There’s a very specific kind of audacity that is required to look a paying audience in the eye and announce that “Toy Story 5” is on its way: a full theatrical fifth installment of a story that could have ended in 2010. A story about letting go, released into a culture that has made letting go literally impossible. The original films were about growing up, and the industry refuses to.
But this isn’t just about Hollywood; it’s really just the most visible symptom of something that has infected the entire body of Western culture. The truth is that most people have collectively stopped making new things. We’ve learned to call repetition franchise and absence of risk accessibility. There’s an entire vocabulary designed to make creative cowardice sound reasonable.
The question worth asking isn’t why studios greenlight sequels, because they’re going to make money off of that decision. The real question is why we, as a culture, lost the appetite for something genuinely new. When did the unfamiliar become something to be managed rather than sought after?
Walk through any major city and all you’ll see are glass boxes and steel framing. Towers reflecting on you because they have nothing to say to themselves and structures that have outsourced their identities to their surroundings. There was a time when buildings were acts of beauty and ambition, when craftsmen carved stone into leaves and faces and when figures caught mid-gesture in grief or joy. When an architect looked at a blank site, they asked what a space could be and how they could use every square inch of the space to its full extent.
Cathedrals in Europe took generations to complete because there was the idea that something worth making was worth time. Artists were created for reasons larger than themselves, but for a belief that, which may sound radical now, beauty was a form of truth and that truth deserved to be pursued with everything one had.
The Cologne Cathedral broke ground in 1248. Construction halted entirely in 1560 because money ran out, and Gothic architecture had fallen out of fashion. It sat partially built for three hundred years and then, in the 1800s, builders returned with the original medieval blueprints and completed it by 1880, 632 years after the first stone was laid. The Duomo di Milano took nearly six centuries. Notre-Dame de Paris, whose cornerstone was set in 1163, was not fully complete until 1345, which was the work of over a thousand carpenters, masons and metalsmiths whose names were forgotten. Compare that to 22 Bishopsgate in London—a 62-story glass tower completed in 2020, designed and built in about five years and already described by its developers as a “vertical village focused on the modern office worker.” It reflects the London skyline and has a wellness floor. Nobody is going to return to finish it in three hundred years because there is nothing left to finish. It was finished the moment it stopped making financial sense to keep going.
Walk through these buildings, and you’ll notice what happens when a culture takes its craft seriously and when it believes that how something is made should be inseparable from what it represents.
Then walk past the average urban development or even building on a major road. There’ll be a gray or glass rectangle with identical windows. The building will likely have a potted plant chosen by someone who was paid to make decisions nobody cared about. The building can be demolished and no one will care.
This translates over to film, where the live-action remake of an aged film continues to be created just for the money, where it’s stripped of any willingness to try something that hasn’t been tried before. These remakes are the glass boxes of cinema.
Fear connects those towers and franchisements. It’s a very specific fear of the original. The thing with no pre-existing audience.
We used to build for the centuries that followed us. For the people we would never meet, because symbolism and beauty were reason enough, yet somehow along the way we stopped believing it was.
