It’s taken a lot of us far longer than it should’ve — blame COVID? — to realize that something is deeply, profoundly amiss in our cinematic culture. And it’s been like that for some time, perhaps as much as a full decade if not more.

I only started to wake up to this when I began asking a few questions that had no immediate answers. Where had all the mid-budget movies gone? Why don’t studios make comedies any more? Why haven’t we had any major new movie franchises past a spat of teen scifi dystopian flicks in the early teens? Why do summer movie seasons, frankly, suck these days? Why is streaming way worse than it was 10 years ago?

The best explanation for this that I’ve heard is that for all of cinema’s history, we existed in a type of monoculture. We saw the same films, we talked about the same movies, we shared those experiences. But when the internet came along, culture fractured and splintered, with everyone dashing off to their own specific corners, and the monoculture rapidly declined and then died by 2015.

In other words, there’s no new shared culture being created. Everything ground to a halt over 10 years ago and hasn’t started back up yet. And whether or not you buy into that notion, Hollywood absolutely does — and it is frantic to solve it.

From 2015 to 2025, studios doubled-down on massive-budget spectacles, especially superhero flicks, until we were sick of them. Then they started making live action copies of popular animated films, even though the whole idea was beyond stupid. Then they started plumbing the creative time periods — the ’80s and ’90s in particular — to see what could be resurrected and sequelized.

Have you noticed how many “legacy” sequels to movies 20 or 30 years removed are coming out in the 2020s? Initially, it was kind of cool to get that blast of nostalgia, to finally get a follow-up to, say, Top Gun or Beetlejuice. But gradually it’s become disturbing. A lot of these projects are disappointing, featuring much older actors going through the motions with a script that doesn’t know how to tell a story nearly as good as the original.

Need me to list some of the parade of lackluster legacy sequels? Hocus Pocus 2. Space Jam 2. Disenchanted. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The Disney Star Wars trilogy. Dumb and Dumberer. The Matrix Resurrections. The last four Jurassic World flicks. Karate Kid Legends. Ghostbusters 2016. Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. The Fantastic Beasts series. Halloween Kills. Terminator Genisys. Zoolander 2. Bill and Ted Face the Music. It just goes on and on with the pointlessness of it all.

Even TV isn’t immune to this, as scores of ’80s and ’90s sitcoms have been rebooted in recent years, usually to lackluster reception. Sorry, Fuller House and Frasier, your time has passed.

I could wave my arms past the movie scene and point to how dull and non-revolutionary technology’s become in our culture as a whole. From phones to cars, everything is merely slightly iterative, but nothing more. AI is the worst and is ruining so many sectors — including entertainment — simultaneously and at a frightening pace.

Is there any wonder that people are scrambling to go back in time? That there’s a real resurgence of love for older movies, older tech, physical media, and times when movies were churning out so many creative and entertaining ideas?

Again, I won’t be so extreme as to say that there is no creativity or artistry these days, because that’s not fully true — just mostly true. It genuinely worries me that Hollywood is plumbing the nostalgia well so hard these days, all while knowing that it can’t last forever and that there aren’t any plans to move past the endless mining of Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park to make fresh, exciting franchises once more.

The 2025 summer movie season is… fine? It is fine. Better by a long shot than 2024. But it is nowhere near as exciting as what we routinely experienced in the ’90s or 2000s. There’s been no “must see” event, nor any real discussion that lasted past a week.

That’s the sad thing about these massive blockbusters that Hollywood churns out: They can earn a billion or more, and yet they leave no cultural footprint.

Back in ’93, everyone was talking about Jurassic Park all summer long. Same with Independence Day in ’96. Or, heck, even The Phantom Menace in ’99. Now we have a $225M Superman, and people kinda like it the day they see it and don’t talk about it after that.

That’s not good. Hollywood may be making money in some sectors, but it’s lost so much ground for any sort of lasting impact. We don’t quote movies from the past 10 years. We rarely collect them or think about them. Avatar 2 made $2.3 billion in 2022, and I’ve yet to hear a single person quote it, reference it, or discuss it since then. That’s this lack of cultural footprint, and it’s infecting almost all these flicks.

Where all this is heading in the rest of the 2020s and 2030s, I have no idea. I’m not a prognosticator. All I know is that AI ruins almost everything, the nostalgia well for these franchises is running dry, and Hollywood is at a loss how to be risky and innovative once again.

Now, what I would like to see is a return to form: A scaling back of these grossly over-budgeted nothingburger spectacles and an investment in more mid-budget flicks. I’d like to see the past left alone as a source of material and a push to come up with new ideas and settings. Directors need to be given creative freedom and should be trained to be daring even as they bring expertise to bear.

We’ll see. The past in movies remains and is largely preserved — as long as we hold onto physical media, of course — and one could conceivably live out the rest of a lifetime only enjoying films made prior to 2015. But for my kids’ sake and even my own, I want to see this stagnation put to bed and a catalyst to start making real movies again.