I am a huge fan of both the big and small screens, but, lately, I feel like a time traveller dropped in a dystopian nightmare where the fan favourite franchises of yesteryear have been twisted into grotesque parodies.
This decline isn’t merely about reboots—there is a death of genuine risk-taking in Hollywood. Fight Club is a good place to start—this film had its protagonist beating himself up in corporate bathrooms while delivering anti-consumerist sermons. Today’s so-called ‘edgy’ films seem to think dropping an occasional F-bomb constitutes rebellion.
Or take American History X—it didn’t just show racism; it brutally dissected it with a rusty scalpel. Modern social commentary feels like it’s been neutered by committee, every rough edge sanded down until the message is as dangerous as a plastic spoon in a padded room.
It feels like the characters I cherished have been kidnapped and replaced by their charisma- bereft clones, their soul vacuumed out and replaced with marketable mush. Look at every “mature” franchise deranged recently: The Boys started as a brutal takedown of superhero worship but now feels increasingly like the same corporate product it was meant to mock. The new Hellraiser stripped away Barker’s sadomasochistic horror for PG-13 thrills. The Batman danced around the edge of darkness but couldn’t commit to the genuine psychological horror of Moore’s or Miller’s vision.
Even John Wick now feels increasingly sanitised—more video game than the raw revenge thriller it started as. Deadpool 3 being squeezed into the Disney machine is like watching a rebellious teen being forced into a school uniform. The recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre tried social commentary but ended up as toothless as a vegan butcher.
Each “reboot” follows the same pattern: promise maturity, deliver mediocrity. And it’s not just genre stuff. Remember when Scorsese showed us real gangster life in Goodfellas? Today, we get sanitised mafia stories that feel like they’re written by AI based on a Wikipedia page.
Biopics have become particularly egregious—from Elvis to Bohemian Rhapsody, every rough edge of those two debauchery lifestyles got polished into family-friendly montages. Even war films, once unflinching in their depiction of conflict, now feel like recruiting videos with better special effects.
Then there’s the ill-fated attempt to resurrect Marvel’s Blade franchise—an endeavour as doomed as Dracula’s daylight funeral. Blade, in its ’90s glory, was a cinematic revelation. As a gritty, R-rated spectacle, it dared to merge complex anti-heroes with a darkly humorous edge, back when superheroes were more neon than noir.
Now, we witness the declawing of legends—Wolverine reduced from a berserker rage to a quip machine, The Terminator has gone from a chilling horror-thriller to a neutered spectacle, and the Alien franchise devolved into an unrecognisable mess. It’s like watching a wolf pack domesticated into poodles.
Fast-forward to today, and the Blade reboot’s chaotic production, plagued by delays, rewrites, and budget cuts, mirrors an industry worshipping at the altar of quantity over quality; in the process, sacrificing the sacred cow of creative integrity for the almighty dollar.
The original Blade was a seismic shift, proving audiences could handle adult-oriented superhero narratives. Yet here we are, with modern Marvel unable to muster the courage to roar—a once-mighty lion now a mewling house cat.
The Blade reboot debacle is a microcosm of Hollywood’s broader decay. Studios, in their relentless pursuit of mass-market, family-friendly fluff, have smothered the sparks that once ignited these tales.
Mahershala Ali’s casting should have been a triumph—this was the man who could command a screen. But that promise died a slow death amidst endless script changes and tonal shifts, akin to watching a thriller morph into a farcical comedy.
It’s as if Marvel is too timid to invest in Blade’s raw intensity. These script rewrites aren’t about refinement; they’re a testament to the modern studio’s cowardice. Each revision dilutes the concept until it resembles a watered-down cocktail. Ali’s extraordinary talent is wasted in a system where marketability trumps artistic merit.
In this era, franchises are hurriedly resurrected to satiate content quotas, with thoughtful storytelling and character legacy tossed into the cinematic scrapyard. RoboCop—once a biting satire, now a generic action shell. Predator—once a muscular thriller, now a CGI-infested spectacle.
Each franchise falls victim to the same sanitising machine—a factory churning out neutered narratives. The art of storytelling is fading into oblivion, and with it, the magic that once ensorcelled audiences. Beloved franchises are reduced to hollow shells, each revival following the same tired formula—grand announcements, hollow promises to honour the original, and then a systematic dismantling of everything that made it special in the first place. Hollywood’s risk aversion is a farce—like watching a tightrope walker crawl across the floor.
Enter the streaming era, a dystopian wonderland where “content factory syndrome” reigns supreme. Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, and their ilk race to fill their libraries, treating art like widgets on an assembly line. Their recent output: Red Notice—expensive yet forgettable, like a Rolex made of plastic. The Gray Man—boasting the budget of a small nation’s GDP with the charisma of a screensaver. 6 Underground—Michael Bay without the insanity, akin to decaf coffee in a monster truck. Bright attempted edginess, but played it safer than a kindergarten sandbox. This obsession with quantity has wreaked havoc on storytelling depth, reducing it to algorithmic checkboxes.
This creative drought won’t last forever—it can’t. Eventually, audiences will tire of empty calories and demand substance.
We’re already seeing signs of audience fatigue with declining streaming subscriptions. But the real cost isn’t just in the mediocre content we’re getting now—it’s in the great films and shows that will never exist because they didn’t fit the algorithm’s parameters. How many potential classics are we sacrificing at the altar of “safe” content? The irony is as rich as it is bitter: in the quest to capture audience attention, we’re losing the very essence that made storytelling captivating in the first place.
Yet, in the depths of this despair, there lingers a faint glimmer of hope—a hope that, one day, the industry will awaken from its algorithm-induced slumber and remember the power of a story well told. Until then, we are left to wander this barren cultural wasteland, yearning for the days when films dared to challenge, provoke, and inspire.
