Are We Seeing The End Of Retro Culture?

Throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, retro culture seemed EVERYWHERE! We were getting retro game after retro game after retro game, various old properties that were famous in the 80s and 90s such as “Transformers” and “GI Joe” came back for an encore to astounding success, hell, even music genres that were popular 20-30 years ago (such as techno and disco) began seeing a resurgence! For a while, it was all about retro, retro, retro, prompting many people to jokingly ask “What year is it?” when faced with so much media that would’ve felt right at home a few decades ago. Games like “Shovel Knight” and “Super Meat Boy” look and feel like they came from a different era, while other titles such as “Hotline Miami”, “Retro City Rampage” and “FEZ” are filled with so much love for the 80s and 90s that one just can’t help but feel nostalgic for days gone by when playing them. The same goes for movies and TV shows – “Drive”, which directly inspired the aforementioned “Hotline Miami”, would feel right at home if it was released as an 80s low budget pulp thriller, and then of course there’s the smash hit series “Stranger Things”, which is essentially the 80s Stephen King adaptation that never was. And this is without listing the dozens upon dozens of revivals of franchises from our past, such as “Star Trek”, “Planet of the Apes”, “Terminator”, “Robocop”, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and many, many more.

But in the last few years, the wave of retro things seems to have stopped. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s still occasionally an awesome retro-inspired project that catches our attention (such as “Stranger Things”, as well as Oscar nominee “Mad Max: Fury Road”), but for the most part the media just seems to have moved on from this trend. Looking at the list of upcoming videogames for 2017, for example, only two of the announced games have a retro inspiration – “Shenmue III” and the Castlevania-inspired “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night”, both of which were brought to life thanks to the original franchises’ creators asking for fan support on Kickstarter for one last hurrah. The same goes for movies – the majority of movies that are coming out in the next few years are part of established franchises, with the few that bank on nostalgia (e.g. “Trolls”) being very far in between. Why is that?

One of the biggest reasons why studios are being more cautious with retro stuff is because they’re simply not as profitable as they once were. Let’s look at two of the most anticipated retro products of 2016 – the “Ghostbusters” remake and the game “Mighty No. 9”. “Ghostbusters”, despite a very controversial marketing approach from the studio which sought the help of vocal feminists to label everyone who disliked the movie as a misogynist, still only made $226 million on a $144 million budget, and while initially that may seem pretty great, keep in mind that the budget listed here is only for production and doesn’t include the massive marketing campaign, so the real estimate should be close to about $300 million cost, which means that “Ghostbusters” actually lost money. While I don’t have any sales numbers for “Mighty No. 9”, I do have its reviews, and, as I’ve mentioned before, they’re not that great, with an average score of around 5/10.

But the lack of success for these otherwise massively high profile projects is only a symptom, not a cause. In order to be able to properly answer the question of why retro is not doing too well and gradually disappearing, we need to discover just why it was popular in the first place. And the reason for that is simple – the people who were kids in the 80s and 90s were adults in the 2000s, with disposable incomes. Thanks to the Internet, their nostalgia for the shows they watched and games they played as children reached the ears of the people who actually have the power to bring them back, and so they did. But as the market got saturated by these “retro” properties, a HUGE number of which weren’t really all that great at all (I genuinely fail to think of a single movie reboot of an 80s property that was any good, and many independent game makers opted to use “retro” graphics for their games to cut costs even when they weren’t appropriate). Today, we’ve got our fair share of retro stuff, and we don’t want any more. Instead of looking at the past, we’re looking at the future.

In 2008, “Iron Man” blew people’s minds with the promise of a shared universe between numerous movie franchises, but it wasn’t until 2012 when “The Avengers” hit that this promise was actually fulfilled, and we saw the heroes of 4 movies teaming up to stop a bigger threat. Since then, we’ve learned what the Marvel Cinematic Universe holds for us all the way up until 2019, and the same can be said for the DC Extended Universe, which started in 2011 with “Man of Steel”. Numerous studios are announcing their projects way ahead of time, sometimes without even having a star or a director (we had a release date for a “Captain Marvel” movie way before ANYONE had signed on to work on it). Hell, even franchises based on nostalgic properties, such as “X-Men”, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” are announcing massive cinematic universes spanning the rest of the decade. Perhaps the reason why retro isn’t as prevalent today as it was in the past is because audiences have stopped looking towards the past and have begun looking at the future.