Sometimes I think that BoxOfficeMojo, a website I used to refresh every weekend but now mostly visit in order to feel depressed, ought to divide its tallies of box-office totals into two distinct lists. One list — the more depressing one — would continue to show overall box-office takes, which would mean, as now, a list dominated by superheroes, more superheroes, video-game adaptations, and sundry remakes and reboots of franchises from a more creative past. But then the other list, the more encouraging one, would feature only original stories, giving you a glimpse of what kinds of originality still find some sort of audience, albeit a less substantial one than Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Of course there is a slight cheat inherent in this idea, one that apologists of the superhero era would be quick to raise. Hollywood has never been a font of perfect originality, and even when the “original” movies of the pre-Marvel era weren’t being adapted or remade from some preexisting source, they were very often what you might call spiritual remakes — following a general genre path or imitating the themes and beats of some prior hit even if they weren’t literally sequels with a Roman number slapped on.

An “original” box-office ranking for 2022 thus far would exemplify this point, since it would presumably include near the top Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, which is an adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel and a tacit sequel to Branagh’s prior adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, and the Channing Tatum–Sandra Bullock vehicle The Lost City, which is a spiritual sequel to the Michael Douglas–Kathleen Turner 1980s comedy-adventure hit Romancing the Stone.

Neither of the new movies, the mystery or the comic adventure, is particularly successful overall. But the pleasures they offer still illustrate a key difference between unoriginality in the older style and the new kind of repetitious franchise filmmaking.

In the older style, the familiarity and unoriginality was usually a matter of the background: In a typical romantic comedy, say, the audience took certain beats and character arcs and plot turns for granted, but the movie succeeded or failed based not on that familiarity but on something sui generis, the chemistry and sex appeal of the central players, the leading couple, the stars. The originality of the conceit and the cleverness of the script mattered too, but they were there to serve the human element, whether that meant Roberts and Gere, Ryan and Hanks, or even Hugh Grant and whichever lucky lady earned his stammering affections.

In the new blockbuster style, by contrast, the actors still matter somewhat, but the system is designed to make them interchangeable; meanwhile the backdrop — meaning the special-effects-driven spectacle and (sometimes) the comic-book world-building — is much more fundamental, much more the thing that actually pulls audiences in.

And the modest pleasures of both Death on the Nile and The Lost City lie in the way they depart from this approach. Both movies have special effects (dreadful ones in the first case, a cut-rate CGI Egypt), and The Lost City has substantial action sequences, but both movies know that what they’re really selling is the acting, the faces, the human beings in the films.

In the Christie adaptation that means an old-fashioned ensemble cast, the here-comes-everybody pleasure of the whodunit, which brings together the vividly beautiful (Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer as the leading couple, the target of envy and eventually violence), the repurposed familiar (Branagh as Hercule Poirot), the up-and-coming (Emma Mackey, Rose Leslie, Letitia Wright), the comedic (Russell Brand), the underused veteran (Annette Bening), and more.

Meanwhile the main weak point in the movie, relative to the more effective recent Christie knockoff Knives Out, is its lack of trust in the essentials of the whodunit formula. Traditionally the detective is supposed to be a familiar and consistent figure setting off the variations of the suspects. But Branagh in his hubris decides to give Poirot an origin story (and not just Poirot but Poirot’s mustache!) and his own character arc within the plot — and the less said of both the better.

The Lost City has a better understanding of its own formula. The plot has a lady romance novelist (Bullock) kidnapped by a mad media heir (Daniel Radcliffe) who thinks the archaeological details in her bodice-ripping novels hold the key to finding a long-lost treasure, at which point the novels’ Fabio-style cover model (Channing Tatum) decides to play Indiana Jones and rescue her. But this setup is completely in service to the stars: The point is just to put Tatum and Bullock together in the jungle, throw in a brief appearance from Brad Pitt (as a special-forces rescue specialist), and overwhelm you with old-school movie-star charisma.

And the weakness this time isn’t in the plotting but in the writing. The concept is solid, the Tatum–Bullock chemistry is strong enough to sell the July–October romance, Pitt is perfect — but alas the movie is just 40 percent less genuinely funny than it thinks it is, and 25 percent less funny than it needs to be to work.

Which should be expected, unfortunately: Even if part of Hollywood remembers the basics of how to do star-centered storytelling, it’s practice that leads to perfection, and when it comes to these kinds of entertainments, the movie business probably isn’t getting the practice that it needs.