremendous demand for reworking the old classics as immersives (along with tremendous controversy). People will like to be able to move the camera about and be in the neighboring table in Casablanca, etc. That work will eventually get done but it's going to take a long, long, long time to do it. It certainly won't get done in our lifetime, nor our children's.
Those are all good points... some of that (e.g., immersiveness) may be able to be computer generated without much human involvement. I agree as far as "current event" stuff, which I tried to indicate by referring to "reality shows", though they're different.