Why is most, if not all, new entertainment in Current Year a remake or reboot of a previous franchise? Original ideas are hard to come by these days.
Is it laziness/refusal to innovate from the industry? Consoomer manchildren locked in a doom-loop of nostalgiawank? Have we reached the point in history where every story that could be told has been told, and there is no longer anything new under the sun?
I don't have a good answer, but let's look at the question from another angle.
What was it about the period, say, 1930 - 1960 (just focussing on capeshit, other genres may have different years, like 1960 - 1990 for western and Japanese space operas)? What made those years so productive? If you look at very long durations of the Western culture-form, I think the rate of new story production was very low. People told variations on the same folk tales across time and space (thus the efforts of the Grimm bros. in Germany). Of course there were new stories - Shakespeare and Rabelais - but even Shakespeare's largest themed body of work, the Henriad cycle, is just a recount of the English kings during the latter phase of the Hundred Years' War.
One notion I have is that the period 1930 - 1960 was full of breakneck advancement. People who came of age in 1930 had been born into the end of the Victorian balance of powers, where flight and radio were novelties, and then got to live through two world wars, the invention of the tank, atomic power, jet planes, TV, the destruction of all but one of the world's imperial thrones, the rise of Wilsonian self-determination... the movie X-Men First Class makes it plain in a meta way, that the X-Men were born out of the atomic era. In universe this is handwaved away by radiation causing mutations. In reality, I think the rapid development of powers beyond man's control, especially the nuclear bomb, raised the urge to embody those vast powers in human form.
You could say the same thing is happening now with computer technology, but that's a different matter. The medium of comics has been degraded for other reasons. The best shot the "creative class" took at expressing that power gave us the dude who huffed his grandpa's experimental internet gas.
I don't think other themes are as played-out. Capeshit just sells AND has run out of creative steam, so it's a perfect storm for remake hell. If audiences ever get into spycraft realism and reflecting on the Cold War, there are several good Le Carre books that have yet to be made into films. Pretty please...
