Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct. People have a lot of explanations for this, but they're all incomplete because they don't realize the same thing is happening everywhere. An oligopoly has conquered all of popular culture.
In television, for example, it used to be pretty rare for two versions of the same show to appear twice at the top of the viewership charts. Now it's common.
The oligopoly has come to music, too: the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades (chart cred: Azhad Syed, towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-ana…)
And literature. Until 1990, it was pretty remarkable for one author to have multiple top-10 bestselling books. Now it happens almost every year.
And video games. These days, basically *all* bestselling games are franchise installments.
Why is this happening? I think there are four important factors:
experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-…
Most importantly, I don't think we've realized what all these sequels and spinoffs are doing to us. It's not that they're bad––some are great! But movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, and they can't do that by feeding us reruns forever
btw if you liked this, I do this every other Tuesday on my blog experimentalhistory.substack.com
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