Marketing media has always been all about building movies and television shows into events, but I've reached the age where I'm anticipating fewer and fewer titles than I used to. I'll happily watch whatever everyone else is talking about, but there are very few projects anymore that I'll track obsessively months and years in advance the way that I did in the past. 2025, like 2019, saw the releases of several long-awaited pieces of media that I'd been looking forward to for a while, like the last season of "Stranger Things," and I'm realizing that there's not much left in 2026 and beyond that I'm really anticipating.
Sure, I'm curious about "Project Hail Mary" and "Dune: Part 3," and even the new "Mandalorian" and "Avengers" films, but the excitement that I always associated with being a film fan has largely ebbed. I recently sat down and wrote up a list of everything coming up that I was actively looking forward to, and it was barely a dozen titles. I know a lot of this is due to me being in my forties and no longer in the audience that the majority of media is aimed at - especially in the case of genre media. However, there are a couple of contributing factors and specific nuances that I want to take some time to talk about. I've written similar posts a few times before, but this time I want to get a little more analytical.
A big issue is the nostalgia wave moving on to Millennial and early Gen Z properties. I count myself as a late GenXer, and all those remakes and legasequels of 80s and 90s media are becoming scarce. "Spaceballs" is probably the last big one on the horizon, which does sound like a lot of fun. Most of the targets for cultural strip mining are now 2000s media like "Freaky Friday," "The Devil Wears Prada," and our recent billion dollar hit, "Lilo & Stitch." The new "X-men" movies should be right on time. I have fond memories of a lot of these, but not the kind of emotional connection I have with the big hits of my childhood. There are a few new attempts being mounted to reboot older kids' properties like "Masters of the Universe" and "The Chronicles of Narnia," but in most cases I've already seen multiple versions come and go, so it doesn't feel like anything special.
I used to have a significant list of projects stuck in development hell that I was waiting for - "Ender's Game," "The Sandman," and "Watchmen" among them. I think watching a lot of these Holy Grail projects actually get made, and dealing with the inevitable tempering of expectations, influenced me to stop pinning my hopes on them prematurely. Would I love to see a new version of "The Last Unicorn" or big budget adaptations of "Akira" or "Evangelion" finally hit the big screen? Sure. However, I no longer automatically assume that any of these would be an improvement on the media that already exist for these titles. The big exception, of course, is "The Dark Tower," because there's no way that any new adaptation of that one wouldn't be an improvement on the terrible 2017 film.
My tastes and attentions have gradually shifted away from IPs and genres and towards specific actors and directors. I know, for instance, that I will generally enjoy a Christopher Nolan or Greta Gerwig film, but this is not a certainty. After "Doctor Strange" I've become much more wary of films that look great on paper. I have never seen a project waste such a fantastic cast on such underwhelming material. There have also been far too many director and actor passion projects that have turned out badly. It's honestly a nice surprise when a "Sinners" or a "Life of Chuck" turns out well. Or even an "Alien: Romulus."
This doesn't mean that I'm no longer looking forward to new media, or that I'm not going to write up my yearly lists of anticipated films and series. However, it's an unavoidable fact that many projects fail to meet expectations, and in the case of the ones from development hell there's often a reason why it took so long for something to reach our screens. I'm going to miss the fun of the hype, but I guess I've been around the block enough times that this aspect of my fandom experience is probably over for good. The movies aren't any better or worse in the end, though, and this way I avoid a lot of disappointment.
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