Copy-Paste Cinema: Has Nostalgia Replaced Innovation?
By Hannah Ferguson
As a lifelong lover of fantasy and a devoted DreamWorks fan, I rushed to the theater on opening weekend to see the 2025 live-action How to Train Your Dragon. The original 2010 animated film was a cornerstone of my childhood—and of many Gen Zers—so I went in hopeful, ready for an action-packed expansion of the story we already know and love.
And you know what, it was okay—no, it was good. But of course it was good. It was the same movie. Nearly shot-for-shot, line-for-line, beat-for-beat. And somehow, that sameness made it feel hollow. I walked out of the theater underwhelmed, assuming others might feel similarly.
Instead, I found the internet alight with praise: an average 4.0 stars on Letterboxd, a solid 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, and glowing reviews that celebrated its loyalty to the source material. But is that really the bar now? In an era already drowning in remakes and reboots, is faithful reproduction all it takes to impress us? And most importantly, what does it say about our collective imagination when familiarity alone is enough to be considered a success?
Stills from How To Train Your Dragon 2025 and 2010; Image Sourced from Buzzfeed
The recent release of How to Train Your Dragon is just one installment in the growing tide of live-action remakes flooding theaters—and dare I say, its success may owe something to the underwhelming performances of recent attempts like Lilo and Stitch and Snow White. These remakes have increasingly drawn criticism as lazy, uninspired cash grabs, capitalizing cheaply on the legacy of the original, rather than offering up anything new.
And yet, when a remake dares to deviate from its canon, it often faces even harsher backlash.
Live-action Remake of Snow White (2025); Image Sourced through Pinterest
Take Snow White (2025), which was met with controversy months before its release when lead actress Rachel Zegler stated, “She’s not going to be saved by the prince… she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” While a feminist update may seem timely, many fans balked, claiming the studio was tampering with a sacred classic.
Similarly, the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film faced such intense criticism over Sonic’s uncanny redesign that the studio delayed the release and spent millions reanimating the character to match fan expectations.
These cases illustrate a new cultural paradox: fans demand accuracy, but studios’ pursuit of accuracy often comes at the expense of originality. Caught in the crossfire, studios increasingly default to safe, copy-paste filmmaking—and we, the audience, reward it. In doing so, we may be unintentionally contributing to cinema’s creative stagnation.
What does it say about us—our ingenuity, our appetite for risk, our relationship to nostalgia—when we applaud a film not for what it adds, but for how well it recreates what already exists? In our yearning for comfort and familiarity, are we slowly closing the door on innovation?
It’s easy to point fingers at studios for their lazy copy-paste routine, but this trend doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are many tangible economic and social forces that have led Hollywood to becoming increasingly risk-adverse. Over the last decade, the profitability of physical media— such as DVDs and Blu-ray— has plummeted, as these formats are becoming essentially obsolete. According to the Digital Entertainment Group’s 2024 Year-End Report, physical media sales in 2024 have dipped below $1 billion— the first time since DVD’s introduction in the 90s, a staggering drop since their 2005 peak. Without this financial cushion, there is now significantly more impetus on studios to up their box office revenue. Their solution? Banking on recognizable, low-risk content with reliable audience turnout.
Nostalgia trends can also be to blame for Hollywood’s growing desire to capitalize on the familiar. A 2023 survey by GWI shows that Gen Z leads as the ‘most nostalgic’ generation, with 15% stating that they prefer to think about the past rather than the future— closely followed by Millennials at 14%. Combined, that’s nearly a third of the movie-going audience actively drawn to the comfort of the familiar. Unsurprisingly, film topped the list as the most nostalgia-inducing form of media (71%), just ahead of music. In other words, Hollywood isn’t just guessing—it's responding to a quantifiable need for retro familiarity.
All hope is not lost, and if the industry continues to play it safe in pursuit of profit, it will be up to emerging storytellers, filmmakers, and artists to break through the next creative mold. The call for newness is still there— waiting for these innovators to answer it. Maybe the next cultural reset won’t come from a studio boardroom at all, but from someone who’s just tired of watching the same movie twice.
