Hollywood has hit a dry spell.

The No. 1 and No. 6 top-grossing movies in America, Where The Wild Things Are and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, are adaptations of children’s books. No. 5, The Stepfather, is a remake, and a new run of the two Toy Story movies as a double feature comes in at No. 8.

On Friday, the world will be introduced to Saw VI, the latest film in the never-ending horror franchise. As millions of people fill theaters to see this installment’s new ways to kill people, cinephiles everywhere must wonder: Is originality dead?

It’s no surprise that sequels and adaptations and remakes keep getting the green light. The lowest grossing film of the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, still made $249 million during its run in U.S. theaters.

The highest grossing film in the Saw franchise, 2005’s Saw II, made only slightly more than a third of that, with $87 million. That movie, however, only cost around $4 million to make — compared with Prisoner of Azkaban’s $150 million budget — and thus was profitable more than 20 times over.

Of course, from a marketing and business prospective, such movies as the Saw franchise are genius. They’re cheap, have a quick turnaround, and almost guarantee a profit. Harry Potter may only come around once every couple years, but its adoring fans ensure that any money put into those films is money well-spent. It’s hard to knock people trying to turn a profit for doing just that.

But what happens to original, innovative films?

For the most part they’re cast off, relegated to art-house cinemas where few people see them. In a world in which books, video games, and other movies serve as the primary jumping-off point for new productions, fresh ideas are pushed to the fringe.

This is not to say adaptations can’t be original or high quality. Where The Wild Things Are, for example, is a 100-minute film based on a 48-page children’s book with almost no text, and Joel and Ethan Cohen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was a critical hit, winning all but best everything at the Oscars.

But most often, the result ends up being derivative schlock, such as 2007’s In the Name of the King, a movie based on the Dungeon Siege computer games. Of course, that movie was directed by Uwe Boll — a man known solely for his ability to make the most terrible of films — but apparently there was an interest in it, otherwise it wouldn’t have been made.

While such movies can apparently drum up enough support to get made and receive wide releases, only big names such as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith get their original stories out to a large audience. Those who write and create original films are not innocent of producing truly horrible movies, but at least they are original.

I’m not trying to make an elitist argument. There’s nothing wrong with pure entertainment derived from other pure entertainment. But there comes a point where it becomes too much, and too many derivative works take over the cinema.

Did the world really need Big Momma’s House 3 or Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2? Probably not.

The movie-going public should ask for better, more original content, before the mere word “original” is removed entirely from the Hollywood lexicon.

Before we line up to see the Halo adaptation — if it ever finally comes out — let us not forget Super Mario Bros.