A new 31-year analysis classified every film in the annual box office top 50 since 1995. Original screenplays now take 10 percent of the slots and less than 11 percent of the money.
Hollywood’s reputation for recycling has never been short of anecdotes. What it has lacked is a number.
A new study from pop culture publication Bamfuzzle supplies one, and it is bleaker than the conventional complaint suggests. Original screenplays accounted for 10 percent of the 50 highest grossing films at the North American box office in 2025, down from 36 percent in 1995. Films built on pre-existing intellectual property, meaning sequels, remakes and adaptations, rose from 54 percent to 88 percent across the same period.
The 31-year study of Hollywood originality classified all 1,550 films that reached the annual box office top 50 between 1995 and 2025 into five categories: original screenplay, sequel, remake, adaptation of material from another medium, and dramatization of true events. Every figure is drawn from Box Office Mojo calendar year charts, and the classification of each individual film is published alongside the findings.
Counting films, however, turns out to understate the shift. Weighted by revenue, the picture is considerably worse. Original films earned 34.2 percent of all money taken by the top 50 in 1995. In 2025 they earned 10.9 percent. Sequels moved from 17.1 percent to 52.9 percent and peaked at 73.7 percent in 2021. Across the 2020 to 2024 period, original films averaged 9.7 percent of top 50 revenue, the lowest figure of any five-year block in the study.
The clearest single finding is a streak. No original film has finished a calendar year as the highest grossing release in North America since Avatar in 2010, a run of 15 consecutive years. There is a stricter version of the same fact: because Avatar opened in December 2009 and won 2010 on carryover earnings, the last original film to open and top its own calendar year outright was Finding Nemo in 2003.
Nine of the 31 years studied produced no original film in the annual top 10 at all. Every one of those nine falls after 2010. Across the sixteen years from 1995 to 2010 it never happened once.
“Hollywood is out of ideas is the wrong sentence,” said Bryan Falcon of Bamfuzzle. “Hollywood stopped betting on them. Original films still work when they get made. They stopped being scheduled.”
One finding cuts against the usual explanation. The number of distinct franchises appearing in the top 50 each year rose from 21 in 1995 to 36 in 2025, which rules out a simple consolidation story. A small number of enormous franchises did not absorb the chart. A larger number of franchise entries now compete for the same fixed 50 positions, and films arriving without an existing brand are what get squeezed out.
The scale of the largest is still striking. The Marvel Cinematic Universe alone accounts for 38 appearances in the top 50 and $13.06 billion in combined domestic gross, more than double the next closest franchise. Its continued dominance is one reason audience attention around the next Avengers film has shifted from marketing beats to speculation, with Avengers: Doomsday fan theories now circulating well ahead of release. On the study’s evidence, that anticipation is precisely the asset an original screenplay cannot buy.
The report is unusually explicit about its limits. Because it observes only the top 50 grossing films each year, it measures commercial prominence rather than production volume, and cannot establish whether fewer original films are being made. It contains no budget data, so it supports no conclusion about profitability. Classification of roughly 40 borderline titles involves editorial judgment, and each is flagged in the underlying data.
The trend itself is not in question. The original film share of the top 50 declines at an average of 1.10 percentage points per year with a correlation coefficient of negative 0.815. Revenue share declines faster still, at 1.33 points per year with a correlation of negative 0.891.
The 2025 top 10 makes the point without any statistics at all. It contained four remakes, the highest concentration recorded in any year of the study, and exactly one original film: Sinners, at number seven.
Bamfuzzle has made the findings free to cite and republish with attribution and a link, and intends to extend the study by one calendar year each January.
