By Angelica Di Monte
Illustrated by Angelica Di Monte
As yet more franchise titles hit the big screen, Hollywood proves once more that it has killed creativity to turn it into a corporate marketing strategy.
The Little Mermaid (2023), Wonka (2023), Inside Out 2 (2024), Moana 2 (2024) Despicable Me 4 (2024), Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), Mufasa: The Lion King (2024), The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) Freakier Friday (2025), Karate Kid: Legends (2025), Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (2025), I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025).
It is not an original take if I say that Hollywood has run out of ideas. In recent years, it’s become increasingly difficult to find an original blockbuster. Most new releases seem to be a reboot, a sequel/prequel, a live-action remake of an animated classic, or a cinematic universe expansion of a well-known franchise. The titles cited above are only a few of the ones that have been released in the last couple of years.
While arguing that the current Hollywood industry merely rests on sequels or reboots would be false and reductive, the question still stands: Why is Hollywood recycling its own past now more than ever? We could justify it as a risk-mitigation strategy and blame greedy studios that prefer to stick to what is “safe” and profitable. But that doesn’t explain why the same movies keep being remade and why it works. What if we looked at the other side of the coin to explain why this is happening? Perhaps the roots of the crisis go much deeper, beyond film or Hollywood.
The Economy of Nostalgia
Major studios, like Disney, have learned that nostalgia provides a reliable emotional return on investment, and know that audiences will turn to familiar stories for comfort, leading to the capitalisation on longing.
Then why is nostalgia so profitable? And why are we so nostalgic?
The explanation for our nostalgia-driven culture lies in our own fragmented lives and our struggle to navigate an overload of information. We live in a digitalised era that is fast-paced and flooded with social media algorithms with an easy access to endless information, leaving us having to process an overwhelming array of information all at once. We watch movies while scrolling on Instagram reels on a smaller screen, we shift through multiple tabs during lectures and scroll through our lives in 15-second clips. When we go on social media, we seek a sense of connection and go on an endless quest to piece fragments of our identity together in search of authenticity and meaning, which only results in a sense of anxiety, identity crisis and disconnection from reality. When everything moves so quickly, it is nearly impossible to find anchorage, and to construct an identity with something so volatile and ever-changing. Therefore, when nothing is solid, we cling to nostalgia for stability. How we consume media in an algorithmic culture is also part of the blame. Streaming platforms have trained us to prefer familiarity and to emotionally recycle and rewatch content.
Cinema’s Identity Crisis
This psychological and social condition ends up being reflected in Hollywood cinema, which has become an industry that can no longer create without referencing itself.
Audiences have always sought comfort and escapism from the anxiety of everyday life; this is not new. What is new is Hollywood’s realisation that familiarity sells. When you spend hundreds of millions on a blockbuster, you want a guaranteed audience, which nostalgia gives. A sequel to the Indiana Jones franchise i.e. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) is a guarantee that the audience will exist. Gareth Edwards, director of the new Jurassic World film, Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025), told BBC’s Front Row that he was trying “to make it nostalgic. The goal was that it should feel like Universal Studios went into their vaults and found a reel of film, brushed the dust off and it said: Jurassic World: Rebirth.” Studios know that audiences will show up for the emotional familiarity of a story they already love.
The issue with all this creative recycling is that films become capitalist products served as comfort food, where storylines lack substance, and characters are underwritten. When every franchise is milked for the success it has had in the past, emotional stakes vanish, and Hollywood turns into a vat of reprocessed nostalgia. For instance, Disney’s 2019 The Lion King remake replicates every frame of the 1994 original, except that hand-drawn animation is replaced by sterile photorealistic CGI.
Unfortunately, this continues to work because Hollywood’s over-commercial, profit-maximising, risk-averse machine of entertainment production is compatible in a world where everyone is exhausted from information overload, and where audiences crave and will buy the safety of the familiar rather than seeing something new.
However, not all is lost. Creativity still thrives in independent and international cinema, and even Hollywood itself is not limited to its remakes and sequels and has so much more to offer beyond that. Not even all Hollywood sequels or remakes are devoid of creativity and not all franchise films are emotionally hollow. However, while nostalgia is comforting, it is infinitely recyclable and its exploitation by Hollywood is becoming boring. As audiences, we can choose where to direct our attention, and our money. If we want cinema to be as valuable as it once was, we need to stop rewarding corporations for repackaging our memories and start paying more attention to those who create something new. Art should ultimately make us feel something.
