We’re Living Through the Golden Age of Bad Sequels — and Honestly? Good.

There is a genre of take, and you have read it a thousand times, that goes: cinema is dead, everything is a sequel, Hollywood has run out of ideas, and we are all doomed to a beige eternity of Part Fours. It is a satisfying take. It is also, I think, exactly backwards — a case of mistaking the weather for the climate, and the noise for the signal.

Yes, the sequels are bad. Gloriously, confidently bad. But bad sequels are not new, and they are not a symptom of decline. They are the toll the industry has always paid to keep the lights on — and right now, that toll is buying us something genuinely good if you know where to look.

The sequels are the subsidy

Here’s the mechanism nobody in the doom camp wants to sit with. The forgettable franchise entry is not competing with the great original film for a slot. It is funding it. The nine-figure sequel is the financial cover that lets a studio greenlight the strange, mid-budget, no-IP swing that will end up on everyone’s best-of-the-decade list. Kill the bad sequel and you don’t get more masterpieces; you get a nervous studio that greenlights nothing.

Every era has its cash-grab garbage. We only remember the previous eras by their masterpieces because time already did the sorting for us.

That’s the trick memory plays. We compare today’s full slate — sequels, cash-grabs and gems all jumbled together — against a curated highlight reel of the past, where the era’s equivalent junk has been quietly forgotten. It’s not a fair fight. Give it thirty years and the same sorting will happen to now.

The actual thing to worry about

So no, the bad sequel isn’t the crisis. If you want something to actually fret over, fret about the rewatch — the way the culture keeps re-consuming what it already loves instead of risking something new. But the sequels? Let them come. They’re paying for the good stuff, and in a decade you won’t remember a single one of them anyway.