The Sequel Trap
There is a persistent and comfortable myth circulating inside Hollywood's executive suites, and it goes something like this: audiences have simply stopped going to the movies. The pandemic broke the habit. Streaming finished the job. The theatrical experience is a relic, and the numbers — down more than 20 percent from pre-pandemic levels — prove it.
The myth is wrong. What the numbers actually prove is something more specific, and more damning: audiences haven't stopped going to movies. They've stopped going to these movies. And when something genuinely new arrives, they show up with a fervor that makes the industry's pessimism look not just mistaken, but willfully blind.
In the summer of 2023, two films that had no business being blockbusters became the defining cultural event of the year. A biography of a nuclear physicist, rated R, with a three-hour runtime, made $951 million worldwide. A satirical toy commercial became the highest-grossing film of the year at $1.44 billion. Together, Oppenheimer and Barbie — neither of them franchises, neither of them sequels, neither of them based on a comic book — generated a combined opening weekend of $235 million in North America alone. For the first time in more than a decade, none of the three biggest films of the year were part of existing film franchises or inspired by comic books. The CEO of IMAX put it plainly: "Original content, rather than sequels, ruled the day in 2023."
Hollywood's response, predictably, was to learn nothing.
The Math of the Familiar
The logic that drives franchise filmmaking is not irrational. It is, in fact, deeply rational — and that is precisely what makes it so dangerous. Studios pay 30 to 50 percent less to market sequels because the audience already knows what the product is. When a single blockbuster's marketing budget can run between $150 and $250 million, that savings is not trivial. Sequels carry pre-built awareness, pre-sold audiences, and the promise of predictable opening weekends. For a risk-averse industry still scarred by pandemic losses, this calculus feels like prudence.
The problem is that it has compounded into something structurally deranged. In 2017, major studios produced 12 original films compared to 24 recycled ones — a 1:2 ratio. By 2024, original films had dropped to 4, while recycled titles had risen to 27, nearly a 1:7 ratio. Consider what that means in practice: for every one original story a major studio releases, it makes seven sequels, prequels, remakes, or franchise installments. And of the top 20 highest-grossing domestic releases of 2024, only two were original content.
What began as a sensible hedge against uncertainty has curdled into an almost total abandonment of the creative infrastructure that built these franchises in the first place. You cannot harvest indefinitely without planting.
The Endgame Problem
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the clearest case study in what happens when a franchise outruns its own narrative. Avengers: Endgame marked the culmination of a carefully crafted narrative spanning 22 films and over a decade of interconnected storytelling — an unprecedented achievement in franchise architecture. It was, by any measure, a conclusion. A finale. The story had been told.
The studio, having watched the MCU accumulate more than $32 billion globally, made the decision that the story could not be allowed to end. What followed was an attempt to restart a concluded arc using characters audiences had either not fully bonded with or, in many cases, had only encountered through Disney+ series that carried their own viewing prerequisites. When The Marvels debuted in November 2023, it was partly a sequel to 2019's Captain Marvel but also tied into the events of the WandaVision and Ms. Marvel Disney+ series — and it failed to make any impact at the box office. The film opened to $47 million domestically, against projections of $80 million.
The attendance curve since 2019 tells a story the studio has been reluctant to read. Only two of Marvel's last nine MCU films made any meaningful profit, and even in those cases, analysts have raised questions about the actual net returns after marketing. The franchise that once functioned as a reliable industrial engine has become a money-losing enterprise propped up by the inertia of brand recognition — and even that brand recognition is eroding.
The mechanism here is worth understanding. The MCU worked in its first three phases because it was building toward something. Each film was both a story in itself and an installment in a larger architecture that gave audiences a reason to stay engaged across years. Endgame was not just a movie. It was the payoff on a decade-long investment. The films that came after it have been, at their core, attempts to convince audiences to make that same investment again — without offering a comparable destination. The sequel logic held; the narrative logic did not.
When the Brand Eats the Movie
The Joker collapse is a different kind of case study, and in some ways a more instructive one, because the original film had no franchise infrastructure at all. It was a standalone character study made for $55 million that connected with audiences viscerally enough to earn $1.078 billion worldwide and an Academy Award for Joaquin Phoenix. It succeeded precisely because it existed outside the franchise machine.
What Warner Bros. did next was entirely predictable and entirely counterproductive. The sequel's budget went from $65 million to $200 million — a threefold increase for a film confined, narratively, to courtrooms and prison cells. The studio had taken a story that worked because of its intimacy and its idiosyncrasy and converted it into a tentpole. Joker: Folie à Deux failed to hit its estimated break-even threshold of around $400 million, eventually settling for $207 million worldwide, projecting a net loss of $144 million — making it the biggest financial failure of 2024.
