The Spreadsheet Ate Hollywood
How the suits ate culture and called it strategy.
I went to the movies and realised I was looking at a civilisation terrified of new ideas.
Another Minions movie.
Another Star Wars.
Another Mortal Kombat.
Another Mario Bros.
Top Gun recycled for nostalgia.
Another Scary Movie.
Masters of the Universe dragged out of the 1980s and dipped in live action.
Toy Story 5.
Another Spider-Man.
Another Supergirl.
Moana — but now with real humans because apparently cartoons also need sequels now.
I hate sequels. Not because all sequels are bad. Some are brilliant.
But because we appear to have entered an era where almost nothing else gets made.
Where is this generation’s storytelling?
Not the remix.
Not the reboot.
Not the nostalgia extraction pipeline.
Where are the strange new worlds.
The weird risks.
The films people initially thought were insane before they became cultural landmarks.
Where is this generation’s Matrix.
Its Shrek.
Its Fight Club.
Its Jurassic Park.
Its Titanic.
Its Get Out.
Its Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Where are the new myths?
And the more I thought about it, the less this felt like a creative failure and the more it felt like a management failure.
Hollywood let the suits in and it got boring and dull like them.
That sounds flippant but I genuinely think it is true.
The modern entertainment industry increasingly behaves less like an artistic ecosystem and more like a risk-managed investment portfolio.
Originality is hard to spreadsheet.
Existing intellectual property is easy.
A sequel comes with data.
A reboot comes with brand recognition.
A remake comes with an existing audience.
A cinematic universe comes with predictable merchandising and international marketability.
You can forecast it.
Model it.
De-risk it.
Explain it to shareholders.
And slowly, over time, the machine becomes hostile to the conditions that created it.
This is not unique to Hollywood.
I’ve watched consultants do the same thing to companies for years.
They arrive promising optimisation, efficiency, transformation, alignment.
And at first some of it works.
The mess gets cleaned up.
The systems improve.
The chaos reduces.
But then something else starts happening.
The weirdness disappears.
The personality disappears.
The edges get sanded off.
The instinct gets replaced by governance.
The culture becomes sterile.
The thing becomes measurable instead of memorable.
By the end every company starts feeling emotionally identical.
Technically competent.
Spiritually dead.
Like the modelling industry finding a beautiful young woman full of uniqueness and life and slowly transforming her into a commercially optimised version of herself until she looks exhausted, lonely, interchangeable and hollow.
Profitable.
Manageable.
Marketable.
Dead behind the eyes.
That is increasingly what modern culture feels like.
Not terrible.
Just algorithmically flattened.
Hollywood has perfected the art of the product life cycle reboot.
Their business strategy is the equivalent of running the lemons through the grinder to get every last drop of juice from the brand value, even if it tastes like shit.
They are making lemonade. Grotesquely.
A complete betrayal of everything that built it, the pure human magic of creativity and imagination.
The spreadsheet-brained fantasy underneath all of this is the belief that creativity is just another production system that can be optimised indefinitely without losing the thing that made it valuable in the first place.
But creativity is inefficient.
Real creativity is weird.
Expensive.
Embarrassing.
Risky.
Over budget.
Difficult to explain in a board meeting.
Sometimes catastrophic.
Sometimes transcendent.
The problem is that optimisation systems hate transcendence because transcendence is statistically volatile.
So instead we get content.
Not stories.
Products.
Not mythology.
An endless recycling operation feeding us slightly altered versions of things we already loved when culture still remembered how to surprise us.
And AI is about to accelerate this problem dramatically.
Because generative AI is extraordinarily good at recombination.
It can imitate styles.
Continue patterns.
Remix familiarity.
Generate endless aesthetic averages from existing successful things.
Exactly what modern corporations already want.
Not originality.
Recognisability.
Not artistic risk.
Predictable engagement metrics.
Not new myths.
Familiar intellectual property with lower labour costs.
The danger is not that AI destroys creativity.
The danger is that corporations deploy AI inside systems already structurally hostile to originality.
Which means the future of culture risks becoming an infinite hall of mirrors:
movies referencing movies,
stories referencing stories,
algorithms feeding audiences increasingly optimised nostalgia until culture collapses inward under the weight of its own recycled familiarity.
Because the suits never understood what made people love this stuff in the first place.
You cannot spreadsheet wonder.
You cannot KPI your way to mythology.
And the machine that optimises everything eventually optimises away the very thing people came for.