By: Samuel Mortel
There’s been extensive discourse about how the 21st century has been culturally lacking in creativity. For nearly two decades, we, the viewers, have dealt with Hollywood’s hunger to pander to Gen X and Millennials by preying on their nostalgia. However, it seems that the powers-that-be in the board rooms of major film and television studios have latched onto a new target: Gen Z.
Do we need studio executives to figuratively jingle keys at us by repackaging the things we enjoyed as kids? Or, better yet, do we even want it? I’d argue the answer is no.
People first started noticing the formation of our current cultural landscape in the early 2010s. In the year 2010, journalists began observing this gradually prevalent tactic of rehashing old ideas and properties, shown in the LA Times op-ed “Hollywood gets a kick out of ‘rebooting’” by Ben Fritz and Steve Zeitchik.
They wrote, “For those hoping to see more original stories on screen, however, reboot-mania is a discouraging example of creative poverty in the movie business. Most big-budget event films are sequels or are based on popular existing properties, be they books such as ‘Harry Potter,’ video games such as ‘Prince of Persia’ or toys such as the upcoming ‘Battleship.’ But with the option to reboot, studio executives don’t even need to look for new material to adapt,” the authors wrote.
In the 10-plus years since this article was written, the reboot epidemic has grown far beyond what anyone could’ve imagined. Over the past decade, it seems like nearly every single bit of intellectual property that Gen X and Millennials grew up with has been rediscovered and reanimated. There are seemingly countless examples like “Ghostbusters,” “Full House,” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” either receiving a sequel or some form of reimagining (or both, in the case of “Ghostbusters”) in the past 10 years, most of which were either received poorly by fans and critics or wiped from our shared cultural memory. Now that nearly all of Gen X and Millennial culture has been picked clean, the industry has decided it’s time to mine nostalgia from our generation.
It’s important to note that this recent shift to targeting Gen Z nostalgia coincides with the fact that the oldest members of Gen Z are just hitting their 30s while the youngest members are about to approach working age. The Zoomers (a nickname for Gen Z) born in 2012 are spending their allowance on a trip to the movie theater to watch the latest installment of a franchise they’ve been invested in since they were in kindergarten. Meanwhile, the Zoomers born in 1996 are taking their children to the theater to show them a live-action version of a film they saw when they were a kid. Our generation are now participants in the economy, and Hollywood is in a gold rush to take our money.
One of the earliest examples I can recall is “Raven’s Home,” a sequel series to the iconic 2003 Disney sitcom “That’s So Raven” where the titular character is now a single mom raising a pair of tweens. It lasted 6 seasons, running from 2017 to 2023. Despite being relatively well-received, the series dealt with a gradual decrease in viewership, with 3.5 million viewers when the first season aired compared to less than a million viewers when the sixth and final season aired. Still, it was a sign of what was to come.
Since “Raven’s Home,” we’ve gotten a wave of remakes, revivals, and sequels. Including but not limited to: “Wizards of Waverly Place,” “Camp Rock,” and “iCarly,” just to name a few. In the past five years, we have numerous examples of companies performing necromancy on TV shows and movies ranging from 2001 to 2010. The prevalence of these reboots and sequels feels, in a sense, manipulative and cheap. From the perspective of these large studios, movies and television are no longer avenues for artistic expression and adding to the culture.
How many creative and refreshing low-budget films could’ve been made with the $250 million Disney spent on the live-action adaptation of “Moana”? How many interesting ideas from young creatives get pushed aside so monopolies can sloppily reheat whatever we were served as children, knowing we’ll eat it up anyway? There’s no point in taking risks and giving audiences a new beloved, original property to capture their imagination when you can just offer them a safety blanket in the form of whatever beloved original property captured their imagination 20 years ago and rake in an easy hundreds of millions of dollars. The current media landscape does nothing but incentivize cowardice and laziness at large studios and leaves our culture in a state of arrested development.
However, the tide may be changing. The live-action “Moana” adaptation actually ended up underperforming both at the box office and with critics. Moreover, we’re starting to see a real phenomenon of films winning over audiences without being based on whatever 20-somethings watched when we were kids.
The success of a movie like “Backrooms” and “Obsession” offers a rare example of Gen Z’s own original cultural creations being put on the big screen rather than something that we watched when we were in middle school. Gen Z showed up in the movie theatre, for both of these films: “Backrooms” earning $400 million, and “Obsession” earning $500 million respectively.
What binds all these films together is that they all contain complex adult topics that reflect our times and prompt discourse. Across these films, you can find a platform to launch discussions on topics surely more complex than whatever you’d gain from another installment in the Shrek franchise.
Best believe, there were many franchises and films that were incredibly successful as well, but this year has shown us that there is a clear demand for fresh, original movies that take risks, encourage (sometimes uncomfortable) conversation, and add to our collective culture.
Gen Z isn’t satisfied with being coddled with the same old franchises we’ve known our whole lives. There’s an overwhelming appetite for our generation to create our own culture, engage in work reflective of our times, and experiment with new ideas from new creatives rather than relying on the safety of a manicured, tried-and-true, “market-tested” media environment.
Now it’s up to Hollywood to get the message.