It doesn’t take much analysis to see that new and original movies aren’t selling these days. According to Box Office Mojo, here were the top 10 highest-grossing movies in the United States in 2025:
1. A Minecraft Movie
2. Lilo & Stitch
3. Superman
4. Jurassic World: Rebirth
5. Zootopia 2
6. Wicked: For Good
7. Sinners
8. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
9. How to Train Your Dragon
10. Avatar: Fire and Ash
This list includes four sequels, two reboots, and two live-action remakes. The only movie with a genuinely original premise is Sinners. There are multiple reasons for this trend, none mutually exclusive. However, I think the biggest reason is a cultural phenomenon taking place in Gen Z.
Raised in a culture that’s constantly changing and almost entirely online, my generation is becoming increasingly desperate to experience “the good old days.” We’re drunk on nostalgia.
Nostalgia is most clearly defined by a sense of longing. It’s an intangible ache that the present moment is lacking in some essential way, and that a better way of life is buried in a long-gone era. We know that the world we’re living in is falling apart. We know that the digital age we were born into isn’t working.
And so we long. We’re nostalgic for eras that we truly know nothing about because we’re convinced that somewhere, left behind in the ’80s and ’90s, is the thing we’re missing. Or we’re nostalgic for our childhood, when logging on to Webkinz or the Modern Warfare 3 lobby was the extent of our social media.
Our love of ’80s music has endured far longer than the Drake–Kendrick Lamar feud. We flock to retro clothing from eras we’ve only ever seen in movies. We love typewriters and drive-in movie theaters, old video-game consoles and record players. We carry disposable cameras on vacations and hang Polaroids in our dorm rooms.
We’re a generation utterly consumed with nostalgia. And it’s not even nostalgia for a life we remember living. How did this happen?
Jaded Digital Age
According to conservative estimates, more than half of Gen Z is spending at least three hours a day on social media. Across those hours, they’re consuming new content in the form of memes, short reels, YouTube videos, and other YouTube videos reacting to those YouTube videos.
We’re exposed to new content every hour of every day. Amid the infinite list of problems that come from this, the culture of content creation has fostered cynicism. Our generation feels exasperated from the perpetual pressure to be “original” and “authentic.”
My generation is becoming increasingly desperate to experience ‘the good old days.’
The digital age has made my generation jaded by “new.”
Accentuating this trend is the unstoppable trajectory of our culture away from anything resembling simplicity. This is particularly true regarding the rise of AI-generated content. When so much of what we interact with on the internet is produced by large language models, it’s entirely expected that we should find comfort in printed Polaroids and record players, old books and VHS tapes. We’re quickly approaching a world where nothing can be trusted except what can be touched.
The digital age is pushing my generation to cling to a worldview dominated by nostalgia. Though we live in a world that thrives on cynicism and skepticism, a world that clings to the secular and dismisses the spiritual, we’re painfully aware that the postmodern world is destroying our souls. In nostalgia, we long for tradition, for things that last. We’re convinced the answer is found in transporting ourselves back to a simpler time.
And yet, nostalgia doesn’t satisfy our longings. There’s no peace in the statement “things used to be better,” and even less peace in desperate attempts to bring the former things to the present. As the writer of Ecclesiastes spells out clearly, “All is vanity and a striving after wind” (1:14). If my generation has any hope of curing this longing in our souls, we’re going to need to seek a better way forward than nostalgia.
Better Way
When I was in the third grade, my ideal Friday night was a piece of pizza from this local place called Mancino’s, an ice-cold Cherry Coke, and then several hours of playing Super Mario Galaxy with my brother. It was the rest from my labors that I so deeply craved.
Sixteen years later, I still sometimes feel nostalgia for the simpler weekend plans of my youth. I could drive 700 miles to the nearest Mancino’s, dig up my old Wii from my parents’ basement, and call up my brother for another weekend of Super Mario Galaxy. That would be fun, but it would do absolutely nothing for the ache in my soul.
Neither the constantly moving digital age nor the nostalgia-saturated lifestyle is how God intended for us to live in the present. Both promise rest and deliver only restlessness. My generation has become intoxicated on both, and both have utterly failed to fill the longing we feel so acutely. This is because new things and old things, however good, were never meant to bear the weight of our deepest longing. God designed us to find our ultimate joy in what’s eternal—God himself.
New things and old things, however good, were never meant to bear the weight of our deepest longing.
The writer of Ecclesiastes diagnoses why: God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (3:11). The ache we feel isn’t a malfunction—it’s a homing signal. We were made for something that doesn’t age, doesn’t glitch, and doesn’t require a software update. No vintage record player and no AI-generated feed can answer that. Only the eternal can.
And the eternal, it turns out, isn’t a thing but a Person. “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22–23). Here’s the paradox my generation needs to hear: God’s love is the oldest thing in the universe and the newest thing we’ll encounter today. It’s more ancient than any era we long for and fresher than any feed we scroll.
Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8)—the only “retro” that doesn’t disappoint and the only “original” that doesn’t fade. His love is the only thing that can soothe the ache of a nostalgia-drunk generation.
