There's a story being told in Hollywood right now, and it's gaining momentum fast. The narrative goes like this: audiences never actually tired of franchises. They just wanted better ones. Spider-Man still pulls nearly $20 million in its third weekend. Odyssey has sailed past half a billion. The sequels and expanded universes aren't dying, the argument suggests, they're just evolving. This trend is being sold as inevitable. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.
Don't get me wrong. Strong box office numbers for established properties are real data points. They matter. But the conclusion Hollywood is drawing from them concerns me, because it sidesteps the harder questions about what's actually happening in our theatrical market.
The first problem with the "franchise fatigue is dead" narrative is that it confuses survival with thriving. Yes, big tent-pole films with recognizable IP still attract audiences. But at what cost? Theater counts for smaller films have contracted. Mid-budget originals have become endangered species. When audiences show up for Spider-Man, they're making a choice, but that choice increasingly exists within a narrower menu of options.
The second problem is timing. We're looking at a very specific moment. The recent strikes ended. Production pipelines are normalizing. Audiences are returning to theaters after pandemic disruption. Of course the franchises are performing well right now. But this recovery period doesn't prove that audiences have fundamentally rejected their earlier skepticism about superhero saturation and sequel culture. It just proves that when the product pipeline clears and marketing budgets deploy, the big players still win. That's not vindication of the model. That's just market gravity.
What troubles me most is how this narrative is being weaponized in industry conversations. Studios are already using it to justify greenlighting decisions. More Spider-Man spinoffs are in development. More extended universes are being planned. More IP-based projects are greenlit. The lesson being absorbed isn't "make better sequels." It's "keep making sequels, just keep them big enough to matter."
Meanwhile, the actual story buried in these numbers tells a different tale. Practical Magic 2 sparked merchandise enthusiasm, sure, but that tells us audiences are hungry for *specific kinds* of stories and experiences, not necessarily that they want more of everything with a familiar title. The excitement around it wasn't purely nostalgic. There was something else there: permission to explore a particular aesthetic, a particular tone, a particular kind of female-centered storytelling. That's different from generic franchise obligation.
The box office is also telling us that scale and spectacle still command premium pricing and attendance. But that was always true. The real question is what's happening in the middle. What percentage of theatrical revenue now comes from the top ten films versus the top 50? How many original properties are making money, and at what distribution scale? Those answers matter far more than whether Spider-Man's third weekend held strong.
Here's what I think is actually happening: the theatrical market is polarizing. The biggest franchises are entrenched and performing well. Everything else is fighting for scraps. That's not "franchise fatigue is dead." That's market consolidation dressed up as vindication.
The studios selling the "it was never the franchises, it was just bad execution" story have a vested interest in that narrative. They have investments in existing IP. They have corporate structures built around exploitation of known properties. Of course they want us to believe the model works.
But believing that requires ignoring the massive ecosystem of storytelling we've lost, the filmmakers we're not funding, and the audiences who've stopped going to theaters because the menu stopped serving them.
That's not inevitable. It's a choice. And we should call it what it is.