Why Hollywood Ran out of Ideas

Two months into 2025, Netflix spent $320 million on The Electric State, a movie so aggressively forgettable that I had to Google it twice while writing this sentence. That's more money than most countries spend on education for a film that vanished from cultural consciousness faster than a Snapchat message. And that wasn't even their biggest swing and miss in their history. That honor goes to The Gray Man, which somehow managed to burn through $200 million to create what can only be described as the most expensive screensaver ever produced. Ryan Gosling looking vaguely confused for 2 hours while things exploded around him in the most generic way possible. Together, these two disasters consumed over half a billion dollars to produce nothing.

I wouldn't even call them bad movies. That would imply some level of artistic intent gone wrong. These were non-movie, content-shaped objects designed by algorithm and assembled by committee. But it wasn't an accident. This was the system working exactly as intended. See, Hollywood has spent a lot of time convincing itself that audiences are fundamentally stupid. Will consume any familiar-looking product as long as it's packaged correctly and marketed aggressively enough. And they built an entire industry around the assumption that creativity is a bug, not a feature. Something that needs to be minimized and controlled rather than cultivated or even celebrated. And they've succeeded in creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by consistently serving audiences reheated leftovers. They've trained people to expect nothing more. Then they point to declining box office numbers as proof that nobody wants original content when really they've just forgotten how to make it. What we're witnessing is the systematic destruction of an art form by people who fundamentally don't understand what they're destroying. And that's where our story begins. Because understanding how we got to the point where studios can light half a billion dollars on fire while creating nothing memorable needs you to also understand how Hollywood's relationship with risk, creativity, and its own audience has fundamentally broken down. They're just TV executives. They're men with jobs. Jerry, I'm going to paint you a picture of how movies get made.

Now, a writer walks into a studio with an idea. Maybe it's weird. Maybe it's personal. Maybe it's the kind of story that could only bubble up from one specific human brain wrestling with one very particular set of demons. And sure, the executive listens politely, nods at appropriate intervals, then drops the question that's murdered more good ideas than Rotten Tomatoes ever could: "What's it like?" They don't ask what it's about or why this story matters. What they ask is, "What can we compare it to?" Because if you can't pitch your vision as Die Hard meets The Notebook or Jaws but with commitment issues, then how the hell is some MBA supposed to build a PowerPoint about projected returns? And Hollywood's been playing this game for decades.

But in 2010, an executive at Warner Bros. looked at Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy and thought, "We need to reverse engineer this thing." They had lightning in a bottle. Three of the most successful superhero films ever made, each one a genuine cultural phenomenon. And their brilliant strategy was to figure out the secret formula and mass-produce it. What actually made The Dark Knight work was that Nolan had a specific vision. He wasn't really trying to make superhero movies. He was making Christopher Nolan movies that happened to feature Batman. And the difference is everything. But executives don't think in terms of vision. They think in terms of replicable assets. So, they hired Zack Snyder, a guy with his own very distinct visual style, and then spent 5 years trying to sand off every rough edge that made him interesting in the first place. They wanted Snyder's movies to be darker than Marvel, but not too dark. More grounded than Thor, but more fantastical than Batman Begins. Serious enough for critics, but fun enough for kids. And when Batman v Superman hit theaters after they cut 30 whole minutes away from the story, half the audience saw an ambitious deconstruction of superhero mythology. The other half saw an incomprehensible mess. Both groups left the theater pissed off, just for completely different reasons.

