Ok, it’s official. 2025 was the year creativity ‘seemingly’ died. The best selling movies -like Zootopia 2, Jurasic World, and Mission Impossible 8- were all sequels, OR they were remasters like Lilo & Stich and How to train your dragon. Similarly, the best selling video games: -Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4, Madden 26- were all big franchises or remasters like ‘Oblivion Remastered.’ Meanwhile, names we have seen for decades, like Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, & Bruno Mars once again dominated the music charts.
And no, 2025 was not an exceptional year. Take a look at this chart. Thirty years ago, only about one quarter of top 20 movies were sequels, spinoffs, prequels or remakes. Now it’s close to 90%. Similarly, almost all of the top selling videogames now come from established franchises.
Even books show this very same trend: the share of top-selling titles written by an already famous author is increasing each year.
But wasn’t the internet supposed to do the opposite? In the early 2000s, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson famously predicted that -as the internet made it cheaper and cheaper to send songs, movies and games to customers around the world- this would enable niche creators to rise, while it would cause big studios to become LESS powerful. This theory, the theory of the long tail, was a beautiful idea: the democratization of culture.
So, what went wrong?
As always on Money & Macro, for this video we, a team of economists, went deep into the economics literature, and summarized all the key insights that can explain why big budget sequels are bigger than ever today and we ask the question if the rise of sequels reduced creativity, or if there’s actually a thriving long-tail of amazing niche content you don’t know about hiding below the surface.
But, to answer these questions, we first need to understand how the media used work
Ch1: The gatekeeper economics of the pre-internet media
Let’s go back to the 1980s.
Now, imagine you were a singer and wanted to earn a living with your passion. The odds would be stacked against you from the very beginning. First, you needed a studio filled with super expensive equipment to record your song. Second, to distribute your song, you needed a factory to press records. Third, these records then needed to be distributed to thousands of record shops. These record shops had limited shelf space. So, to convince shops to sell your record, you needed to have an existing relation, or prove you were already popular by getting air time on the radio, for which, again, you also needed the right connections.
In short, before asking consumers if they liked their content, aspiring creators first had to convince gatekeeper like record labels to give them a shot. If granted funding, they could record and distribute their music.
This system DID produce many songs, movies and games, that sold really well, AND were loved by both consumers and critics.
However, as you can imagine, this extra layers killed a lot of films, games and music that we would have loved. In fact, some of our most beloved cultural icons almost got stuck with the gatekeepers. For example, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter book was first rejected by 12 publishers before it was published by Bloomsburry. Heck, even the Beatles were rejected by nearly every major label in Europe before producer George Martin finally signed them in 1962.
So, of course, when (1) the costs of recording equipment fell lower and lower AND (2) the internet made distribution costs almost zero, Anderson’s long tail predictions about the rise of niche media and the fall of big, safe, blockbusters made total sense. Yet, here we are today with more blockbusters than ever.
So, again, what happened?
Ch2: The fall of the gatekeepers
The digital revolution would revolutionize the media industry in two main ways. First, the internet made distribution almost free overnight. Music and movies no longer had to be pressed onto CDs or DVDs and sold in physical stores. With a few clicks, songs and films could be downloaded straight onto an iPod or a laptop.
At first gatekeepers tried to hold back change, but after piracy platforms like Napster, the Piratebay and others devastated the revenue in all creative, and especially the music industry, record labels, publishers and others increasingly brought their content to legal online distribution platforms like Spotify, Netflix and Steam.
Second, digital technologies dramatically reduced the cost of creating art. Suddenly, you could shoot a movie on your iPhone or record music in a home studio using inexpensive microphones and software. This allowed many artists to self-fund their work and distribute it online to millions of people, effectively bypassing traditional gatekeepers.
So… yes, in the early days of the internet the long-tail looked to be coming true. As you can see here, in these graphs by economics professor Joel Waldfogel, the number of new songs added each year rose from about 50,000 in 1988 to nearly 350,000 by 2007. Meanwhile, the number of US made original films also exploded, along with self-published book titles, and television shows.
So, the first part of Anderson’s prediction, actually seems to have been true. Far lower production costs, and cheap distribution have led to an explosion in creativity. The long tail is there… But while the number of songs, movies, and shows exploded, people increasingly spent their money on consuming sequels and franchises rather than niche products.
But why?
In his research, professor Waldfogel, first looked at two obvious explanations. The first is that, while it could be true that many more creative products are made, the quality of these is actually really low. To test this hypothesis, Waldfogel looked at reviews. Are independent productions bad, therefore scoring lower review scores than big budget sequels and remakes? For music, this does NOT appear to be the case. Combining lists of best albums into a critic-based quality index, he finds that, while critics really love music from the 1970s, average appreciation for newer music remained stable after Napster revolutionized song distribution.
Meanwhile, TV shows seemingly only got better. This graph shows IMDB ratings for the top 25 released TV shows. As more TV shows were made, the average quality did not seem to suffer.
Finally, for video games, we can also see that as the years pass, independently developed games actually increasingly dominate top game lists by critics and audiences alike. Heck, even during the 2025 game awards, it was not best sellers like Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4 or Madden 26 that dominated the awards, but rather smaller self-published games like Silksong, Hades 2, and Clair Obscure expedition 33.
