What I have heard was that the studio did not like the original script. They were just beginning production and the studio said “we will cut all funding and sue you if you use the original script.” So the writers took ideas from a few movies to make the department heads happy. The original idea was to make a movie of madness and creation in a loop. A weird idea from Battle Star Galactic. Humans create Machines and destroy themselves trying to destroy machines. Machines make humanity and forget about Machine origins. A weird loop throughout time.
That original idea might have been better, but I suspect there would have been even less of an audience for it. This film had the potential to be very good, so it was a shame to see an inferior version of a rehashed idea. It's nice to know that they didn't set out to copy established IPs at least.
My main point is that the film journalists seemed to use this movie's flop to perpetuate a narrative that "See, moviegoers don't like original ideas either, so stop complaining about all the remakes." The problem with that logic is that this movie is not an original idea -- it's a remake of a movie these journalists don't know about. It's becoming a more and more common problem too: 2007's Disturbia was just a unattributed remake of Hitchcock's Rear Window, and Martin Scorsese's only Oscar win was for The Departed, which is an almost shot-for-shot remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, but no one in the Academy seemed to notice at the time. How does someone win Best Director for someone else's movie? Derivative movies can be fun, and The Creator isn't a bad movie, but it's just not a new contribution to science fiction, and someone whose job is watching movies should know that.
