History Repeats Itself or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Another Late-’70s Media Reckoning

Cultural industries rarely collapse all at once. They fray, deny, overproduce, and only then reset. What often gets remembered as a single “moment” is usually a process stretched across a decade. That’s true of Hollywood in the late 20th century, and it’s true of our current media landscape across gaming, film, and comics. Periods of cultural anxiety often masquerade as periods of decline. When institutions wobble, output shrinks, and money tightens, it’s easy to mistake contraction for collapse. But history suggests something else, that these moments are not endings. They are resets and right now, across comics, games, film, and streaming, we are approaching a structural position eerily similar to the late 1970s.

To understand why this moment is quietly promising, you have to look at what’s actually failing, and why.

When the Old Lies Stopped Working

By the mid-to-late 1970s, Hollywood was bloated, confused, and hemorrhaging money. The studio system had lost its grip on audiences. Safe bets weren’t safe, designed to offend no one, they were failing. Then like now, audiences weren’t rejecting cinema they were rejecting artistic indifference disguised as mass appeal. What emerged from that chaos was clarity. Studios, suddenly unable to subsidize endless mediocrity, were forced to back projects that knew exactly what they were. 

By the late 1960s, Hollywood was still spending like the old studio system worked but audiences were already drifting away. Studios poured money into prestige productions designed to feel broadly appealing, culturally respectable, and impossible to dismiss. These films were increasingly out of step with the cultural mood surrounding them. Large-scale musicals and roadshow epics like Doctor Dolittle (1967), Hello, Dolly! (1969), and Paint Your Wagon (1969) reflected an institutional belief that scale, prestige, and technical polish still carried automatic cultural authority. Some underperformed outright. Others became symbolic of an increasingly strained logic. These films didn’t struggle because they were poorly made. Most were made with enormous craft and confidence. The problem was that they were speaking in a language the culture had stopped conversing in. By the time Lost Horizon arrived in 1973, a last vestige of what came before, New Hollywood was already reshaping American cinema.

A new breed of film had emerged cheaper, sharper, more personal films were connecting powerfully with audiences. The French Connection (1971) rejected polish in favor of grit. The Conversation (1974) made paranoia its subject instead of spectacle. Taxi Driver (1976) was openly alienating and unforgettable. These films did not succeed because studios suddenly valued art. They succeeded because no one knew what “safe” meant anymore. When the old formulas failed, executives backed directors not out of bravery, but confusion. The auteur era was born from institutional collapse, not enlightenment. This was the true crisis period, the point where the system lost its internal logic. By the end of the 70's, Hollywood could no longer continue operating the 60's way. The old studio model was dead. Something had to replace it. Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) did not end the crisis by restoring confidence in prestige filmmaking. They ended it by introducing a new organizational logic, high-concept, repeatable, scalable entertainment. The industry stabilized, but only after discarding the assumptions that had governed it for decades. The blockbuster era didn’t overthrow New Hollywood, it was its industrial evolution, director-driven cinema operating at a scale large enough to stabilize a broken system. The failure came later, when studios mistook the scaffold for the source of meaning and tried to reproduce scale without authorship. Sound familiar? 

The Streaming Boom Was Our ’60s Studio System

The last decade of media mirrors the decades before that reckoning, cheap capital, infinite growth assumptions, audience numbers replacing taste, focus groups replacing editorial judgment, and IP replacing meaning. The logic was simple, volume would mask failure. If something didn’t work, bury it under ten more releases. That model only functions when failure is cheap enough to absorb. Blumhouse can survive it because the budgets stay low; five misses can be offset by one hit. Streaming tried to apply that same logic at an entirely different scale, and for a while, the illusion held. But now the lie is exposed. Streamers are pulling back, orders are down, budgets are being scrutinized, layoffs are widespread, and price hikes are driving churn. The era of “we’ll fix it in post / marketing / Season 2” is over.

