The Privatization of Nostalgia: How Corporate Franchises Killed Original Art

Every single one of the ten highest-grossing films worldwide in 2024 was a sequel. Not eight of ten, which would itself have been a historic low point. All ten — the first time that has happened in the recorded history of the box office. You have to travel down to thirteenth place before you find something resembling an original story, and even that turns out to be a book adaptation. The last wholly original film to top the global box office was Avatar, in 2009, back when a smartphone still occasionally made phone calls.

This is not a complaint about sequels existing. The Dark Knight is a sequel to a reboot of a comic book adaptation and remains one of the finer films of its decade; nobody serious is arguing that franchise storytelling is inherently beneath contempt. The actual scandal is narrower and considerably more damning: the pipeline that used to produce the next generation’s classics — the mid-budget original film, greenlit on the strength of a script rather than a pre-existing wiki page — has been almost entirely dismantled, and the people footing the bill for its disappearance were never consulted about the demolition.

The Deed to Your Childhood

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly, because the mechanism is the story: a handful of media conglomerates spent the last two decades acquiring not films but the rights to your memory of watching them, and once acquired, that memory became a lease you pay against every time a studio decides your nostalgia is due for a renewal. Disney did not simply buy Lucasfilm in 2012 for four billion dollars. It bought the deed to a specific, unrepeatable feeling that several hundred million children had in a dark theatre sometime around 1977, and it has been charging rent on that feeling ever since, in the form of sequels, spin-offs, theme park rides, and, when the well threatens to run dry, remakes of the remakes.

Since 2010, Disney’s live-action remakes of its own animated classics alone have grossed over ten billion dollars. The Lion King — a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of a film the studio had already made once, competently, in 1994 — pulled in $1.66 billion on its own, more money than every Best Picture winner of the last three decades combined has managed to earn, put together, as a group. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, thirty-five films deep, has cleared thirty-one billion dollars worldwide. Set that beside the entire thirty-year run of Best Picture winners — Oppenheimer, Titanic, Return of the King, Forrest Gump, all of it — and the Oscar winners don’t clear eleven billion combined. One franchise, built entirely from intellectual property some company already owned the deed to, outperforms three decades of the industry’s most celebrated original storytelling by a factor of three.

George Lucas himself, the man who arguably invented the modern franchise-IP economy and then watched a company buy the keys to his own creation out from under him, gave an interview last year making almost exactly this point about the studios that inherited his model. “The stories they’re telling are just old movies,” he said. “Let’s do a sequel, let’s do another version of this movie… there’s no original thinking.” Coming from anyone else, that would be rich. Coming from the man who started this particular fire, it reads less like criticism and more like a confession made under oath.

Who Actually Pays the Rent

Here the argument requires precision, because it is easy to make this sound like an aesthetic quarrel between people who miss the eighties and people who don’t. It isn’t. The mid-budget original film — the twenty-to-forty-million-dollar drama or thriller or comedy that used to be a viable, unglamorous, steady employer of working actors, working writers, working crews, and working theatre staff — has been the specific casualty of the franchise consolidation, and its disappearance is a labour story wearing a culture story’s clothes. A franchise tentpole employs a small army of visual-effects contractors on gruelling, non-unionized overtime and then discards most of them the moment the sequel wraps. The mid-budget original film it replaced on the release calendar used to employ writers’ rooms, character actors building an actual career instead of a single-appearance paycheque, and the kind of below-the-line crew work that turns into a trade rather than a gig. When a studio chooses the guaranteed IP return over the risky original script, it isn’t merely making a safer artistic choice. It is closing a factory and opening a casino next door, and calling the casino a promotion.

