The Twilight of 20th Century Entertainment

A lot of people are asking the wrong questions about why film, television, and comic books are in freefall.

Pundits blame streaming for TV’s collapse. Movie buffs maintain that theaters are empty because of cape fatigue. Comic book fans keep trying to resuscitate the Big Two by pointing fingers at the 90s speculator bubble or “those darn normies!”

Like the blind men groping the elephant, they're all missing the bigger picture.

It’s not just about politics. It’s not even about business decisions—though admittedly, entertainment executives have been making one blunder after another. The hard truth is that these art forms: film, TV, and comics; are creatures of the 20th century. They're obsolete technologies, and no amount of nostalgia will let them stay relevant in a 21st-century world.

Let’s start with comic books. Longtime readers will recall that Research Guy’s multi-decade back issue study revealed a clear life cycle: creation, growth, maturity, stagnation, decay, and finally, the current stage—death. At present, the Big Two have just enough brain activity left to shamble around signing licensing deals.

That timeline correlates almost perfectly with the rise and fall of the comic book as an art form. The superhero comic was a byproduct of cheap color printing, the wartime boom, and mid-century mass literacy. When continuity reigned and editors still knew what a story was, comics functioned like serialized myth.

But once Marvel and DC pivoted from storytelling to brand management, the party was over. Comics weren't killed by politics, but by irrelevance. They were hollowed out to make way for more fungible IP assets. Try building a mythos when your only mandate is to keep Spider-Man looking recognizable for toy packaging.

Comics didn’t die when the speculator bubble broke. Alternate foil cover mania wasn’t the cause of death; it was a result of the industry having already been dead for years.

Related: Did Normies Ruin Comics?

Television followed a similar arc. The postwar boom in TV sets coincided with a massive captive audience. The Golden Age came and went. The cable explosion carved out demographic niches. Then came the streaming era, with its promise of unlimited choice, only to deliver an endless flood of sterile sludge.

That brings us to Current Year, when Zoomers are tuning out. That’s an understatement: Teens have abandoned scripted TV and films almost entirely. Why wouldn’t they? Why sit through ten hours of committee-written slop just to be told you're wrong for existing?

Rleated: How ACT Helped Kill Adolescent Entertainment

Hollywood followed much the same route from novelty to dominance to decay. The original appeal of movies was that they were a communal spectacle; the one experience technology couldn’t bring into the home. But when screens shrank and every house got its own, the magic drained away. Today’s studios are bloated relics coasting on goodwill built in 1977.

Here’s the pattern: All three media hit their peak when they were still novelties. Their artistic legitimacy was always a little dubious. Film tried to smuggle in prestige with awards shows. TV boasted a new "golden age" every 15 years or so. Comics rebranded as graphic novels. But in every case, the medium needed institutional support and cultural centrality to thrive. And they’ve squandered both.

The 20th century is over. Its media are dissolving with it.

Related: RLM - Right for the Wrong Reasons

But there’s one medium that’s weathered the storm.

Books.

The written word: Ink on paper or pixels; structured prose meant to be read.

Why? Because writing predates all the other media we mentioned. Reading is not a 20th-century novelty. It’s not even modern; it’s civilizational. Ideas have been passed down in writing since the dawn of civilization. From clay tablets to scrolls to novels, books aren’t an invention of the Industrial Age—they’re as enduring as religion itself.

Books don’t need massive infrastructure. They don’t require production crews, brand managers, or legacy platforms. You don’t need $100 million to write one. You just need the will to tell a story and the discipline to finish it.

And books are immune to obsolescence because they don’t rely on artificial scarcity. Nobody buys just one book, and you can have a thousand authors writing for a thousand niches.

Genre fiction coming out of newpub beats anything Hollywood’s put out in decades. Because unlike TV or film, indie writers don’t have to water down their stories for international markets or DIE compliance.

That’s also why, in the middle of a cultural collapse, newpub isn’t just surviving but thriving.

Writing isn’t trendy. It’s eternal.

So yes, comics are dead. TV ratings evaporate as Zoomers tune out and Boomers check out. We’re watching Hollywood’s embalming in real time.

But those media were never built to last. They were always time and place-specific product propped up as cultural monuments.

Books are culture. And they’re not going anywhere.

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