By Emery Pressman
The recent success of YA romance shows, Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, have demonstrated that viewers are starving to see fresh faces on their screens. So why do the same handful of actors keep appearing in every trailer and on every billboard?
Employing repeated exposure of individual actors to manufacture ‘moviestars’ is not a new phenomenon – in fact, it is textbook Old Hollywood. For example, between the years 1932-1936, Hollywood ‘Golden Age’ actor John Wayne averaged between 5-11 movies per year.
However, nearly a century later, audiences approach media differently. Consumers are dispersed between short form social media content, gaming, podcasts, and traditional long form content. The ability to divert one’s attention toward another source of stimulation when the current one becomes (even slightly) uninteresting have made it that much harder to hold the attention span of younger generations. As a result, film and TV must learn to compete with the instant gratification / dopamine reward received when scrolling through new content within just seconds of the last.
This changing media landscape has brought around a sharp drop in Hollywood employment and production. For example, 2023 marked the official end to “prestige television” when the number of scripted series fell by 14% – only the second time since the early 2000s that the number of shows declined year over year. Series like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Mad Men, generated massive commercial success in the 2010s. In spite of their widespread acclaim, an evolved digital environment compounded by tightened creative budgets following the 2020 pandemic and the 2023 actors’ and writers’ double strikes led to the end of peak TV, and just as equally impacted filmmaking.
Therefore, reused talent (think Jacob Elordi, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet) indicates that the entertainment industry is operating from a risk-averse standpoint: using famous faces’ built-in distribution channels to ensure ticket sales and streams. The challenge to keep up with the quick mental payoffs of short form, user-generated content on top of increased financial binds has largely influenced casting processes to be more conservative when considering an actor’s pre-established fan base. A viewer who might not connect or resonate with the premise of Marty Supreme (2025), for example, might have spent the money to see it anyway if its protagonist, played by Timothée Chalamet, is one of their favorite actors and they can confidently expect a worthy performance from him.
Though, talent is not the only component in production being recycled as a safety cushion. Intellectual property (pre-existing creative material or branding) has become one of the most valuable weapons studios are wielding in their battle to err on the side of caution.
The uptick in using recycled IP as a ‘hail mary’ attempt at box-office and streaming success has manifested in two ways. The first being in the reboot, remake, and spinoff eruption of the last five-or-so years. For example, HBO Max’s Harry Potter TV series based on the 7 books and pre-existing films is set to premier in the winter of 2026. Camp Rock 3 released in August of 2026, 16 years after Camp Rock 2 debuted on Disney Channel. Gossip Girl (2021-2023), a reboot of Gossip Girl (2007-2012), was cancelled after two seasons due to viewers feeling like it failed to properly “lean into the nostalgia” of the original.
Head of Film at The Guardian, Catherine Shoard, interprets this trend as a sign that Hollywood is “stuck on repeat, sucked in with an ever-more deafening gurgle into a death cycle of creative bankruptcy desperately presented as comfort food.” In other words, studios are re-packaging old content to remind audiences of childhood favorites to avoid an expensive gamble on new material – even if the re-heated “comfort food” doesn’t always taste the same as viewers remember.
The second way reused IP presents itself is in live action adaptations of once-animated tales. Practically every Disney princess cartoon has a live action counterpart, and Disney has shown no sign of stopping, with Tangled, the live action adaptation of the 2010 animated story of Princess Rapunzel, currently in production. In adapting familiar fairytales, studios like Dinsey can profit off of ongoing merchandising, increased brand value of characters, and a lack of residuals that need to be paid to the writers and directors of the original films. Writer and film critic Tansy Gardam explains that “merchandise is one of the few reliable ways to make money out of existing films” in a world where “the once lucrative home media landscape has been decimated by streaming,” illustrating how studios rationalize live action remakes.
Contemporary viewers have loved watching new faces rise to fame. Countless fan accounts, TikTok edits, red carpet interviews, and viral photoshoots are circulating within the current pop-cultural orbit for rising stars such as Obsession’s Inde Navarrette and Off Campus’s Belmont Cameli. Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams noted that his newfound global fame is “hard to complain about because for a long time [he’s] been a cliché of an actor… struggling server, paycheck to paycheck, just desperate for any role, let alone a good one.”
However, since entertainment has become an industry attempting to regain its footing in the face of an economic downturn, the “Hollywood dream” isn’t coming true for as many aspiring talents as eager audiences hope for.
But, in spite of skepticism – whether due to recycled casting or writing – of certain projects’ creative rationale, numbers reveal that people keep consuming. The live-action remake of Lilo and Stitch (2025) made about $1.038 billion worldwide, and earned $46 million more than its entire production costs during just the opening weekend. Mean Girls (2024) based on the 2004 original raked in about 2.9x its budget of $36 million.
Recognizeable actors or IP have repeatedly proven that they can properly function as risk-reducing tools, demonstrating that viewers may be more indulgent in familiar or nostalgic content than they’d like to admit. Whether in reconnecting with an adult version of their favorite character from a childhood movie or streaming a new show because of a particular actor, consumers feel comforted by what they know. Hollywood’s increasing repetition of creative material therefore not only serves the industry financially, but also provides the public with a form of escapism through a reassuring sense of stability.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
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