Loop the Loop-that’s the name of one of the first looping roller coasters ever in North America. It spun its riders from 1901 to 1910 on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Its use of an elliptical design reduced the strain of g-forces that was bothersome in previous loop roller coasters and added rubber wheels to further improve comfort. But the combination of many riders still experiencing discomfort and smaller cars with fewer seats led to a lower than expected volume of riders per hour. To offset this loss, the operator came up with an idea. They built an observational deck next to the loop and gave non-riders a chance to pay a smaller fee to access it. Just to watch people ride the loop. This way, giving them a chance to vicariously experience the thrill of riding the coaster. A watered-down, second-hand simulacrum of being on the ride without ever actually walking up, sitting down, and risking your own world being turned upside down.

Theatrical movies are the biggest pieces of art we make and enjoy. A cultural artifact that involves hundreds of people, years of creation, and hundreds of millions of dollars in the cost of production to complete, and not much less to advertise. They make sense only if tens upon tens of million people across the globe see them. We recognize them, by any metric you choose, as something important and worth having. Why? What is beyond eating popcorn and watching something happen for two hours? What else is an in-person communal experience everyone can afford? Where do we all meet to codify and reaffirm our beliefs? Where can anyone walk in from the street at any time of the day and jointly subject themselves to an experience outside of their control while being mixed in with their fellow men, your family, your closest and your farthest one? Where else do we unite in a collective story with shared intentionality? Church is an obvious answer, but the second-best cathedral filled with something bigger than yourself to look upon in awe is a movie playing inside of a movie theater.

The financial crisis of 2008 took money out of our pockets and put the internet there instead. This, and the slow death of secondary revenue in the form of physical home video sales, cracked the theatrical release model within the movie industry. Your options for entertainment expanded from a handful to dozens upon dozens. All in the palm of your hand. Instead of needing to be somewhere at a specific place and time to see something specific, you get to watch anything you want, whenever you want. Two hours, or two minutes. Dealer’s choice. The industry’s response was as logical as it was shortsighted. Introduce a new version of something old, ride it out with another sequel, reboot something that worked before with a new cast, spinoff something from that when it works. From the 2010s onwards, most of what we see and thrives inside our theaters is a reiteration of the past. Pre-existing intellectual property, long for IP, that has an in-built audience who comes back on an impulse of memory. A human reflex to grab for any droplets left in the spring of youth. The biggest success story of them all being a series of movies that refer and recall each other up, down, left, and right to create and build stakes. Both for the tale you’re watching, you’ve previously seen, and the next one that is yet to come. A maze-like subscription model to the story beats themselves that has captured both the audience's and investors' minds and wallets.

Since sustainability is also something they both proclaim to enjoy, it would be wise to think about the movies they watch and make in the same terms. What will happen when the source materials for rebooting and remaking pre-established IPs get exhausted? Or we eventually hit a referential point in the past where we first started rebooting and remaking pre-established IPs? We’ve burned through the most recognizable comics of the 1960s and 70s. The 1980s Spielbergian retro VHS aesthetic pedaled up, took off and flew over the hill on a kid’s bike. We’re presently deep into revisiting the 1990s. Disney live-action remakes, Flatliners, Power Rangers, Baywatch, and so forth. Vinyl soundtrack releases are joined by cassette tape releases. The remake loop is not only dangerously close to closing in on itself, but in some cases already overtaking itself. The Mummy from 1999 got a reboot while The Matrix, released in the very same year, got a fourth sequel. Coincidentally, The Matrix is the last original movie made for adults that outgrew beyond its theatrical origin—both in multimedia spin-offs and cultural impact. And it’s almost a quarter of a century old. The latest Spider-Man, created sixty years ago, revolves around referencing 2007's and 2014's Spider-Man. That’s a lot of g-forces in a short span of time. Three more installments have been announced. Can we expect references from the 2019 one in any of them, or is the more realistic question of how much in how many? It’s obvious that a major original movie push is needed to move a stalemate culture forward. If not for anything else, at least for future remakers and rebooters to have something to work with. Not to mention that referencing anything after a certain point in the 2000s will become increasingly difficult due to the advancement in technology splitting our singular cultural lazy river into individually curated water theme parks. With cheap and momentary access to most movies ever produced, we alleviated ourselves from the pressure of going in for something new and unknown, and instead chose a low-cost and low-risk option to stay in a preferred cultural loop of our own making. Nothing is ever really gone, so nothing new is ever really needed. To make things worse, this technological change also robbed us of seeing, feeling, and thinking things together. One of the main features and functions of cinema is that it forces us to see and experience our biggest stories together. Our present time and space we live in right now isn’t mirrored and bounded by the same stories we share anymore. Our zeitgeist, the spirit of a generation or a period of time, is the absence of zeitgeist. Broken in a million different pieces scattered to a million different timelines. The supposed luxury being you pick and choose whatever you want from whoever you want while not considering that some cultural barriers are perhaps meant to hold things together, rather than lock something out. This also altered the way we share our opinions on cinema. Shifting from watching one thing and then cultivating your point of view of its worth(lessness), to pushing the one thing you watch as the only point of view worth having. What happens to a society that can’t see and doesn’t tell itself a unifying story of what it aims and strives for? What comes after the majority of movie makers and audience members stop reaching for something new? How long can a theme park stay in business if it can only offer riding the same ride or watching it from the sides?

