Love reliving my childhood at 35. Image: Tina Tiller
From Toy Story 5 to Scary Movie 6 to Jackass 6, it sure feels like we can’t escape millennial franchises coming back from the dead right now.
Look, I am not here to say that I am some sort of prophet, but last month I had a dream that I wrote an Austin Powers prequel. Simply called “Austin” and inspired by the university flashbacks from Goldmember, it starred Timothée Chalamet as Powers and featured the line of dialogue “not my todger, baby”. My dream came one step closer to reality when, just days later on a podcast, Mike Myers confirmed that a new Austin Powers movie was actually on its way.
Perhaps it’s less that I am Nostradamus of the modern age and more that every single day it feels like there is news of an old 90s or 2000s franchise being disinterred for an an audience of slack-jawed, misty-eyed millennials brimming with nostalgia for the extremely recent past (2002 was yesterday, don’t talk to me). Just last week, Prime Video premiered Legally Blonde prequel Elle, while the last two films I saw in cinemas in 2026 were… Toy Story 5 and Scary Movie 6.
Toy Story 5 I can excuse. Although they definitely should have left the franchise as a perfect trilogy in 2010, dusting off Buzz, Woody, Jessie and co managed to feel justified by tackling the urgent issue of technology ruining all of our lives. The film has about two too many storylines and actually ends up taking a weirdly neutral perspective on tech, but I was far too busy sobbing along to the latest gospel from the patron saint of millennial sap, Taylor Alison Swift, to notice at the time
There was unfortunately nothing to distract from the abhorrent Scary Movie 6, which I could comfortably say is one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life (and I also sawMichaelthis year). An incoherent collection of half-assed SNL sketches making lazy barely-references to everything from K-Pop Demon Hunters to the Epstein files, the film squandered its returning “core four” cast from the 2000s juggernaut and left me feeling hollow and full of remorse.
On reflection, most millennial revivals have resulted in the same regret-filled nostalgia hangover. When Hemingway said “we can’t ever go back to old things” he was surely referring to soulless cinema trips to Devil Wears Prada 2, Freakier Friday, or that Mean Girls movie based on the Mean Girls musical based on the Mean Girls movie. Even TV has succumbed – Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, Scrubs and even Harry bloody Potter have all come crawling back this year.
How did we get stuck in this inescapable millennial franchise hell loop? Rosemary Overell, senior lecturer in media, film and communication at the University of Otago, describes a potent mix of nostalgia and rampant “capitalism by capitalising” as they call it intechno-hell video essay Jankspace. “Nostalgia is a compelling, gripping, emotion,” she said. “It is a mix of sadness and longing for the past and an odd enjoyment of revisiting that past through objects in the present.”
The urge to constantly reheat and tweak pre-existing IP also comes down to money, and film studios beingless open to risk in the streaming age. “It is cheaper to produce a commodity which has already been written than pay a lot of new staff to create a free commodity,” Overell explains. “The mitigation of risk is never completely possible in the free market, but a movie which was previously trendy indicates that it may ‘land’ again if the IP is already there.”
And while it may provide a quick nostalgia hit, Overell’s concern with the franchise machine is that it threatens labour power in creative industries. “If we fall into a continual revival of old IP, the demand for skilled workers in script writing, generating ideas, and music writing etc. contracts,” she says. “Hollywood doesn’t simply mine old IP because the audience organically desires to see a reboot… they produce that want and desire
WithJackass: Best and Lastout now andShrek 5,Practical Magic 2,Focker-in-Law,The Grinch 2,Princess Diaries 3anda Clueless prequelon the way, it seems like we may never escape the current millennial vortex. “I don’t think capitalism or the nostalgia industry will ever peak or collapse without a broader structural shift,” says Overall. “Revivals will continue so long as capitalism requires new trends and perceived ’novelty’ to peddle new things to consume.”
Perhaps we millennials just need to accept that our generation is now just as washed as the boomers making and devouring endless movies about The Beatles. While Gen Z are out here smashing box office records withtheir whacky original IP in low budget horror movies like Backrooms and Obsession, surely there’s plenty more old dross we can dredge up from the Y2K well. 30 Going on 60? Freddy Got Fingered… Again? 1000 Days of Summer (climate change angle)?
In the meantime, it looks like I’ve got an Austin Powers prequel screenplay to work on.
