Has Hollywood Really Become Boring?

Numbers Do Not Prove Boredom, But They Show A Narrower Shelf

In North America, theatrical admissions were a little over 1.2 billion in 2019, before the pandemic. According to The Numbers, 2024 landed at about 760 million tickets, while 2025 remained around the high 700 millions.¹ Revenue alone can obscure the change because ticket prices have risen. Count the bodies in seats, and theaters have still not returned to the physical scale of 2019.

The top titles make the mood clearer. The 2024 North American box-office top 10 consisted of Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Wicked, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dune: Part Two, Twisters, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and Kung Fu Panda 4. Sequels, adaptations, a stage musical turned film, legacy sequels, established characters. Every one of them was something the audience already knew in some form.²

2025 did not look all that different. A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch, Superman, a new Jurassic World, Zootopia 2, the second part of Wicked, The Fantastic Four, How to Train Your Dragon, and an Avatar sequel all show how much of the upper tier is supported by existing IP. Ryan Coogler's Sinners stands out as an exception, which in itself says something: a large original film succeeding is now treated almost as an anomaly.³

What this shows is not quality itself. Existing-IP films can be good, and an original film is not automatically interesting. The issue is that the most visible theatrical shelf for Hollywood films is increasingly filled with the same kind of label.

When people say the films are boring, they may not be reacting only to one disappointing title. They may be seeing the repetition of the whole shelf.

IP Works As Insurance Before It Works As Story

A large studio film is not only dealing with two hours of a viewer's time. It carries production budgets, marketing costs, global releases, post-theatrical streaming value, merchandise, theme parks, and the possibility of another installment. Under those conditions, a thing people already recognize will naturally be easier to approve than a story no one has heard of, however interesting it may be.

The film reassures before it surprises. The logo comes first. The character comes first. The connection to the previous work comes first. Recognition arrives before discovery.

There is nothing wrong with that pleasure. The return of a beloved character can feel like a festival. But when that becomes the default shape of the blockbuster, cinematic time stiffens. Somewhere behind the image, there is always a corridor leading to the next installment. A dead character might return. The ending stops being an ending and becomes a landing for the next announcement.

Before an aftertaste can settle, you hear the machinery of series management.

Audiences Are Not Simply Rejecting New Stories

It is also hard to say audiences dislike new stories. In a YouGov survey of 2,243 U.S. adults conducted in July 2025, 32% said they typically prefer movies that tell new stories with new characters, 5% preferred returning to existing stories and characters such as sequels and reboots, and 54% said they liked both equally.⁴

Those numbers make the easy explanation hard to sustain. It is not simply that everyone wants sequels, so sequels get made. Audiences are not rejecting existing IP, but they are not asking only for it either. Many people want both the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Younger audiences do not seem to have simply abandoned film, either. UCLA's Center for Scholars & Storytellers reported in its 2025 Teens and Screens findings that, among respondents aged 10 to 24, 57% said they watch traditional media more than older generations think they do. The report also found that, if money and logistics were no constraint, seeing a new movie in theaters was the top-ranked weekend activity for the second year in a row.⁵ The movie theater has not been completely discarded by young audiences.

But they are no longer watching film only where previous generations watched it. The same UCLA article says 78.4% watch TV or movies on YouTube or social platforms at least sometimes. Deloitte's 2025 survey also found that 56% of Gen Z respondents and 43% of millennials find social media content more relevant than traditional TV shows and movies.⁶

The audience has not vanished. It has scattered. Theaters, streaming, YouTube, TikTok, games, clips, review videos, conversations with friends. Film now circulates not only as a complete work, but as fragments. In that environment, when theaters try to pull audiences back, the temptation to lean on a huge familiar name becomes hard to resist.

That reliance, in turn, makes the theatrical shelf feel narrower.

Maybe The Problem Is The Entrance, Not The Work

There are still interesting films inside Hollywood. Horror keeps finding ways to reach the body directly on lower budgets. Places like A24, NEON, Searchlight, and Focus Features continue to release strange mid-sized and smaller films. If streaming and festivals are included, American cinema still has a lot of voices.

But those films sit a little apart from what many people picture when they hear "Hollywood film": the row of large releases taking the biggest screen at a multiplex on the weekend.

So the question of whether Hollywood has become boring needs to be split in two.

Hollywood filmmakers have not collectively lost their senses. Film itself has not suddenly weakened as a form. But the Hollywood that appears most visibly in theaters has tilted toward safer, pre-explained, easily extendable works. That tilt shows up as audience fatigue.

"Boring" is a blunt verdict when applied to individual films. As a description of the unease created by contemporary blockbusters, though, it feels fairly honest.

What I want is those first few seconds of entering a world I do not know. The screen opens, and a voice or place appears without being protected by a name I already recognize. The story moves a little slower than my prediction, then slightly off from the direction I expected. That instability used to sit well with the darkness of a theater.

We still cannot prove that Hollywood films have truly become boring. But there are reasons they can look that way. What is guaranteed before the film begins has become larger than what remains after it ends. Under that weight, the screen feels a little less bright.