Too much government regulation makes life a living hell. For proof, see the UK, with its shrinking number of crisps in every packet; the fact you now can’t browse r/cider without providing a form of age identification; and the bureaucratic nightmare that is trying to order new recycling bags off a local council website. At the same time, too little regulation can quickly lead to violent and precarious concentrations of wealth and power. In order to avoid a 2008-style economic collapse, even the most devoted free-market capitalist invariably has to suck up some degree of checks and balances from the state. But where we have come to expect government regulation across a range of sectors, from finance to food, we have yet to accept the idea of it in one of our most treasured industries: film.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the biggest films of the last few years: the recently released Jurassic World: Rebirth (which required a plot absurd enough to justify a seventh Jurassic Park franchise film, in this case using dinosaur blood to cure heart disease); the latest Superman reboot (this one pandering to millennials and Gen Z by exploring the ‘emotional experience’ of being a superhuman alien); a second installment of the Lilo & Stitch live-action remake (which, to appropriate Jorge Luis Borges, is about as interesting as a comb to a bald man), the fifth John Wick film (this time with the entirely pointless addition of even more assassins with tragic backstories); a new onslaught of Marvel Cinematic Universe films (somehow stubbornly persisting with a new set of heroes after what we hoped would be the conclusion of this franchise with Avengers: Endgame); the sixth Final Destination film (a series which, more than any other, has survived by repeating the exact same plot each time); Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (a truly democratic film franchise, which the public once successfully bullied into redesigning Sonic’s appearance following an unloved trailer); and Moana 2 (a denigrating mockery of Polynesian culture posing as a tribute to ‘representation’).
All of these films have two things in common: their dearth of unoriginality, and their staggering box office success. Each film is either an unwanted live-action remake or the new output from a franchise that has already been flogged like a gimp on his birthday. Additionally, they all largely feature a small group of absurdly high-paid Hollywood stars, all of whom generally play the same character (or rather play themselves) in every role. According to Forbes, the five highest paid actors of 2024 earned a total of $447 million. In the U.S., the ‘Big 5’ film studios (Universal, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures) earned a total revenue of $106.73 billion dollars (roughly equivalent to the GDP of Bulgaria in 2024). Walt Disney Studios alone earned $91.36 billion. These are staggering numbers.
“It is because of this that I propose the need for direct state regulation in the film industry.”
As many directors admit, remakes and reinstallments are driven by box-office earnings: a billion-dollar-earning film will instantaneously secure a sequel. Yet despite marinating in so much money, nothing of cinematic value seems to emerge from today’s Hollywood. There are, of course, occasionally interesting modern blockbusters. I was personally impressed by the subversive ideological premise of David Gregory’s Zombies of the Third Reich (2025), which seemed to intentionally play with the idea that, if Nazis represented the purest evil imaginable, we have to make the strange admission that Nazi zombies are somehow more digestible, more familiar to liberal democracy, than everyday human Nazism. But what is most noticeable is that any worthwhile, standout films are becoming more and more of an exception.
To put it simply, the film market has gone seriously awry. If unchecked financial interests inevitably come to threaten the wider economy, it is not difficult to argue that the same financial interests are corrupting the film industry. Individual consumer intentions are, however, nowhere near powerful enough to counter broader financial structures. What is required is not a ‘shift in attitude,’ but rather a targeted administrative intervention. It is because of this that I propose the need for direct state regulation in the film industry.
Through the hands of the state, the hegemony of repetitive and unoriginal blockbusters could be dismantled. Marvel Studios and its persistent cinematic atrocities could be defunded. Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Will Smith, a host of multi-millionaire actors, and the endless production of unwanted live-action remakes would fade away with the profit motive. Direct government limitation of Hollywood budgets would dethrone the Big 5 studios, and we would no longer have to put up with x numbers of dire superhero films, endless Jurassic Park remakes mostly comprised of scenes where Chris Pratt holds his hand up at a dinosaur, or cheap tangoes between Godzilla and King Kong.
The idea of centrally regulating cinematic productions is admittedly not new: Soviet control over Russian cinema—in particular under Stalinism—ensured that filmmakers were forced to adapt their artistic techniques to Party propaganda. The experimental stylizations of Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (1929), for example, were considered by the administrative nomenklatura to deviate dangerously from the rugged principles of Soviet Realism. Concerned that experimental cinema could threaten the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution, screenplays had to be submitted to the Soviet Politburo in order to ensure that neither the plot nor even the styles of mise-en-scène contradicted the Party line.
The Soviets subsumed cinema to the determining role of ideology. My suggestion, however, has little to do with a central ideological message. The interventions I propose would seek to limit Hollywood budgets and thereby influence the context in which cinema is produced. The repetitive output of contemporary cinema is a symptom of Hollywood’s unregulated profit-driven market, which fixates on the highest-paid actors and maximising studio revenues. We got MCU film number 36 (!) not because of Marvel Studios’ passion for artistic expression, but because, like any other economic industry, profit potentials were seen. When asked about the possibility of a new Final Destination installment, director Steven Quale gave a bluntly honest answer: “We’ll see how this one performs internationally, and if it makes as much money as the fourth one, I’m sure Warner Brothers will want to make another one.” Directors no longer even bother trying to hide behind a veil of ‘artistic passion.’ Instead, they gladly proclaim their financial interests. They may be just as happy working in investment banking or tech startups.
If the problem is the enormous amount of money circulating around Hollywood, the first step in rescuing cinema would be to suck some of it out. Budgets, and subsequently actor and director earnings, would be centrally limited to a number which ensures that writing, casting, locations, production, marketing, set management, and all other expenses would proceed unhindered without going above a certain necessary amount. Manufacturing wealth would no longer be the raison d’être of cinema. The logic of this implementation is somewhat straightforward, but the history not only of film but art in general suggests that great inventions emerge when profit is reduced to secondary background noise. The exact figures of these government regulated cuts to Hollywood budgets would be a matter of a longer legislative deliberation, and don’t matter for the moment.
Unlike the Soviet method, there is no teleological reasoning to my proposed intervention: I do not recommend a specific (even ideological) form of cinema. Some may have a preference for New German Cinema, John Schlesinger, or Nicholas Ray, but recreating a film period for which I am particularly nostalgic is not the intention here. The intervention would rather be preventative: the forms of cinema it would produce cannot be predicted, but a reasonable bet could be made that if the possibility of profit were removed from the equation, the days of Marvel and nth instalments of pointless action franchises would quickly be behind us.
Follow Rafael on X @apocryphael
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