Now, any sane organization would look at this and think, "Maybe micromanaging creative talent isn't the path to success." Warner Brothers went the other direction. They decided the problem wasn't their approach; it was that they weren't being systematic enough about it. More market research, more focus groups, more demographic analysis. Because surely the issue wasn't that they'd hired an artist and then forbidden him from making art. The issue was that they hadn't collected enough data points to predict what art should look like. The funny part was that Disney was watching this train wreck and feeling pretty smug about their Marvel strategy. And honestly, they had every right to be. The MCU was a genuine cultural phenomenon that somehow managed to satisfy both blockbuster audiences and film nerds. But that was mostly down to Kevin Feige, who at the time understood something that the rest of Hollywood seemed to have forgotten. Audiences want to see more than just Iron Man. They want to see Jon Favreau's version of Iron Man, shaped by his sensibilities, filtered through his particular brand of humor and heart. And for a few glorious years, Marvel cracked the code. Hire interesting filmmakers, give them established characters to play with, then get out of their way and let them cook.

But success is a hell of a drug, and it makes you paranoid about losing what you built. By the time we hit Phase Three, the Marvel formula, which used to be "hire good directors and trust them," had calcified into something much more rigid. Every movie needed to hit the same beats, maintain the same tone, appeal to the same demographic slices. Directors went from being collaborators to being highly paid contractors tasked with executing someone else's vision. And that became pretty clear with Edgar Wright and his Ant-Man movie. Wright had spent years developing his take on the character since before Iron Man. He had fallen in love with a weird little corner of the Marvel universe and wanted to do something genuinely unique with it. His version would have felt different from everything else in the MCU, and that was the entire point. But when it came time to actually make the movie, Marvel got cold feet. Wright's vision was too Wrighty, too weird, too specific, too much like the thing that made Edgar Wright worth hiring in the first place. They wanted his style, just not so much of it. So they parted ways, hired Peyton Reed instead, a perfectly competent director who could execute the Marvel House style without causing any headaches. And the film was fine, completely watchable, but utterly forgettable. And that became the template. You don't need to take risks on visionary filmmakers when you can just hire craftsmen who won't fight you. You don't need to deal with the unpredictability of artistic collaboration when you can just plug directors into a predetermined framework. This is how we ended up with an industry that hires racehorses and then insists they pull carts. Studios want the credibility that comes with attaching talented filmmakers to their projects, but they don't actually want those filmmakers to do anything particularly "filmmakery." And I guess it's how we got a generation of movies that feel like they were assembled by committee, which they literally were. Most decisions are filtered through multiple layers of executives, all trying to minimize risk and maximize broad appeal. It's very much like designing a car by focus group. You might end up with something that doesn't offend anyone, but you're definitely not getting a Ferrari.

And just when you think this system couldn't get any more dysfunctional, along comes streaming to make everything exponentially worse. I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: nothing. Netflix has absolutely no clue whether their movies are good or not, and they're perfectly fine with that arrangement. In the old Hollywood system, which had plenty of problems, there was at least brutal honesty about failure. If your movie tanked at the box office, everyone knew it. The numbers were right there in Variety on Monday morning. Your career took a hit. Your next project got harder to finance. It was a little Darwinian and sometimes unfair, but it at least created pressure to not completely phone it in. Streaming metrics obliterated all of that accountability, and the studios couldn't be happier about it. When Netflix announces that The Gray Man was watched by, say, 110 million households, what the hell does that actually mean? Did they watch the whole thing? Did they make it through the opening credits before switching to TikTok? Did they fall asleep 20 minutes in but leave it running because they were too lazy to find the remote? Did they hate every second but stick with it anyway because, hey, they'd already started? We don't know. We can't know. And that ambiguity is the entire point.

See, without real accountability, the incentive structure goes completely sideways. Netflix's goal isn't to make good movies. Their goal is to make enough stuff that you forget to cancel your subscription. Quality becomes irrelevant as long as the content looks expensive enough to justify that monthly charge hitting your credit card. I call this the "content singularity." The point where there's so much available entertainment that individual quality becomes absolutely meaningless when there are literally thousands of hours of new content every month. You're not trying to create something people will remember. You're trying to create something that fills the algorithm's appetite and keeps the machine fed. The Electric State again is the perfect example of this logic in action. The Russo brothers, guys who just finished directing some of the biggest movies in human history, get handed a blank check to create a generic sci-fi thing that looks like every other generic sci-fi thing, but with better explosions and more famous people. It's not trying to be great. It's not trying to say anything. It's trying to be present, to occupy the expensive sci-fi movie slot in Netflix's content matrix for 3 months until they need to fill that same slot with something else. And I think this mindset has started poisoning theatrical releases, too. But when studios begin treating their biggest movies as mere content rather than cultural events, the rot spreads everywhere. Why take risks when safe, familiar products generate engagement numbers that nobody can verify but everybody can claim credit for?