There is a genuine, checkable precedent for what happens when this kind of consolidation gets forcibly broken open rather than left to compound. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount Decree forced the major studios to sell off the theatre chains they owned outright — chains that had, until that ruling, let a handful of companies control production, distribution, and exhibition simultaneously, guaranteeing their own formula pictures a captive audience with no competition permitted through the door. Breaking that vertical monopoly didn’t destroy the industry. It arguably built the one that followed: the collapse of guaranteed distribution forced studios to compete on the strength of the films themselves, and the next quarter-century produced the New Hollywood era — Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, films that took genuine narrative risks because the old guaranteed-shelf-space model no longer existed to protect the safe alternative. The lesson courts drew in 1948 was specific and testable: when a company owns the entire supply chain from creation to consumption, competition doesn’t emerge on its own. It has to be forced.

The Theme Park With No Exit

Martin Scorsese caught considerable grief in 2019 for comparing the Marvel pictures to theme parks rather than cinema, and the backlash mostly missed what was actually precise about the comparison. A theme park is not a bad thing to be. It is, however, a specific thing: a closed system, engineered for a predictable, repeatable, pre-tested emotional response, built by a company that owns every attraction inside the gate and has no financial incentive to build a ride that might genuinely surprise you. That is not a metaphor stretched to fit an argument. It is close to a literal description of how a modern franchise slate gets greenlit, tested, and re-tested against audience data before a single frame is shot — risk isn’t reduced, it’s engineered out of the process almost entirely, and what gets engineered out along with it is the possibility of the film doing something nobody at the studio predicted it would do.

None of this makes the individual films worthless, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. What it makes worthless is the idea that this is simply what audiences want, as though the menu wasn’t written by the same people counting the receipts. Audiences didn’t organically demand thirty-three sequels, reboots, and remakes for 2025 alone. They were offered thirty-three sequels, reboots, and remakes, alongside a shrinking handful of original alternatives receiving a fraction of the advertising budget and a fraction of the screens, and then the resulting box office numbers were presented back to them as proof of their own preference — a closed loop dressed up as a market signal.

The Landlord Owns the Streaming Service Too

The theatrical box office is only half the ledger. Streaming platforms solved the franchise-dependency problem in a quieter, more totalizing way: instead of merely favouring the IP they already owned, they built the entire commissioning pipeline around predicting what you’d watch based on what you’d already watched, which is a technical way of saying they built a machine whose only real skill is recommending yesterday to you again tomorrow, only with a new coat of paint slapped on it. A streaming executive does not greenlight a show because it might become a classic. They greenlight it because its poster resembles the poster of a show forty million subscribers already finished, and the algorithm has learned, correctly, that resemblance retains a subscriber more reliably than surprise does. Ted Sarandos didn’t invent this logic so much as industrialize it, turning “more of what performed” into a commissioning philosophy sturdy enough to survive an entire company’s programming slate.

This matters for the same reason the theatrical numbers matter: it forecloses the mid-budget original a second time, on a second platform, closing the one exit ramp that theatrical decline was supposed to leave open. For a few years, the hopeful line was that streaming would rescue the original film theatres no longer wanted to fund — a straight-to-service pipeline for the twenty-million-dollar drama nobody would greenlight for a multiplex anymore. Instead the platforms built their own version of the franchise logic, just without the theatrical marquee to make the sameness visible. You don’t notice thirty variations on the same true-crime documentary format the way you’d notice thirty superhero sequels on a marquee, because the algorithm never shows you all thirty at once. It just quietly ensures you never scroll far enough to find the one thing that wasn’t built from the last thing’s blueprint.

What Gets Lost When the Rent Comes Due

The working-class kid who used to be able to see her own unglamorous life reflected back at her in a mid-budget original drama has, in any meaningful commercial sense, lost access to that mirror. What she gets instead is a bigger, louder, more expensive version of a story she already knows the ending to, because someone already owns the rights to that ending and has calculated, correctly, that she’ll pay to watch it again. Original art was never simply entertainment. It was one of the few places a culture got to encounter itself before the encounter had already been focus-grouped, IP-cleared, and pre-sold to three hundred million people who’d seen the trailer twice.

The sequel isn’t the problem. The absence of anything left to eventually make a sequel of is. Somewhere in a studio accounting department, someone has already run the numbers on whichever nostalgia gets monetized next, and the rest of us will find out what it was the moment the trailer drops.