In the past few years, the mainstream entertainment industry has been gripped by an epidemic of costly flops. These failures have spread across video games, movies, comic books, and more. Titles expected to be blockbuster hits—like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Skull and Bones, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League—instead faced staggering losses.
Many keen observers, such as game designer Alexander Marcis and YouTuber Thomas Umstattd, have attributed this shift to a generational cultural turn outlined in Fourth Turning theory. This theory explains why recent safe bets from major studios and publishers now seem strikingly out of sync with modern audiences.
Let’s explore how Fourth Turning theory reveals why mainstream entertainment, which once defined the zeitgeist, is now struggling to connect with a public that seems increasingly indifferent to its offerings.
Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory outlines a historical cycle in which society rotates through four distinct eras, each about twenty years long. These four phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis, are tied to collective attitudes toward authority, community, and individuality.
Right now, we’re at the start of a Fourth Turning, also known as the Crisis phase. These periods have historically coincided with societal upheavals, from the American Revolution to the Great Depression to WWII. Now, the current cultural shift is driven by Millennials and Gen Z.
In the Crisis, society undergoes sweeping reform as people seek stability in the face of perceived existential threats. Institutions lose trust as audiences turn away from convoluted narratives and cynicism, gravitating instead toward stories with clear moral direction and heroes who act selflessly for the greater good.
Related: Why Major Tabletop RPG Publishers Are Losing Longtime Fans
Thomas and Alexander identify a clear pattern among what they call flopbusters: These entertainment products are ideologically progressive, heavily deconstructed, and focused on subverting tropes. This storytelling doctrine reflects assumptions popular a decade ago during the last Unraveling. So, these projects have largely missed the current cultural shift, and their underwhelming performance illustrates how studios and publishers failed to anticipate the change from the Unraveling to the Crisis.
Major entertainment organs, whether in film, games, or books, keep banking on a model that assumes consumers want endlessly deconstructed antiheroes and morally gray villains. But in fact, audiences are beginning to crave just the opposite.
Thomas explains that cultural momentum has shifted, and the public now yearns for aspirational heroes akin to Superman or Captain America, rather than dark antiheroes like Batman or Deadpool.
The trend away from antiheroes toward aspirational figures doesn’t get much clearer than the recent success of video games featuring morally unambigious conflicts, such as Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2.
In the Third Turning, audiences favored angst-ridden protagonists grappling with dark pasts pursuing murky motives. As a result, postmodern storytelling flourished, often celebrating subversion and cynicism.
But as Marcis points out, today’s audiences increasingly view postmodern deconstruction with skepticism. Brandon Sanderson, for instance, publicly acknowledged moving away from postmodern fantasy, recognizing that his early experiments with subversion and deconstruction left readers feeling frustrated and betrayed. Now, audiences are instead seeking stories that fulfill, rather than subvert, their expectations.
Related: Not Even King Brandon Can Get a Movie Made
Mainstream publishers still treat postmodernism as a selling point, which only widens the gap between them and a public that’s growing tired of dark twists and subversive endings. Alexander and Thomas both note that audiences today find subversion wearying, especially during a Crisis phase. When real life feels chaotic and bleak, the last thing many want is fiction that offers even more ambiguity or nihilism. Instead, they seek the simplicity of heroes who act for the common good, sacrificing for others—a model that even mainstream comics and movies have strayed from in recent years.
Author David V. Stewart does the autopsy on postmodernism. Watch it here:
And while Gen Z and Millennials are shaping the broader cultural shift, Generation Y drives the nostalgia movement.
Gen Y grew up with the optimistic heroes of the 80s and 90s and has brought this longing for aspirational figures into the Fourth Turning. Much of today’s entertainment cashes in on Gen Y’s nostalgia for classics by remaking them, but studios fail to understand what made these originals enduring. Instead of capturing timeless themes, they add layers of subversive reinterpretation that feel disconnected from the originals.
This tension between nostalgia for simpler, morally grounded narratives and the studios’ ironic reinterpretations has eroded consumer confidence in legacy franchises. Audiences increasingly see these “reimaginings” as hollow cash grabs instead of honest treatments of the stories they love.
Related: Gen Y: The Plan Is Terrifying
Pendulum theory, which dovetails with the Fourth Turning framework, predicts that cultural values oscillate on a forty-year swing between individualistic and collectivistic ideals. As Alexander describes, progressivism’s peak in 2023 marked a turning point, with audiences beginning to reject what they perceive as progress-for-progress’s-sake messaging.
This pivot has manifested in the growing demand for stories that affirm traditional virtues like justice, selflessness, and heroism in ways that go beyond political sloganeering. The entertainment industry’s ideological commitments increasingly look like liabilities as audiences tire of Narratives disconnected from the pressing real-world concerns that dominate the Crisis phase.
In a Fourth Turning, people’s patience for art that holds up a mirror dwindles. Instead, audiences desire stories that hold up a lamp, offering moral clarity, hope, and affirmation of values that offer meaning in uncertain times. Fourth Turnings bring an end to cultural experimentation and a return to simplicity, unity, and purpose in storytelling. For an industry addicted to individualism and moral ambiguity, the adjustment is proving bumpy.
To remain relevant, mainstream publishers, studios, and game developers must recalibrate, recognizing that society’s expectations are moving away from antiheroes and subversive themes. The winning stories of tomorrow won’t look like today’s anti-morality plays. They’ll resemble the classic protagonists of previous Crisis eras: aspirational figures who embody ideals of justice, honor, and self-sacrifice.
