Did we get dumber, or did Hollywood just get greedier?
- Chris Godfrey
- Jun 25
- 5 min read
Retreads, pre-treads, call them what you like, but sequels and franchise movies are killing the original film. Chasing profit and quarterly returns, Hollywood has traded originality for a sure thing and made risk a dirty word. Unfortunately, this cold mind set has infected a lot more than movies - sports, the arts, fashion - they've also gone for the money. Basically, they've industrialised our culture and we've sat back and said "that's fine by me".
Let's start with a list.
This summer, cinema audiences can look forward to ‘Toy Story 5’, ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’, ‘Evil Dead Burn’, and ‘Supergirl’. These are all sequels or franchise spin offs.
Come autumn, we get ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’, ‘Wicked: For Good’ (part two of a two-part adaptation of a stage musical based on a novel that was itself a spin-off of The Wizard of Oz, a 1939 film), and a ‘Hunger Games’ prequel focused on a supporting character from the original series. Once again, no original films in sight.
Lastly, winter will bring us ‘Dune: Part Three’, ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, ‘Angry Birds 3’, ‘Jumanji: Open World’, and the nostalgic reunion nobody asked for, ‘Freakier Friday’, which reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan twenty-three years after the last one.
And that’s the entire mainstream 2026 slate. Sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and reboots. Not a single original story in the top tier. Not one.
Did audiences wake up one morning and collectively decide they'd had enough of original thought? Or did the movie majors just stop bothering?
There was a time when Hollywood was genuinely dangerous
The 1970s weren't just a good decade for cinema. They were a genuine cultural explosion. ‘The Godfather’. ‘Chinatown’. ‘Taxi Driver’. ‘Dog Day Afternoon’. ‘Network’. ‘The French Connection’. Films that were morally complex, politically uncomfortable, and structurally unlike anything that had come before. Films that demanded something from their audience.
Of course, this wasn't all idealism. It was also survival. The old studio system was bleeding audience share to television, to European art cinema, to the counterculture. Desperate to stay relevant, the majors did something they'd never done before: they handed the keys to a generation of film makers with audacious ideas and absolutely nothing to lose. Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, Lumet, Ashby, etc. Directors, not executives, in the driving seat.
Their films were events, not products. People didn't go to see ‘Apocalypse Now’ because they recognised the IP from a comic book. They went because word spread that something extraordinary was happening in cinema.
The moment risk-taking died
Then, suddenly, it was death by two films. Ironically, both from the 1970's. First it was‘Jaws’ in 1975, then it was ‘Star Wars’ in 1977. Both brilliant. Both, in their different ways, catastrophic for the industry's long-term creative health. Not because of what they were, but because of what the studios learned from them.
They saw that spectacle sells. That a recognisable brand sells more. That a sequel to a recognisable brand sells most of all.
Then, in 1980, Michael Cimino blew $44 million on a disaster called ‘Heaven's Gate’ and the suits had all the excuse they needed. The director-driven model was over. Corporate buyers moved in through the 1980s. Studios got folded into asset portfolios. Hollywood stopped being a creative industry and became a division of a larger entertainment conglomerate, answerable to shareholders, quarterly targets, and risk management consultants.
Suddenly, the artist had become the most unpredictable and therefore most threatening element in the process.
The numbers speak louder than artists
Sadly, successful franchise films return an average of 3.1 times their production investment while original films can only manage x1.8. On a $200 million movie, that gap is the difference between a board that goes home happy and one that doesn't.
In 2019, the last pre-pandemic benchmark year, franchise films represented 42% of wide releases but took 82.5% of worldwide box office. Non-franchise original films shared the remaining 17.5% between them. And in 2025, all ten of the top domestic titles were sequels, prequels, or franchise instalments.
The global market compounds this even further. International audiences now account for 73% of worldwide box office. Spectacle travels. Nuance doesn't. An action sequence needs no subtitles. A precisely written piece of character drama set in 1970s South Boston does.
So, US studios now make films for the 73%. And the 73% want to see something they already know. It's a perfectly rational response to a financial model that has systematically punished risk for forty years.
This isn't just about the movies
Look around. The same logic runs everything.
Television gives us an endless conveyor belt of Scandi noir, procedural crime dramas, hum drum soap operas, and spin-offs of spin-offs. Publishing churns out book fourteen in the same thriller series because book one did well on Amazon. Fashion houses dust off their 1980s archive every few years, call it a heritage reissue, and charge twice the price. Glastonbury - once the scrappy, unpredictable alternative to mainstream entertainment - now runs on a roster of legacy headliners and a ticket lottery that’s chaotic, expensive, and designed to create scarcity.
The arts, broadly speaking, have been consumed by the same commercial logic that runs a supermarket chain. Proven product. Repeatable return. Minimum deviation from the format that worked last time.
The logical conclusion: humans need not apply
Keep following the money and you arrive somewhere uncomfortable.
If originality is a financial liability. If IP is an asset. If the ideal product is a formula that can be repeated with predictable returns and minimum creative variance, then the human being - the writer, the director, the artist - becomes the most expensive and least controllable part of the machine. They have opinions. They want rewrites. They go on strike. They cost money and cause delays. Occasionally, God forbid, they insist the ending should be different.
Now enter AI. Not as a creative tool, but as a cost-reduction strategy dressed up as innovation. Studios and streaming platforms aren't investing in generative AI because it produces better stories. They're investing because it produces cheaper ones, faster, without ego, without union membership, and without the inconvenient belief that the work should mean something. The mass lay-off of writers, visual effects artists, and creative staff across the entertainment industry plays to the same story that killed New Hollywood. Profit over people. Formula over feeling. The removal of the human element because the human element is unpredictable and unpredictability is expensive.
What we're watching now isn't the rise of artificial intelligence, it's the final stage of a massive project to industrialise culture. To take the thing that makes us human - the ability to imagine something that has never existed before and make it real - and turn it into a managed, repeatable, profitable process.
Basically, money talks, artists walk.
Final word
‘Angry Birds 3’ is not art. It’s a business decision. And so is the algorithm generating the script for ‘Angry Birds 4’.
So, the question isn't whether we got dumber. We didn't. The question is whether we're going to keep paying for the privilege of being treated like we did.
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