Why Tight Money Doesn’t Kill Bold Work, It Kills Mediocrity 

At first glance, it sounds backward to say that tighter budgets favor distinct voices. Shouldn’t companies become more cautious? They do but caution no longer means blandness. In the boom years, “safe” meant four-quadrant appeal, broad, neutral tone, familiar IP sanded smooth, endless development. That model only works when money is cheap enough to absorb waste. When capital tightens, the most dangerous thing a project can be is unclear. Middle of the road work is expensive. It requires heavy marketing to explain itself, endless rewrites to please imagined audiences, executive oversight to correct indecision, and franchise framework to justify existence. Distinct voices, by contrast, are cheaper. Clear intent reduces development friction. Strong POV attracts talent organically. Identity markets itself through word of mouth. A defined audience creates a predictable floor. When money gets tight, studios don’t chase “riskier” projects, they stop subsidizing mediocrity. Clarity becomes the safest bet, even when it looks strange, sharp, or uncompromising. 

To be clear though In the late 1970s and early 1980s, franchise scaffolding didn’t hollow out cinema, it stabilized it. Today, that same mechanism may be the force accelerating its collapse. It's important to understand the difference. When films like Jaws and Star Wars arrived, franchises were not the default logic of the industry. They were an intervention. Hollywood, emerging from a decade of institutional confusion, needed a way to restore audience trust and reduce executive paralysis. Franchises provided that clarity. They offered high-concept premises, legible stakes, and repeatable value at a moment when the system had lost confidence in its own judgment. Crucially, franchise scaffolding in the late ’70s was additive, not substitutive. These films coexisted with mid-budget dramas, adult thrillers, and director-driven genre work. The scaffold supported strong individual entries; it did not replace them. Scarcity amplified their power. Releases were infrequent, cultural digestion time existed, and sequels felt like events rather than obligations. That context no longer exists. Today, franchise scaffolding is not a stabilizer, it is the default production logic. Individual works are no longer allowed to stand on their own. They exist to service an ever-expanding structure, to set up future installments, maintain continuity, or justify the existence of the larger universe. Resolution is deferred, risk is postponed, meaning is diluted, and what once signaled trust now signals homework. Where franchises once clarified value, they now obscure it. Weak entries are reframed as “setup.” Audience disengagement is blamed on external factors rather than narrative failure. Volume replaces anticipation, and saturation destroys scarcity. The scaffold, once a support, becomes a weight. This marks the central inversion of the current moment. In the late ’70s, franchises reduced risk by simplifying the question of what mattered. Today, they increase risk by preventing that question from ever being answered. The implication is sobering but necessary, the next stabilization of media will not come from ever-larger universes or more elaborate continuity. Those tools already did their historical work, and overstayed their usefulness. The coming reset will favor stories that are allowed to exist without justification, resolution without deferral, and identity without scaffolding. History did not repeat itself here, we overcorrected. Systems tend to break not when solutions fail, but when those solutions become dogma.

Comics Are Already There

This is why comics feel ahead of the curve right now. The Absolute Universe at DC. The Ultimate line and X-Men resets at Marvel. Born not from nostalgia, but from editorial admissions that the house style failed. That continuity became a cage and smoothing everything into sameness drained meaning. What’s replacing it looks a lot like the post-’70s correction, closed or semi-closed runs, Genre-forward storytelling, artists and writers with real stylistic authority, and editors stepping back instead of sanding down. When resources shrink, you don’t want committees. You want people who know exactly what story they’re telling.

Games and Film Are Lagging But Following the Same Curve

If film is relearning the lesson of the late ’70s slowly, games are learning it violently. For most of the 2010s, AAA gaming operated under assumptions strikingly similar to Hollywood’s late-’60s studio logic… ever-larger budgets, ever-broader appeal, franchise continuity treated as safety, and retention metrics slowly replacing authored experience. Like the roadshow epics and prestige musicals of that earlier era, these projects were often technically impressive, professionally produced, and strategically smoothed, but they are increasingly failing through either indifference, exhaustion, or abandonment.

