It’s like every time I think Hollywood can’t sink any lower, they pull out a shovel and dig.

It has become startlingly clear to me within the last decade that, at least in mainstream popular culture, creative and original ideas are no longer the desired outcome for the ideal movie or TV show. Major production companies couldn’t be more straightforward about their desire for maximum profits at the expense of art and their audiences’ enjoyment if they tried. They might be more subtle about it if they just spat directly in the faces of movie-goers and TV-watchers everywhere.

There’s no denying that plenty of original movies and new ideas are pumped out of film houses every year. I’ve seen Babygirl, Challengers, and Conclave, thank you very much. But please, take a look at the biggest global box office hits over the last ten to fifteen years and get back to me. 

In 2024 alone, we saw countless sequels and prequels hit streaming services and box offices everywhere: Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Gladiator 2, Despicable Me 4, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, Wizards Beyond Waverly Place, and more. Everywhere we turn, characters, actors, and stories from decades past are plastered across advertisements and promotions begging us to remember the good old days. 

If no one else is willing to take a stand, I will. I need the world to know—-Audiences everywhere are sick and tired of sequels, spin-offs, re-boots, and retellings. We do not need, nor do we want, any more continuations of established universes. How many more shows and movies can be made about irrelevant background characters that nobody cared about in the original? How many times can the same stories be recycled?

Hollywood producers and executives everywhere, if you’re reading this, please stop breathing new life into rotting corpses. The stench is becoming dire. 

While I won’t deny that the 1990s to the 2010s was a great era for movies and TV, I will say this: we have to stop acting like we’re suspended in time. The glory days are over, and it’s now clearer than ever that we have become trapped in an endless cycle of regression. We continue to reach backwards into the past instead of looking to the future and its untapped potential. 

I should clarify before I continue and this complaint becomes too absurd and dramatic. I don’t hate sequels. It would be hypocritical of me to bash them when some of my favourite films are prequels and sequels. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to extend a beloved character’s story beyond its original scope. Sometimes there are so many details from the original work that went untold that further exploration is almost a given. 

My problem is what has become of the modern film industry. Studios now see one box office success and lose their minds. Slap-happy executives become eager to make an easy hundred million dollars, elongating stories past what’s needed and shoving mass amounts of half-baked content down their audience’s throats for the price of originality.

With the emergence of streaming services and the obsolescence of physical media, large production studios have become increasingly risk-averse. No one is still willing to go out on a limb and tell the story of something unheard of anymore, too scared the movie will bomb and they’ll lose a billion dollars they didn’t need to spend. 

So, to play it safe, they stick with what they know is a surefire success: slap a ‘2’ on the end of an old movie title, tease the return of a beloved actor, and boom, a box office hit. They might even turn a beloved animated film into an uninspired live-action version if you’re lucky!

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Scream VII, Happy Gilmore 2, Smurfs, Gremlins 3, How to Train A Dragon, and more. There seems to be no end to Hollywood’s dedicated efforts to churning out tired, unoriginal slop. 

What’s additionally concerning is that the advent of generative AI has proven to be a hurdle for creatives working in Hollywood. Why would a company pay a young upstart for their new and innovative ideas when they could just ask ChatGPT to make a sequel of a movie that did well ten years ago, for free? 

Things came to a head in 2023 when large production studios had become increasingly unwilling to offer stable employment or income to their workers and began investing more into AI. While major studios were cutting corners on quality, writers, showrunners, and other employees alike were suffering for it, losing their hard-earned jobs and wages. So, with their livelihoods and dreams on the line, both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) went on a 148-day strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to fight for fair compensation for workers’ labour. 

After 148 days, losing 45,000 jobs and the Southern California economy suffering a loss of nearly 6.5 billion dollars, production companies finally gave in and met the unions’ demands. 

It took nearly five months of active protesting for executives to finally concede, agreeing to pay their workers instead of replacing them with AI and giving them scraps to live off. If that’s how frugal they are with their hard-working and talented employees, it’s no wonder they’re so hesitant to spend money on creating new intellectual property. 

I know that sequels and remakes have been Hollywood and film tradition longer than I’ve been alive, but with all of the technological advances and historic changes that have been made, surely there are new stories out there. New storytellers. New characters to invent. New worlds to explore. Why spend so much time, effort, and money to do something that’s already been done? Where’s the innovation? Where’s the fire?

The sands of time slip through our fingers for a reason. Attempting to fight that process leads to nothing but stagnation and feelings of emptiness. In the end, we are left with only a constant longing for what once was in the form of gauzy nostalgia.

While there may be a formula for success, there is no formula for art, and it’s disheartening to see the most prolific creators of cinema lose their integrity for the sake of profits. I have hope that someday Hollywood’s war on originality will end, but until then you’ll probably catch me hate-watching live-action remakes of my beloved childhood films at the nearest Cineplex.