Nine out of ten of the top‑grossing films worldwide in 2025 were a sequel, reboot, remake, or adaptation of existing intellectual property (IP).

From Ne Zha 2 and Zootopia 2, to Avatar: Fire and Ash, and How to Train Your Dragon, original concepts were few and far between. The one exception, F1, succeeded because it rode (pun intended) on the back of one of the most recognisable sporting brands in the world.

This isn’t a coincidence: it’s a signal. But don’t take this as a lament about the drop in cultural creativity.

The more interesting question to ask isn’t ‘isn’t that a shame?’ but ‘why?’ And, most importantly for our industry, ‘what should communicators do with that knowledge?’

Why familiarity wins

It is tempting to frame Hollywood’s sequel economy as creative laziness or fear of financial risk, but it’s actually a rational response to how the human brain works.

The brain is an efficiency machine. Familiar stimuli reduce cognitive load. In a world of endless tough choices, recognised IP functions as a shortcut that says: ‘you can relax, this is a safe bet.’

Decades of research also show us that nostalgic recall boosts mood, increases empathy, and makes people both more open to persuasion and quicker to trust.¹

Added to this, we remember the past better than it really was. Psychologists call this ‘rosy retrospection’, which primes returning audiences to arrive pre‑loaded with goodwill.

In a nutshell, familiarity breeds comfort rather than contempt.

So, from a behavioural perspective, the dominance of predictable IP isn’t remotely surprising. In a scary, uncertain world, this is exactly what we should expect.

At what cost?

If familiarity always wins, where does that leave us? Are we drifting towards a monoculture where everyone’s favourite film – yours, your parents’ and your kids’ – is effectively the same story, repackaged every decade? Are we living in a world where imagination takes a back seat to catalogue management?

Unfortunately, it looks like we’ve already travelled some distance down this path. Think of Disney’s live‑action remakes and Marvel’s decade‑long multiverse strategy. The music industry’s catalogue acquisition boom is another symptom of the same condition.

Luckily, there’s always going to be at least some market for novelty. Barbenheimer demonstrated that fresh creative treatment of familiar IP and thought-provoking, high-intensity originality can still be genuinely subversive.

It’s not about the known over the new – it’s lazy repetition vs smart reinvention.

What this means for health communications

If we know this is how human psychology operates, then there’s no reason to believe it behaves differently in healthcare settings.

Health comms often assumes serious topics require novelty or complexity or both. Yet we know that behaviour change fails when it leads with the unfamiliar.

The lesson from Hollywood is not to copy the tactic, but to understand the human need it satisfies and to sit with its implications.

First, meet people in familiar places, not clinical ones‍

Health behaviour change happens when something feels relevant to who someone already is. Campaigns that anchor new information in recognisable emotional territory, family, routine, identity, consistently outperform those that ask audiences to reason their way to action.

Second, trust is built before the message is received‍

Franchise IP works because audiences arrive with a pre‑existing relationship to the story world. Health and pharma brands rarely have that luxury, but trusted messengers function in exactly the same way. It’s our peers, HCPs and online influencers who help pave the way for change. And it’s why who delivers the message can matter more than what the message is.

Third, nostalgia can be a public health tool, if deployed carefully‍

Campaigns that reconnect people with earlier, healthier versions of themselves, or with collective memories of resilience, activate the same emotional circuitry that pulls people back to cinemas for a fourth, very-much-unasked-for sequel.

Used well, nostalgia can be a bridge to behaviour change. Used poorly, it can reinforce the behaviours we’re trying to shift.

Fourth, the risk of over‑familiarity is real‍

Just as Hollywood’s IP dependence risks creative stagnation, health comms that rely too heavily on well‑worn tropes risk becoming invisible. The empowered patient smiling bravely on their journey to better health... We’re all quick to tune out what we can predict.

The most effective work neatly combines a familiar emotional anchor with an unexpected perspective, voice or messenger 

The bigger provocation

Entertainment has always been a mirror for the mindset of the moment.

What the 2025 box office tells us is that we’re struggling. The world feels unpredictable, so we are collectively reaching out for the safety blanket of the familiar.

For health communicators, the lesson is neither to blindly replicate their strategy nor to reject it on principle. If we understand the human need for comfort set against the uncertain world that we’re all living in, we can look at our efforts and ask uncomfortable questions.

Is the work we’re doing meeting people in this emotional reality? Are we resorting to repetition and getting lost in a sea of same? Or are we pushing too hard in the other direction, and asking too much of our stakeholders?

At the end of the day, Hollywood does get one thing right. The most powerful stories aren’t always new ones: they’re the ones that make people feel known.

Reference

1. Juhl J, Biskas M. Nostalgia: An impactful socialemotion. Curr Opin Psychol. 2023:49;101545.

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