The other day, as I was looking up a data point on boxofficemojo.com, I noticed something that shocked me: The top 10 grossing movies of 2024, from “Inside Out 2” to “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” are all sequels. Every goddamn one of them. “Wicked” and “Moana 2” will soon bring break into the top 10 — and though “Wicked” isn’t technically a sequel, when you consider how many people have seen the original Broadway show, the truth is that the movie version, as much as any sequel, is a kind-of-the-same-but-also-different follow-up to a gargantuan known quantity. It’s all part of déjà vu entertainment culture.
The reason I was shocked by the fact that I could be shocked by this is that Hollywood has been famously awash in sequels since the dawn of the Reagan era. Making jokes about the creative bankruptcy of films with Roman numerals after their…
