Ever since Halloween had its soft reboot in 2018, requels have become a staple in Hollywood horror franchises.

From the smashing success of the two Radio Silence Scream films to the critically acclaimed gorefest Saw X, it’s clear that this trend is fertile grounds for studios to rake in profit. 2025 proved exactly that; we’re only halfway through the year, but there’s already three requels—Final Destination: Bloodlines, 28 Years Later, and I Know What You Did Last Summer—with a handful more to come.

Following in the footsteps of the other legacy sequels, I Know What You Did Last Summer brings together a cast of Gen-Z actors and stars from the original 90’s flick (and its sequels). In true requel nature, the film’s biggest appeal is its nostalgia, whether it’s iconic set pieces, cheap callbacks, or regurgitated sound bites that often fall flat. Save for the big swing it took in its third act, there’s nothing revolutionary about this installment, which renders itself a diluted version of its 1997 predecessor.

It’s not a fault that only affects slashers. Disney has been guilty of doing this nostalgia-bait with the slew of live-action remakes that show no signs of stopping. Why would they, if each new release, save for a couple outliers, becomes a box office hit? Even with horrid changes that bastardized the 2002 animated counterpart’s messaging, Lilo & Stitch (2025) still grossed over $1 billion worldwide.

The occasional “We want something original” outcry isn’t uncommon; yet, these seemingly loud demands are met with louder rejection. Sinners barely made $400 million even after it’s heralded as Ryan Coogler’s magnum opus and a major Oscars contender. Pixar’s Elio was a commercial flop, unable to live up to the studio’s box office domination with Inside Out 2 a year prior, as it went up against How to Train Your Dragons, F1, and the umpteenth Superman film. It’s the same fate that befell the studio’s original features since Coco while intellectual properties like Toy Story and Incredibles raked in billions.

Amidst all this, one thing becomes clear: original films are dying, and major Hollywood studios could be less interested in producing them.

The worldwide box office from the past five years is proof—most top earners are sequels, franchise installments, or adaptations. If this trend continues, we might as well be seeing the end of creativity in Hollywood.

Many of the Big Five studios’s newer films are losing their artistic identity, rendered as cash cows to be milked for maximum profit. Take Mean Girls (2024) for example; an empty echo of the 2004 cult classic, a diluted reproduction of the Broadway staging, and a 112-minute ad for e.l.f. Cosmetics. Or the recent Jurassic World Rebirth, which adds nothing new to the legacy of its six predecessors.

In 1974, Amos Vogel published what became an influential work in cinema literature, Film as a Subversive Art, which chronicles over 600 projects that pushed the boundaries of visual language, storytelling, and subject matter. In Paul Cronin’s 2004 documentary based on this book, he said, “Subversive art makes you look at things in a new and very different way. It disrupts. It destroys, and thereby builds up new realities and new truths.”

It’s an outlook that’s pertinent in viewing today’s cinema culture, when most major Hollywood studios are risk-averse. Yet, if we look at the current social media landscape, homogenization is the trend nowadays. With the internet reading algorithms and creating aesthetics, society becomes more and more uniform—think how one viral trend is all everyone can talk about for a week. Brands and creators capitalize on it, and in two week’s time, it’s oversaturated and people are over it. But it’s the type of herd mentality that our society is imprisoned by, and the film industry is replicating this.

It doesn’t help that pop culture—fashion, beauty, and even advertising—are circling back to the Y2K era. This bleeds into music, whether it’s an evocation of the sonic genres, music video homages, or even direct references. So it’s à propos that major studios are also resurrecting films from that time period and weaponizing the behavior of buying nostalgia.

Without any new, revolutionary films to define this generation, a lot of us fall back to the classics we know and love from the 90s and 2000s.

Paired with studios’ fears of fresh and risky creative visions, it will continue to create this loop of cause and effect that always favors the continuity of existing IPs instead of original features. That’s why this year, we’re seeing sequels to seemingly standalone movies like Freaky Friday, The Devil Wears Prada, and My Best Friend’s Wedding, on top of TV revivals of Sex and the City and Legally Blonde. There’s little space left for new ideas and stories to be told—rife grounds for creative, boundary-pushing experimentation—which poses a financial risk for Hollywood studios in an increasingly capitalist era.

Considering film presents itself as a reflection of society during a certain time period, the 2025 era falls flat as a mere refraction of the ‘90s and 2000s, offering barely anything new to the zeitgeist. Cinema captures what society loves, fears, and thinks; does that mean today’s society loves the long-gone past and fears creative originality?