Well, it doesn’t. We keep talking about the movie business, but business entities that solely exist to make and sell movies don’t even exist anymore. Disney’s main operating income comes from ESPN, ABC, other linear networks, and theme parks after that. WarnerMedia used to be owned by AT&T, which made seventy percent of revenue by selling phone and internet subscriptions. It’s now losing money by itself. Universal Pictures is part of Comcast. Sony’s largest segment is gaming. Paramount Pictures is less than paramount in the big picture of ViacomCBS - theatrical revenue brought in a bit above two percent of their total revenue in 2019. Netflix is the last and only major movie business that partially exists on the basis of making and selling movies, but only manages to do so by not releasing and playing them in theaters. CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, managed to forge the biggest entertainment company in the history of the planet by blending movies with theme parks and theme parks with movies. An obvious fact when you look at S&P 500, but taken as a controversial slight when spoken out loud by Martin Scorsese when he commented on their crown jewel with the words: “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” No matter who the messenger, the message remains the same: major movie productions across the board shapeshifted from an art form into ride-like experience design. A theme park ride based on a movie has to efficiently and consistently mimic major story and emotional beats of a film it portrays. Visually and sonically big things must happen, but nothing major and essential can change because that would mean diverting from the pre-existing story and lore laid out by the original. Instead of anything new being declared, old things are retold. The ride doesn’t necessarily make sense with where and how it takes you, but you buy its story anyway because you’ve seen it before and you can rationalize it with the help of your memory recall. A great theme park ride has to be great at echoing a grand idea instead of delivering it and never takes you somewhere new, just back to where it all started. The same blueprint and crowning achievement most retooled movies aim for with today’s audiences. Blending and cross-promoting your movie IPs with ancillary revenue sources made through sales with the help of rides inside a stationary theme park is a revolutionary idea. For 1955, when Disneyland first opened. It appears that, in the end, even business ideas get a remake.

Walt Disney designed Disneyland for children’s enjoyment and their parents being able to accompany them on rides. Theatrical movie releases now follow the same logic, but refrain from explicitly positioning themselves like that and rather repackage a childlike experience into an adult wrapper. The vast majority of industries, including moviemaking, focus their advertising efforts on people between 18 and 34 years of age. A cross-section of peak earning years with peak peacocking years make for bountiful spenders. According to the Motion Picture Association, the biggest percentage of frequent moviegoers is in the age cohort between 25 and 39 years of age. But most movies and the vast majority of the biggest blockbusters released in the past two decades were rated PG-13. This means that the biggest cultural artifacts in the world are written and made as something to be seen and understood by an eighth-grade child first. Designed for children’s enjoyment with parents and now even non-parents welcomed to accompany them on these rides. Recent Disney earnings calls revealed that more than half of Disney+ subscribers are adults in households without children. A bespoke, private ride service that remains childish in the nature of its creation, but this time with zero children in sight. To state the obvious: something seems deeply wrong. How come adult stories for adult audiences aren’t our biggest and most ambitious stories being told? What kind of a childless adult orients themselves after and in the company of a 13-year-old? What kind of a society does that? What is the literal story being told here? Mature adults never setting aside their eighth-grade ways en masse sounds like a grim Brothers Grimm tale, but it’s obviously one of the few remaining cornerstones of keeping the theatrical experience alive. Moviegoers frozen in time keep the glacier from completely melting. The largest age group in the USA is adults aged 26 to 30. No matter what happens, they will, in due course, take control and the largest stories they’re currently being told about themselves and the world around them are almost the same age as them while being formulated for a child’s mind to comprehend. So many new people calling themselves creators, so very few new creations. A business and cultural breaking point in time where we all choose to support and participate in the essential narrative dimension of human experience on the virtues of not growing up, not moving on, not creating something new and not portraying nor reaffirming our present selves in our own stories. These aren’t signs of a thriving culture with healthy dispositions for further growth and blossoming. This is a civilizational impasse in the shape of an island full of Peter Pans who don’t even bother flying, because they’re not going anywhere near the real world of adults. It appears the only shadow of our own we’re capable or allowed of casting in and on this world comes not from projecting it on a silver screen, but from the glow of digital screens. No doubt displaying something algorithmically chosen, remade, recut, rebooted, refurbished, recreated, repackaged, and replayed. Something wickedly Peter Panish this way plays, on a never-ending loop.

Perhaps it’s time we leave behind this 20th-century invention of subscribing to the idea of passively lounging on a platform built solely to keep us watching the loop. Maybe it’s time we walk away, get out, make, discover, demand, and expect something brand new for ourselves. A vehicle for a ride of our own. Something that speaks for our and of our time. Something that will be worth leaving behind. Original works that turn this world upside down, and will be worthy of being acclaimed in the future as something of great value and pride. Something that informs and elevates the best of and in us. So good and so unique in so many ways, nobody would dare touch it or even think about attempting to remake it. Our very own immortal cathedral of dreams, forged as a monument to the legacy of our very own volition. We were here, we made something, we mattered.

What will you do to break the loop and help tell our story?