The lesson that should have been absorbed is that the first Joker was not a franchise. It was a film. Its success came from specificity, not scalability. By treating it as the former, Warner Bros. destroyed precisely what had made it valuable.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga presents a third variant of the same pathology. The Mad Max franchise had been resurrected brilliantly with Fury Road in 2015 — a film that succeeded on ferocious craft and formal invention. The prequel that followed it lost a reported $119.6 million. High-profile franchise disappointments have piled up: Warner Bros.'s Joker: Folie à Deux, Furiosa, and Black Adam each lost over $100 million. Each of these was a bet on name recognition as a substitute for narrative urgency. Each of them lost.
The Structural Trap
What drives this behavior, even in the face of sustained evidence that it is not working, is a structural problem in how Hollywood evaluates risk. The decision to greenlight a sequel is made by executives who have historically been rewarded for reducing downside risk, not for maximizing creative upside. A sequel that underperforms is a manageable disappointment. An original film that fails is a career event. The institutional logic favors sequels even when the market logic no longer does.
According to one study, only one-tenth of the 500-plus movies either released or scheduled by major studios and streamers between 2022 and 2026 came from an internal development slate. The rest were acquisitions — existing IP, book adaptations, franchise installments. Hollywood has largely stopped the work of developing new stories from scratch, which means it has stopped building the raw material from which the next generation of franchises would emerge. It is, in the most literal sense, consuming its own seed corn.
In 2024, only 94 movies were released in more than 2,000 locations, a 20 percent decline from the 120 wide releases in 2019. The mid-budget film — the $15 to $90 million range that once produced the Bourne series, the Taken films, the kinds of adult-oriented genre movies that gave audiences a reason to go to theaters on an ordinary weekend — has almost entirely migrated to streaming. What remains in theaters is a landscape of tentpoles and franchise installments, with nothing in between. When a tentpole fails, there is nothing to catch the fall.
What the Outliers Prove
The exceptions to this pattern are instructive precisely because they are exceptions. In April 2025, Ryan Coogler released Sinners — a wholly original horror film, set in 1932 Mississippi, with no prior IP, no guaranteed fanbase, and no franchise infrastructure. It opened to $48 million domestically in its first weekend, the best opening for an original film since Jordan Peele's Us in 2019 and crossed $200 million domestically in its fourth weekend — the first original film to accomplish that since Pixar's Coco in 2017. It received 16 Academy Award nominations and won four, including Best Actor.
The film worked for the same reasons Barbie and Oppenheimer worked, and the same reasons the first Joker worked: it had something to say, and it said it with conviction. Audiences are not, in fact, indifferent to movies. They are indifferent to product — to the recycled assembly of recognizable elements in service of a sequel that exists because the previous film made money rather than because there was a story worth telling.
A senior media analyst at ComScore put the audience's position plainly: "I think audiences are really showing what they want are films that are a little different." That observation was made in 2023. The industry has had two years to act on it. The 2026 release calendar is dense with Marvel, Star Wars, Dune, Toy Story, Hunger Games, and Jurassic World installments.
The Reckoning That Keeps Not Coming
There is a version of this story in which the box office failures accumulate to a threshold where studios are forced to restructure how they develop and greenlight films. New franchise launches numbered just 9 in 2025, down from 20 in 2024, and their box office has fallen sharply compared to 2017, 2018, and 2019. That is the statistic that should alarm studio executives the most — not the underperformance of existing franchises, but the failure to build new ones. Every franchise that exhausts its audience goodwill represents a revenue stream that will need to be replaced. Without new IP in development, there is nothing to replace it with.
The theatrical experience, for all the eulogies written about it, is not dying. The audience is still there. As one film industry analyst said, "People just want to be entertained. To see compelling stories told in a masterful way." That has always been true. The films that have demonstrated it recently — Oppenheimer, Barbie, Sinners, Everything Everywhere All at Once — share no genre, no budget range, no demographic target. They share only the quality of having been made with genuine creative purpose.
The industry's problem is not that audiences have changed. It is that studios have stopped trusting them to respond to anything new. The sequel trap is not a market condition. It is a failure of imagination, institutionalized and quarterly-reported, until the mechanism for correcting it — ambitious original filmmaking backed by real resources — has been almost entirely dismantled.
The blockbuster is not dying because people have stopped going to movies. It is dying because the movies people are being asked to go to are sequels to sequels, prequels to reboots, spin-offs of franchises that peaked before the people buying the tickets were old enough to have seen the originals. The audience figured this out before Hollywood did. They may be right to wonder if Hollywood ever will.