So, big budget franchises and remakes don’t sell more because they are objectively BETTER than independent productions. This brings us to Waldfogel’s second hypothesis, that independent productions are simply not finding their audience. Perhaps, they lack the marketing budget? Or perhaps, buyers are just increasingly nostalgic and risk averse?
No. Surprisingly, that does not appear to be the case. Independent productions are actually selling more and more! In the music industry independent labels were increasingly penetrating the Billboard top 200 during the early internet years.
Also, self-published books, such as most famously Fifty Shades of Grey, ARE in fact increasingly amongst the world’s best selling books.
Similarly, in film, independent movies accounted for about one-quarter of box office revenue in the 1990s, but by 2012 their share had risen to over 40 percent. Independent films also represented more than half of DVD sales.
Finally, on gaming platforms that are easiest to publish for, like Steam on the pc, independently developed games did account almost as much total revenue in 2024, as big budget productions.
This is why in his book, Waldfogel, does actually argue that the long-tail prediction was correct. The digital revolution DID in fact produce a golden age in media.
But the puzzle is still there.
If creativity HAS ACTUALLY flourished —then why do sequels, prequels, and franchises seem more dominant than ever? Why do blockbuster movies and AAA video games look increasingly repetitive?
To understand how both of these trends can be true at the same time, we need to understand a different mechanism that has transformed the media industry, which is
Ch3 Globalization and the economics of the superstar
Cultural markets are what economists call “superstar markets.” That is, every consumer has access to the best game, the best artist, and the best movie. Economists have observed that in THESE types of markets, the very best artists tend to become superstars.
To illustrate this principle, economist dr. Felix Koenig studied how the staggered rollout of television across the US transformed the fortunes of entertainers that used to play in bars or local venues, like dancers, musicians and comedians. In the 1940s, the distribution of earnings for these entertainers looked like this. Some artists were poor, some were rich, but most earned a decent normal wage.
After television became widespread in the 1970s, entertainers who once reached only small audiences in clubs could now reach the entire country, performing directly into people’s living rooms.
This transformed how audiences chose what to watch. With only a few channels to scan, viewers of course switched from a very funny comedian to the funniest one. As a result, the funniest comedians captured a disproportionate share of attention and became superstars, while merely funny comedians lost most of their audience to the superstars. Not surprisingly, by the 1970s, fewer comedians earned ordinary wages, while a small fraction became extraordinarily rich. THIS is the power of superstar markets.
This brings us back to the graphs from the introduction. Movies, video games, and books. INSIDE THE TOP 20, they all became more concentrated. This trend happened as digitalization happened and the internet became more popular. But, it also happened when another trend took place, the globalization of mass media, especially as the English language spread across the globe and Asia got a lot richer, creating many, MANY more consumers.
Indeed, as you can see here, for most of the twentieth century, Hollywood earned the majority of its box office revenue domestically, with international markets playing a secondary role. That pattern has now reversed. Today, most of theatrical revenue for major films comes from outside the United States and Canada, driven by the expansion of markets such as China and the growth of English speaking audiences across Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
This is where superstar economics fully comes into play.
Films that travel best across global markets tend to share certain characteristics: visual spectacle, familiar franchises, and instantly recognizable stars embedded within well-known cinematic universes. In this superstar environment, small differences in quality or recognition can have outsized effects. Securing a top-tier actor, a celebrated director, or cutting-edge CGI can significantly boost global box office performance.
However, this brings us to the final piece of the puzzle, this is all very expensive. So, as making top tier content became more expensive due to superstar economics, it also makes sense that investors increasingly demanded safe products. This can explain why IN THE TOP OF THE GLOBAL MARKET, we increasingly saw the production of spectacle high budget sequels, spin-offs and remakes.
So, globalization can explain why we see more and more concentration at the very top. If you want to play the blockbuster game, you need to invest more and more, and the safest way to do that is to focus on sequels and remakes. But, meanwhile, digitization and falling production costs can explain why we DO actually see an explosion of creativity. Creativity that is actually both reaching audiences and leading to critical acclaim.
Indeed, as you can see here for movies, we have seen more and more money available for cheap movies AND for blockbusters, but NOT for high value productions that CANNOT quite be blockbusters. Therefore, I’m happy to say that for this video, we have quite an optimistic conclusion.
Conclusion
No, 2025 was NOT a bad year for pop culture in general, just for the top 20. If, like me, YOU are fed up with sequels and remakes, then, actually there is a massive long-tail out there for every media category. For example, I really enjoy video games, and HONESTLY, I’m having more fun than ever. While I used to play blockbusters like Call of Duty when I was youngers, last year I really had just as much fun playing indie games on my SteamDeck like Hotline Miami, Ballatro, Brotato and Undertale.
On the other hand, for movies, I wouldn’t know where to look. Luckily, through making this video, I found out that my colleague, Alejandro is a real independent movie fan. He didn’t watch blockbuster remakes at all last year, just amazing titles like the Norwegian Sentimental Value, the Spanish Sirat and the Iranian It Was Just an Accident.
So, the real question, in my opinion, is actually, how do you find the long tail? Well, one of simplest ways to do this is luckily, right here on YouTube. Just use the search bar and type top 10 best independent games, movies, books, or songs of 2025 or… of all time, and there you’ll find that creativity hasn’t disappeared; it has split in two, with a vast, vibrant long tail of experimentation coexisting alongside a small number of highly optimized blockbusters that dominate our shared cultural spotlight.
But, yeah, that is my take, what do you think?
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