Here's Hollywood's favorite business strategy: find something that worked, do it again, and keep doing it until the audience stops showing up. Then wait 10 years and reboot it.
It's not a creative strategy. It's a strip-mining operation. Find a vein of gold (a hit movie), extract everything you can (sequels, prequels, spinoffs), abandon the mine when it's empty (franchise fatigue), then come back later with new equipment (reboot) to see if there's anything left.
The Diminishing Returns
Nearly every franchise follows the same trajectory:
Jurassic Park:
- Jurassic Park (1993) — $63M budget, $1.03B gross, 92% RT
- The Lost World (1997) — $73M, $618M, 54% RT
- Jurassic Park III (2001) — $93M, $368M, 49% RT
- Jurassic World (2015) — $150M, $1.67B, 71% RT (nostalgia reboot bump)
- Fallen Kingdom (2018) — $170M, $1.31B, 47% RT
- Dominion (2022) — $185M, $1B, 29% RT
The pattern: budgets go up, quality goes down, and eventually even the box office follows. The original was a masterpiece made for $63M. The sixth installment cost 3x more and was universally panned.
This isn't unique to Jurassic Park. It's the pattern for nearly every franchise. Pirates of the Caribbean. Transformers. Fast and Furious. Fantastic Beasts. Indiana Jones. The first one works because someone had a vision. Everything after exists because an executive had a spreadsheet.
The IP Obsession
Studios now value IP (intellectual property) above everything else. Above directors. Above writers. Above original ideas. The greenlight question isn't "is this a good story?" — it's "do we own this brand?"
This is why we get:
- A Pac-Man movie (in development)
- A Candy Land movie (in development)
- A Monopoly movie (in development)
- A Barbie sequel (because the first one made money)
The Barbie movie worked because Greta Gerwig is brilliant and had a genuine creative vision. But the lesson Hollywood took from it wasn't "hire brilliant directors with creative visions." The lesson was "board game movies can work." They learned the wrong thing. They always learn the wrong thing.
What It Costs
Every sequel that gets greenlit is an original movie that doesn't. Studio budgets are finite. When $200M goes to Jurassic World Dominion, that's $200M that didn't go to 50 original films at $4M each. The opportunity cost is staggering.
And the crews? They spend their careers working on franchise installment after franchise installment. The gaffer who lit Jurassic World Dominion is talented. But they're lighting scenes for a script that nobody's proud of, in a franchise that's running on fumes, for an audience that's increasingly checking out.
That gaffer could be lighting the next Whiplash. The next Moonlight. The next movie that actually matters. Instead, they're lighting CGI dinosaurs for the sixth time.