The AAA “safe bet” has become the riskiest bet. These games rely on seasonal roadmaps, live-service hooks, and endlessly extensible design, but that kind of safety is capital-intensive by design. Budgets can exceed $200–300 million. Development cycles stretch to seven or eight years. When failure comes, it is catastrophic. Concord (2024), Highguard (2026), and Anthem (2019) all collapsed under the weight of live-service ambition without a coherent core. Redfall (2023) shipped unfinished and unfocused, then was quickly abandoned. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024) attempted to graft live-service scaffolding onto a single-player studio identity and alienated both audiences it sought to combine. Halo Infinite (2021) launched with strong fundamentals but faltered under a roadmap-driven model that eroded momentum rather than sustaining it.

So why the failure? Because Scale and polish just don’t mean what they used to. All these games struggled because they felt managed instead of authored.

The most telling sign of crisis is not just AAA failure, but the disappearance of the middle. In the 2000s and early 2010s, major publishers still supported a healthy tier of mid-budget, tightly scoped games like BioShock (2007), Dead Space (2008), Mirror’s Edge (2008), and Dishonored (2012). That tier has largely vanished from major publishers’ portfolios. Studios are now forced upward into existential AAA bets or pushed downward into indie survival, mirroring the mid-’70s film moment when studios no longer trusted the economics of the middle and lurched between bloated epics and cheap experiments.

But distinct voices are filling the vacuum. As institutional confidence erodes, clarity reasserts itself, often from outside the center. Games with strong authorial identity, even when abrasive or hostile, are finding devoted audiences. Disco Elysium (2019) rejected power fantasy almost entirely and replaced it with interiority, failure, and politics. Cruelty Squad (2021) and Mouthwashing (2024) embrace ugliness, discomfort, and systemic satire rather than accessibility. Old-school genres, CRPGs, and boomer shooters are having a field day because they offer strong writing, clear loops, and a blessed refusal to drown every idea in feature creep. These games are not “safe,” but they are clear. They know what they are, and they know who they’re for. Like Taxi Driver or Mean Streets in the mid-’70s, they succeed not because they appeal broadly, but because they feel alive in a landscape of managed experiences. By “managed experience,” I mean work that feels optimized around retention, monetization, future content, and brand safety before it feels shaped by a creative point of view. This is not a claim that small is good or that AAA is doomed. It’s a structural observation. Large-scale games can survive, just as blockbusters survived the ’70s, but only when the scaffold supports something solid. When franchises replace substance, roadmaps replace vision, and engagement metrics replace authorship, scale accelerates collapse instead of preventing it.

The modern AAA crisis is not one of ambition. It is one of indefinite deferral: stories that never end, systems that never resolve, experiences designed to last forever but mean very little moment to moment. In the mid-1970s, Hollywood temporarily ceded control to directors because executives no longer knew how to define safety. Something similar is happening now in games, unevenly and painfully. The audience is fragmenting, the middle is gone, and the old logic no longer works. In that vacuum, games that are legible, authored, and unapologetically specific are doing what bloated systems cannot, earning attention instead of demanding retention. This is not the end of games. It is the end of pretending that size alone guarantees relevance. Just as in the late ’70s, the next stabilization will not come from bigger universes, but from projects allowed to know exactly what they are, even when that knowledge makes them difficult or uncomfortable.

Out of the "Golden" Age and Into the Sorting Age

The late ’70s weren’t easy. Many careers ended. Many studios collapsed. There were fewer safety nets and less money to go around. But the creators who survived weren’t interchangeable. They were legible. You could tell who they were and what they cared about. That’s where we are again. More projects will fail. More people will wash out or perhaps actually find something to say. The floor will drop. But what remains won’t be smoothed into nothingness. It will be rugged and wonderful. This moment feels bleak only if you’re attached to the old lies, that scale equals success, that mass appeal equals safety, and that neutrality equals longevity. Those ideas didn’t survive the late ’70s. They won’t survive this moment either. What comes next won’t be universal. It will be precise and that’s why, beneath the contraction, beneath the panic, this year’s media landscape is quietly full of possibility.

