As someone who thinks a lot about the history of entertainment, media and pop culture, I notice that some trends that gain traction in certain periods are the result of a gradual evolution that began years earlier. For example, the transition from silent films to talkies. Any film historian can tell you that the box office success of WB’s The Jazz Singer in 1927 was the beacon for the film industry’s justification for gambling on the proliferation of sound films, but that didn’t mean everyone was fully on board with the abandonment of silent cinema. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times came out nearly a decade after talkies were introduced, although that film is still seen as one of Hollywood’s best comedies, so it’s not like people were wrong to say silent films still had value. But its existence is kind of an example of something that has always been obvious and becomes more and more obvious as time goes by, which is that getting Hollywood to embrace something new is very difficult. It took a while for the film industry to embrace television and home video as well, and that’s because Hollywood likes being safe and capitalizing on past success so that they can theoretically guarantee future success. But there is one complicating factor to that plan: audiences love new things and they always have.

Some of you may think I’m wrong about that because of how successful franchises and sequels are and the way that audiences always flock to the theater for things like Toy Story and Spider-Man. But people who have an emotional attachment to fictional characters like Buzz Lightyear and Peter Parker aren’t the same as people who hate original ideas. The summer blockbuster era that began in the 1970s is a good example of how successful original films can be. The original Star Wars from 1977 wasn’t based on a book. George Lucas created an entire mythology of alien species, worlds, weapons, gadgets and a thing called the Force, and that film became the highest-grossing movie that decade.

If you look at the other commercially successful films that decade, The Godfather, Jaws and Superman were based on books, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Animal House, Smokey and the Bandit and Enter the Dragon were not. Plus the 1980s had Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Ghostbusters and Back to the Future, the 1990s had The Lion King, Independence Day, Titanic and The Sixth Sense, and Avatar was the biggest money maker of the 2000s. The reason why all these movies were such big hits and became classics was not only because they were good movies but also because they all felt like nothing audiences had ever seen before.

Hollywood understands to a degree that you can’t dedicate your entire studio to sequels and franchises, but Hollywood is also controlled and funded by Wall Street, shareholders and the corporate powers that be, and it’s difficult to convince those guys to invest in original and unproven concepts. Which is why many of the most original ideas are often independent films made by Hollywood outsiders and young mavericks like Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. And I think the huge success that indie film distributors Focus Features and A24 have both had in 2026 with the low-budget horror films Obsession and Backrooms in the face of competition from Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu and Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is causing Hollywood studio executives to take notice and reevaluate their strategies, because it’s quite possible that this was not a fluke.

Gen Z is driving a lot of the success at the box office today, and that generation does not have as much reverence for Lucas and Spielberg as Gen X and millennials did back when things like Star Wars and Jurassic Park came out. It’s too early for us to tell if this is an actual sea change in the movie business yet, but if this trend continues we could be on the cusp of an exciting new moment in movie history where originality, creativity and bold ideas could start topping the box office while tried and true Hollywood formulas begin faltering. Wishful thinking? Possibly. But consider how that same thing happened back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider came onto the scene and unofficially signaled the start of the New Hollywood movement. I’ve written about this period before as one of the few moments in Hollywood history when independent directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (or the “movie brats” as they are sometimes called) were given creative control, mainly because these directors understood the tastes of baby boomers better than studio executives did, and the box office numbers proved that.

Some people have compared the scrappy counterculture film movement of New Hollywood with what Gen Z directors Curry Barker and Kane Parsons are doing with Obsession and Backrooms. Like I said, it’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of a Gen Z film movement (they would have to venture outside the horror genre for that), but I hope it is. And the fact that so many young people are still going to the movies and driving so much of the success of movie theaters today gives me hope that something like that could be on the horizon. Especially since we are living in a particularly bleak period in modern history right now where our political leaders and tech oligarchs have reached unprecedented levels of indifference and tone-deafness regarding the well-being of younger generations, and that kind of environment often breeds anger, resistance, action and, yes, art. The movie brats of the sixties and seventies channeled that passion in their art and they elevated cinema to unprecedented levels of innovation and public resonance in the process. Will Gen Z’s passion, anxiety and creativity shape the film industry in a similar way?