How the Fourth Turning Explains the Mainstream Entertainment Collapse
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 FansThomas 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 MadeMainstream 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:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BycLrReOyUAnd 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 TerrifyingPendulum 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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