As the mainstream entertainment industry drifts further out of touch with its audience, indie creators have a rare chance to gain traction. Those willing to read the signs of the times and offer morally uplifting stories can connect with a public ready to embrace the new cultural paradigm. As audiences lose patience with subversive Narratives, demand rises for creators who can mark the changing tides and meet the public’s hunger for heroes who don’t reflect our worst fears but feed our best aspirations.
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Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can root for battling overwhelming odds
I’m glad people are latching onto Space Marine 2. The protagonists of that game are brave and strong, yes, but they also have traits especially lacking in the crop of anti-heroes. Namely, brotherhood and the better kind of aristocratic dignity. They care about their Brothers deeply and aid each other unconditionally, and even when dealing with the Chapter Serfs and Imperial Guardsmen who are their legal and physical inferiors, they show respect rather than derision, treating their contributions as valuable. I’ve said it before, 40K may be dark (stupidly dark in some places), but it is the opposite of subversive. My only regret is that it will earn Games Workshop fans and credit that it does not deserve, which it will squeeze more money from like the vampire it is.
Something else just occurred to me: Helldivers 2 has one thing in common with Space Marine 2, and I don’t mean the space guns. I’m talking about the extremely strong bonds it encourages players to form between each other – heck, the game was so good at teaching players to organise that it inadvertently enabled them to unite and boycott several unpopular changes made by both the publisher and the developers, forcing them to be rolled back. There’s a real sense of COMMUNITY. You see the same thing with Deep Rock Galactic, which is also famous for its intimate and tight-knit community. Hmm, now I wonder what it is that people could be longing for?
I don’t know if this is relevant to the conversation, but the TV show Young Sheldon now has a spinoff of its own, Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage. I’m not familiar with either show, but what I do know from the bits and pieces I’ve learned is that Georgie dated and knocked up a woman twelve years older than himself (so she would have been late 20s/early 30s, I think), but instead of running away he took responsibility, married her and raised the child while building a successful business to support them.
That premise stood out to me because I’ve never seen that in mainstream entertainment before. Certainly not in anything produced in the past quarter-century or so. A young man taking responsibility for his actions and living up to them? What happened to the casual hook-up culture we’ve been saturated with for decades? This is a breath of fresh air. I have no idea if it’s a total outlier or the start of a trend, but I certainly hope it’s the latter; that’s the kind of example our kids need today.
Anti-heroes are moral cowards.
Heroes stand bravely against the darkness.
Not a shock that Hollywood, Big Pub, and Mainstream Comics don’t get it, and they resist it where they can.
Not only that, more often than not, they aren’t even proper anti-heroes. Technically speaking, an anti-hero is a protagonist who lacks classical heroic traits. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins would qualify, so you can see how the term doesn’t mean “A morally ambiguous psycho operating on the edge of the law.” That’s what we’re given “anti-hero” to mean, but those are in fact heroic villains or villain protagonists.
I give Bilbo points for loyalty – even at the start he didn’t betray the Dwarves to the trolls on purpose – mercy and genuinely looking outside himself, which stayed his hand from killing Gollum when he was helpless.
He later got the advantage of an invisibility ring, but he still demonstrated skill in getting around giant spiders, keen-eared wood elves and a keen-nosed dragon.
Courage – self evident.
Frodo – loyalty, determination, courage, self-sacrifice (he did it all for the Shire) and he made a good account of himself fighting in Moria.
An anti hero would be a protagonist like Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. You can still feel sympathy for him, and even learn something from him, even if it’s just what not to do.
I had never heard it expressed this way, but it makes sense. When you say ‘anti-hero’ I think Wolverine, Batman, and the Punisher, who all fit into that “morally ambiguous psycho” category. I’d never heard the term “heroic villain” but I’m going to have to remember it.
By this logic, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Mithrandir, and Boromir are all heroic characters in the classic, medieval vein. They all succeed by matching physical and moral courage. This is true even of Boromir, who falls, repents, and dies a good death. The Hobbits in the company are all anti-heroes because while they all show both physical and moral courage, they do so in less obvious ways and with less balance. If this is true of the Hobbits, then it is also true of Elwin Ransom in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, who also triumphs through virtue more than anything else.
Aside from the moral disconnect in modern entertainment, there is also a cultural disconnect too.
I’ve said it before – how many people know that a power slide on a motorcycle is a reference to Akira, something that is almost 40 years old? Yet media is filled with many of these references no one understands and it blends in with the overall work creating zero impact.
Not saying all media has to be super referential, but the occasional reference solidifies the entertainment is made for the entertained. I’ve been watching Vox Machina and in a recent episode, one of the characters made a pose that referenced a meme. There was no fanfare about it, no pausing to point it out; it was subtle, the pose was only a a half a second long because it was a part of the overall action the character was performing. Something like that I can appreciate.
Wow. I did not know that.
There’s a video clip, I’m sure you can find on youtube, but it shows all the references to Akira from various movies or shows. You’d be surprised just how recent it gets referenced, I think as recent as Owl House?
It’s all so tiring, but maybe it’s a telling sign that there is little in our current culture unique and fun enough to reference.
Side note, if you ever have the time to dabble in art history, you’ll find famous works get referenced in movies a lot. All artists in school learn the same stuff so we reference it in our works. An easy example to point to is in the first Bill & Ted movie, they reference “The Creation of Man” when they meet Joan of Arc. They make the same famous hand gesture in that painting before they grab her hand.
Personally, I would be very happy to see a return to traditional hero (or hero journey) storytelling. Maybe that would even indicate another surge in popularity in a genre like Sword & Sorcery (with its stereotypical hero main character). We saw this in the 80s with S&S popularity (Conan the Barbarian leading the way) following the darker 70s with its anti-heroes (or “Heroic Villains”) in Taxi Driver, Godfather, Billy Jack, Death Wish, Dirty Harry, etc.