2026 looks better than 2025 to me plain and simple. Grand Theft Auto VI stands less as a victory lap than as the final expression of maximalist design, arriving into a market that can no longer support endless scale, while titles like Judas and Exodus explicitly reject live-service extensibility in favor of authored, finite experiences, an admission, baked into their design, that the service model doesn't work for everything.

Marvel, DC, and the big franchises are not going away. But what changes the equation is what’s arriving alongside them. In theaters, 2026 is crowded with director-driven, tonally committed genre films that don’t pretend to be anything else: Sequels and IP's still abound but mid/low budget horror is having a heyday (a sign of the times) films like Hokum, Obsession, and The Backrooms. Meanwhile, IP long guarded by the suits is finally making its way into new auteurs’ hands. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and the new Resident Evil point toward a simple truth the industry keeps forgetting… artists tend to understand art better than the businessmen understand audiences. Evil Dead Burn belongs in that conversation too, though Evil Dead learned this lesson back in 2013, ahead of the curve, fittingly, since Sam Raimi never let go of his deadite baby.

Amazon is going all in on gaming adaptations that may actually be good? Expect that to be the new comic book film, speaking of which comic book films are finally being forced to show their hand in the same year that original, mid-budget genre work is proving it can still cut through. On the franchise side, 2026 is stacked with stress tests: Avengers: Doomsday, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Supergirl, Amazon's take on Spider-Noir and HBO’s Lanterns represent a last, concentrated effort to make shared-universe logic feel purposeful again rather than obligatory.

Comic book sales going into 2026 are looking remarkably healthy, while they mirror the same recalibration Hollywood is going through with DCs ongoing Black Label and their Vertigo Relaunch this year. There are also explicit attempts to enhance continuity by re-centering around creator voices as seen in the continued success and investment in Absolute Universe and DC's new Next Level initiative happening later this year. Color me a cynic but I'm excited for more Marvel and DC Crossovers. Something that too signals the dire economic straits the media landscape is currently in but one that breeds wild art and stories.

Funnily enough, even though the streaming era radically altered television, how it’s financed, distributed, and consumed, it may be the medium most tethered to its old incentives. The traditional pilot season is gone. Binge drops replaced weekly rollouts and yet the underlying calculus feels stubbornly familiar. For every Stranger Things or Severance that justifies the streaming age, there are twenty Mindhunters, beautifully crafted, critically respected, culturally discussed, and ultimately abandoned because they didn’t justify indefinite expansion, too pricey, not “enough” viewers. Meanwhile, plenty of deeply forgettable series limp into third and fourth seasons because they perform adequately on retention metrics. Cheap and enough viewers. The boom didn’t necessarily create better television; it created more of it. In that abundance, extraordinary work was bound to appear. But abundance also insulated mediocrity. Distribution changed but when you look closely not much else did.

The releases this year across games, film, and comics are no longer pretending that growth, scale, or infinite extension are viable. Like the late 1970s, the industry has been forced, by cost, by fatigue, by audience indifference, to rediscover a simpler truth, that work survives not by being everything at once, but by being something specific all the way through. The hope is not that the system recovers but becomes something new with shades of the old. That’s why 2026 matters. It’s the first year where franchise media and original genre work are no longer operating in separate lanes, the comparison is unavoidable, simultaneous, and public. The lanes are still there but they're starting to blur and just like the late 1970s, when the system could no longer hide indifference behind polish, the outcome won’t be decided by which projects are bigger, but by which ones actually know what they are and that fills me with hope.