There's no question that Hollywood has increased their reliance on tie-in franchises and sequels and remakes for money-making--any chart of top-grossing films o

There's no question that Hollywood has increased their reliance on tie-in franchises and sequels and remakes for money-making--any chart of top-grossing films over the past few decades will make the trend clear. Good non-franchise movies are still getting made, you might just have to look a little harder to find them. Some of it is not coming from Hollywood, but elsewhere. The trend of higher-quality tv really began with HBO and shows like the Sopranos, when they realized they could get away with stuff you couldn't do on broadcast tv, and have bigger budgets for production and talent. I remember not even having a TV for much of the 1980s--network tv was so bad it was entirely missable. Streaming and cable channels have given a lot of opportunities for niche productions that wouldn't have survived in the old days, or made it past the censors. Sure, there's tropes and common story elements, that's not new, and it's a feature of every media. Film comedies are still cribbing from stuff invented by Chaplin and Keaton.