Amazon's fake Tolkien adaptation is like a billion-dollar case study in this dysfunction. They didn't spend that absurd amount of money to tell a compelling story about Middle-earth. Why would they? They spent it to own a prestige property that could compete with HBO's Game of Thrones. The show itself was just the delivery mechanism for the branding exercise, and it was painful for a lot of Tolkien fans because you can feel it in every frame. Every single creative decision has been focus-grouped to death. The cast is diverse enough to avoid Twitter backlash but also fake enough to upset traditional fantasy fans. The violence is intense enough to feel mature but not so intense as to limit the audience. The themes are profound enough to generate think pieces, but not so complex as to confuse people scrolling on their phones. Okay, that last part was a lie. But you get my point. It's entertainment designed by committee and refined by spreadsheet, and audiences can smell the focus-group sweat from orbit. No amount of money can manufacture the authenticity that makes stories actually stick with you.

But the streaming model has created a new kind of moral hazard for executives. When there's no meaningful way to measure success or failure, you can justify literally any decision after the fact. If Rings of Power cost a billion dollars, which it did, and disappeared without a trace, it wasn't a failure. It was a "learning experience that helped us understand our audience better." If The Electric State bombed, "Actually, it was about building the brand and establishing our commitment to premium sci-fi content." When accountability vanishes, executives become immune to consequences, which frees them to pursue the most risk-averse strategies imaginable. I mean, there's no reason to greenlight something original and potentially controversial when you can make the seventh installment of a proven property. You can't trust a filmmaker's weird vision when you can test every decision with focus groups and data models.

The most damaging part of this shift, and this is what really pisses me off, is how it's fundamentally changed the relationship between creators and audiences. In the old system, for all its flaws, filmmakers had to earn your attention with every project. There was a direct transaction happening. Make something good, get rewarded. Make something that sucks, suffer the consequences. It was honest, even when it was harsh. But when success gets measured by mysterious engagement algorithms instead of transparent box office numbers, that relationship completely breaks down, and creators start optimizing for metrics instead of human connection. Which explains why so much modern entertainment feels like it was made by very sophisticated aliens who've been studying human behavior but don't quite get it. They know all the formulas. They've memorized the patterns. They understand that people like humor and romance and explosions and redemption arcs, but they're missing the indefinable thing that makes those patterns actually mean something to real people living real lives. And the most troubling part of all this is how this creative bankruptcy has started infecting our entire cultural relationship with storytelling. I feel like we're losing the shared language that stories used to provide, the common references that helped us make sense of the world together. But if everything reduces to content, culture disappears.

No, no, no. Nothing happens. Well, something happens. Well, why am I watching it? Because it's on TV. I want you to imagine spending $250 million to make a movie that's actively worse than something you made 26 years ago. Now, imagine being proud of this achievement. If you can do that, then congratulations. You're thinking like a Disney executive. Hollywood stopped being a creative industry in 2016 and became a graverobbing operation instead. We all remember being kids and thinking Disney was magic. And as it turns out, Disney remembered, too. Then they decided to dig up that magic, reanimate its corpse, and charge you $15 to watch it shamble around for 2 hours while making no eye contact. The company looked at their vault of beloved animated classics and thought, "You know what? These perfect movies need to be remade as soulless live-action cash grabs." Their first victim was Beauty and the Beast. But they didn't want a reimagining. Didn't want an update that had something new to say. It was just a straight remake, shot for shot, song for song, with just enough cosmetic changes to justify extending the copyright and calling it new. This is important because this was Disney, a company built on imagination, announcing to the world that they were officially out of ideas. They were going to spend $250 million making a worse version of something they'd already made perfectly the first time around.

