The Critical Drinker recently dropped a solid video dissecting the cultural stagnation of modern movies. His core point: films stopped being culturally relevant around the early 2000s. The last true household name characters: Rocky Balboa, Luke Skywalker, and Indiana Jones, all hail from pre-millennium Hollywood. Since then, the big studios have churned out billion-dollar box office hits that leave no footprint.
No one quotes them.
No one remembers them.
And no one gives a damn about them five minutes after the credits roll.
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That last part’s undeniable.
But like most critics stuck in the Pop Cult, Drinker diagnoses the symptoms while sidestepping the disease. His ultimate conclusion is the one you've heard a thousand times before:
“Hollywood is out of ideas because Hollywood lacks creativity.”
Which is like saying it’s raining because water is falling from the sky.
Let’s tackle the question no one else has the stomach to ask: Why does Hollywood lack creativity?
The answer few want to hear is “Because it lacks faith.”
Western culture has severed itself from its Christian roots. And in so doing, it cut the cord on the ethos that informed and inspired Western civilization from the start.
“Why does that matter?” Late Moderns may ask.
Because when a culture loses its religion, it doesn’t become secular; it becomes decadent. And decadent cultures can’t create. They can only recycle.
That’s why Critical Drinker spends half the video playing clips from movies made thirty to fifty years ago. It’s also why modern directors keep hauling the bloated corpses of Luke Skywalker and Indy out of retirement for one more weekend of nostalgic necromancy. They can’t build anything new, so they loot the ruins.
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It’s not that the talent is gone. The West still produces skilled technicians. You can hire competent VFX artists, sound designers, and—if you know where to look—even a screenwriter.
What you can’t find in Hollywood anymore is vision. The stories they try to tell are reflections of a shallow anthropology: man as a random meat machine driven by childhood traumas and base appetites. When you start from that premise, you can’t end with heroes; you just end with cope.
That’s why modern protagonists don’t overcome. They just process. These days, conflict resolution doesn’t mean victory, it means therapy. So even the good guys are total wrecks who never become whole. Because if you believe man is nothing but a bag of chemical reactions, the best you can offer him is an open ending and a bottle of pills.
Great stories require a vision of man that’s bigger than man. Even the pagans knew that. Neither Homer nor Virgil thought you could tell a real story without the divine. The modern West disagrees, and we’re all living in the creative fallout.
Hollywood isn’t coming back. Not until the culture that birthed it reclaims the faith that made authentic storytelling possible. Until then, enjoy your remakes, your reboots, your assembly line sequels, and your CGI sludge.
Or, better yet, stop looking to Hollywood altogether. Because if you want stories that speak to the true, the beautiful, and the good, you won’t find them in Tinseltown.
You’ll find them where the light still shines.
And the Light has a Name.
If you want your book to compete in the 2025 market, you must be your own best editor before you hire one. Know what makes a book worth reading and what to cut.
And if you need professional eyes on your manuscript?
I edit books. Drop me a line. Let’s make your story sharper, tighter, and worth your readers’ time.
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.
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Notice there are no longer any redemption storylines in H-wood?
They can't identify.
It lacks faith, but it also lacks a robust free market. With the deregulation of the industry from the 1970s on, media has become a cartel of only a handful of companies owning every major studio.
These firms are risk averse and mainly motivated to deliver shareholder value. That translates into banal, boring films, books, and everything else creative. So in addition to rediscovering core values, we need a bust-up of all the entertainment trusts, to restore better artistic competition and fairness