High-minded critics have frequently deplored the state of popular culture as being derivative, stale, stagnant, or stuck. The popularity of comic book movies and superhero franchises is a commonly cited example of this trend. Or an over-reliance on sequels or prequels by creativity-starved writers and profit-maximizing studio execs. Popular writers and commentators have called popular culture ‘collapsed‘, stagnant, or overfitted, with the later writing, “Certainly, anyone who’s shown up at a movie theater in the last decade is tired of the sequels and prequels and remakes and spinoffs.”
Explanations abound, such as overzealous intellectual property rights choking off creativity. Or risk aversion. Or the decline of ‘cultural weirdos’. From Eric Hoel again, “Mastroianni’s explanation is that the weirdos and freaks who actually move culture forward with new music and books and movies and genres of art have disappeared, potentially because life is just so comfortable and high-quality now that it nudges people against risk-taking.” Sebastian Jensen at technotheoria.org blames financial incentives for the decline of culture at the turn of the millennium, “The kind of introverted, smart, artistic people (regardless of gender or race) who would have written stuff like A Song of Ice and Fire are not writing anymore. They all went into tech (particularly AI, software, or game development), finance, influencing, or ghostwriting — fields that offer more lucrative opportunities.”
But have these cultural critics, especially in regard to the alleged overreliance on superhero movies and franchises, have ever bothered to look at what movies are playing, or made any attempt at substantiating their hunches with evidence? At the local small movie theatre, there are no sequels, prequels, or superhero movies playing, and I cannot recall the last time any were shown. True, this is just a single data point, but consider for 2024 only “9 major superhero films were released in theaters” out of “569 movies were released in the U.S. and Canada” for that year. From Box Office Mojo for the December 5-7, 2025 period there are no superhero or franchises at all:
There are only two recent sequels, those being Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 and Zootopia 2, but these are not major franchises, like, say, Star Wars or Harry Potter. Although superhero movies and franchises may seem more prevalent because of their box-office success and the media attention they attract, it’s inaccurate to say they dominate the box office; in reality, they are only a very small percentage of films produced.
True, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is a sequel of Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 2004, but if the gap between sequels or reboots is a really long time, like ,say, two decades as in the case of Kill Bill , then for all intents and purposes it’s an entirely new movie. By that point there are people alive of a movie-going age who may not not have heard of the original. This is much in the same way successful books are re-published as later editions, with small improvements or other updates, but still faithful to the original. Few would argue the 2025 Webster’s Dictionary is “derivative” of the 2024 edition, given that language evolves and entries are continually updated.
Yes, in absolute numbers, there are more superhero movies being produced now compared to 2-3 decades ago. The huge success of the 2000 X-Men and the even bigger success of Spider Man, which in 2002 grossed a staggering $900 million worldwide on a $150 million budget, showed that there was a huge audience for this genre. I remember Spider Man was a huge deal when it came out, with a major merchandising push, even more so than the Phantom Menace, the ’99 long awaited prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, which too was a box office smash. Superhero movies could be produced at scale, like an assembly line, with half a century of intellectual property from DC and Marvel to draw from and thousands of combinations characters, with no limit to the possibilities of storylines. Titanic was undeniably a huge success, but it is difficult to imagine how a sequel could be made given the constraints imposed by the historical setting.
But the thing is, serialized fiction has always been popular, well before the rise of superhero movies; e.g. Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. People like recurring characters and familiar scenes because they develop a connection with them. Many Kurt Vonnegut novels have recurring characters through what can be considered an ‘extended universe’, but does this diminish him as an artist or make his work derivative? Same for the Harry Potter books, the LOTR trilogy and The Hobbit. If the characters and setting were changed in each book, it would be nonsensical. The writing or art ‘works’ because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Forcing originality would only make it worse.
The complaint that today’s popular art or entertainment does not measure up to the past or lacks certain aesthetic qualities, ignores that it’s a two-way street: the consumer is as important as the creator. The internet has shown there are markets or ‘micro niches’ for seemingly everything. I can listen to obscure “Soundcloud’ artists, watch a Youtube mini-documentary about a 2005 Argentina bank robbery, an underwater rescue mission, a morbidly obese man gorging himself with food, or tips on ‘how to lose belly fat‘. Will any of this be remembered in a hundred years? Is it even good? Maybe not…even unlikely. But who cares.
As heaven666 said, “It’s what you make of it.” If someone derives enjoyment from something, then it’s technically entertainment. If someone creates or produces something, then it’s technically art. I’m happy that my reading choices are not limited to ‘the Classics‘, or that my choice of media content is not limited to ‘The National Film Registry’ or that my music choices are not limited to Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’. Although one can argue that quality or tastes of mainstream creative output has declined since the early 2000s, this is orthogonal to originality. This means having to go off the beaten paths, such as obscure or indie acts, or documentaries instead of Hollywood movies.
I think also these criticisms represent nostalgia for the ’90s, as the viral tweet below shows, for when entertainment was more communal and anticipatory, such as large groups of friends waiting and then together buying the latest albums or going to the movies, compared to everything already being on-demand online:
The kids didn’t look dead-eyed like they do now. You see a teenager today and they look like they’ve been through a war or something, all vitality and spirit sapped away. https://t.co/MIDOTVdGT2
— Gary (@plzbepatient) December 13, 2025
Netflix and Amazon-distributed content and Spotify has arguably replaced cable television and AM radio for a not insignificant percentage of the US population, especially post-Covid, and indicated by steadily declining box office receipts, at a 27-year-low as of 2025, and TV ratings. People just aren’t going to the movies anymore, save for the occasional superhero or star-studded blockbuster. Sports and concerts notwithstanding, entertainment has become much more niche or individualized, instead of families gathering in front of a single TV to watch the same shows.
As the Youtube viral mini-documentary “Why Comedy Movies Died” noted, quotable cultural ‘tentpoles’ have given way to content with specific audiences in mind or to gratify the curiosity of the individual, than having any broader cultural significance. Even though Joe Rogan has objectively the most popular podcast, averaging 11 million listeners per episode, which is a lot nominally–this is still tiny as a percentage of overall US population of 350 million. By comparison, by the early ’80s, the major 3-letter networks–ABC, NBC, and CBS–combined had about 53 million nightly viewers out of a population of 220 million.
Whereas comedies such as Anchorman, Caddyshack, and Airplane are still widely quotable, it’s hard to think of anyone quoting anything from Rogan. People recall popular guests, e.g. Elon Musk, but the influence of the show never seems to escape the confines of its medium. A similar pattern is seen with Howard Stern: a big audience, but after many decades there is little that is memorable, compared to the permanence and indelibility of a movie or a popular TV show. People share lines or give vivid descriptions of their favorite scenes, but this isn’t seen with podcasts. There is no podcast equivalent of, say, The Simpsons, Breaking Bad, or The Sopranos.
This leads to an overlooked explanation for stagnation: the rise of infotainment. Indeed, the aforenoted YouTube documentary amassed a 1.8 million views in only 3 months, and there are hundreds like this and for every conceivable topic, like about the decline of the Subway franchise, amassing half a million views in 3 months. Or about Jim Carrey’s career, racking up 6 million views in a year. Fiction as a social experience requires the collective suspension of disbelief, which the audience willingly and enjoyably partakes in, and this heightens the social experience because it can be interpreted in many ways. But with podcasts, people have to try to convince themselves that it’s real, or that what is being said isn’t total bullshit. Even if it’s about something like Bigfoot sightings, it’s implicitly assumed by the audience that the events described by the guest are very much real.