But the thing that really broke my brain was that it worked. It made over a billion dollars worldwide. Audiences showed up in droves to watch Disney desecrate their own masterpiece. And Disney learned the most dangerous lesson possible: You can literally print money by strip-mining your own catalog. Thus began the great IP harvest, where every beloved property became a candidate for resurrection regardless of whether anyone actually wanted or needed it to exist. The Lion King got the same treatment, and they spent $260 million to make a version where all the characters looked like they were heavily sedated. Have you tried to watch that thing? It's like someone took one of the most emotionally powerful animated films ever made and sucked all the life out of it through a computer, but they kept doing it. Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Mulan. Each one more expensive than the last. Each one somehow missing the point of the original more completely. And every dollar Disney spent on these abominations is a dollar they didn't spend on new voices, fresh stories, the next generation of animators and storytellers. They could have funded literally dozens of original animated films for what they blew on The Lion King. But original films carry risk, and risk makes executives break out in hives.

This nostalgia addiction has spread through Hollywood like a zombie plague. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Terminator. They keep digging up these corpses and trying to shock them back to life with what the internet calls "member berries." Each resurrection is more pathetic than the last. But they can't stop themselves because creating something new needs courage. And courage has been systematically bred out of the modern studio executive. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny might be the most depressing example of this whole phenomenon. They spent $300 million to definitively prove that some characters should be left alone. Harrison Ford looked like he was being held hostage by his own legacy. The movie existed for exactly one reason: to wring the last possible drop of profit from a beloved character. Artistic merit, narrative necessity, basic human dignity. None of that mattered. Just one more trip to the well, even if the well was completely dry.

But we've also been trained to accept this mediocrity. We've become so starved for competent entertainment that we celebrate the merely adequate. "Well, at least it wasn't as bad as the last one," we tell ourselves, like it's something to be proud of. This learned helplessness has actually created the most vicious cycle imaginable. Studios point to declining box office numbers as proof that audiences don't want original content when really they've just forgotten how to make it. They've fired or alienated most of the creative talent capable of developing new properties. They've created development processes so bureaucratic and risk-averse that genuine innovation becomes virtually impossible. They've literally built a machine specifically designed to destroy creativity.

And I know what you're thinking: "We've also had good films in the last few years." And you're right. But the few breakout successes only highlight how completely broken everything has become. Everything Everywhere All at Once succeeded precisely because it was very weird and personal and completely unlike anything else in theaters. Parasite found massive audiences because it told a story that could only come from Bong Joon-ho's specific perspective and experiences. These movies were successful because they had something to say, not because they fit into a predetermined market category. But instead of learning from these successes, we keep seeing studios treating them as anomalies, flukes, lightning in a bottle that can't be replicated. They actually conclude that success is fundamentally unpredictable. So, why bother trying to create anything meaningful when you can just remake The Little Mermaid again?

And so, we've gotten to this bizarre point where the industry's risk-averse strategies are actively destroying their own market. People aren't abandoning theaters because they love their couches so much. They're fleeing because studios keep serving them reheated leftovers at premium prices while they insist it's fine dining. But the solution isn't really complicated, by the way. Start trusting storytellers again. Fund weird projects that might fail spectacularly or succeed beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Treat audiences like intelligent human beings rather than demographic data points to be manipulated. But that would need them to admit that their algorithm-driven approach to creativity has been a catastrophic failure. And that's exactly why they'll keep making the same mistakes until the whole system collapses under the weight of its own cynicism. But audiences are finally starting to notice the difference. Box office numbers are declining because they're tired of being insulted by lazy, cynical cash grabs. The jig is up. And maybe that's exactly what needs to happen for things to get better.