Gen Z Didn't Kill Cinema, Beer, or Soda—Lazy Marketing Did

Mark Ritson argues that the soft launch of Supergirl and the breakout success of Backrooms point to a bigger marketing problem: legacy brands keep blaming young audiences for rejecting old products.

Kids aren’t going to the cinema anymore. That’s the general take on the post-Covid decline now afflicting the big screen. And the superficial data does support the depressive assessment. PwC counted 1.3bn US cinema admissions in 2019. By 2023, the figure had fallen to 777m. Per capita admissions peaked in 2002 at 5.1 per year. Pre-pandemic, they had drifted to 3.5. In 2024, they sat closer to 1.8. Frequent moviegoers, those buying six-plus tickets a year, fell from 39% of the audience in 2019 to 17% in 2025, per S&P Global. Streaming arrived. TikTok arrived. Gen Z stayed home. Studios have said as much on every earnings call between 2021 and 2024.

Then reality did what reality usually does to bad marketing theory. It got in the way.

Four films shattered the narrative:

• Marty Supreme (A24, $70m budget): A low-budget biopic about a fictional 1950s ping-pong hustler, grossed $191m worldwide.
• Iron Lung (self-financed by YouTuber Markiplier, $3m budget): A horror film grossed over $50m.
• Backrooms (A24, $10m budget): Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons from YouTube, opened to $81m domestic, $118m globally, and passed $300m worldwide. 43% of its audience was 18-24.
• Obsession (Focus Features, from YouTube director Curry Barker, 26): Grossed about $370m worldwide, becoming Focus Features' highest-grossing film domestically.

Four films. Four directors who did not come up through the studio system. Four budgets between $3m and $70m. Four genre-resistant concepts. And an audience profile heavily skewed toward the demographic that supposedly stopped going to the cinema four years ago.

Now consider what Hollywood spent the same period doing. The top 10 highest-grossing films of 2024 came entirely from existing IP, sequels, and prequels. The only two genuine originals in the top 20 were IF and Longlegs. Between half and two-thirds of the major studios’ 2025 slate was franchise extension, sequel, prequel, or reboot.

The blockbuster strategy, popularized by Harvard professor Anita Elberse in her 2013 book Blockbusters, argued for placing disproportionately large bets on a small number of likely winners. It worked for a while. Before 2000, only seven film franchises had cumulatively grossed more than $1bn. Since 2000, more than a hundred have. But the trouble with a successful formula is that the idiots arrive later and think it will be eternally applicable.

Sales soft? Bigger sequel. Bigger sequel underperforms? Multi-property crossover. Crossover flops? Reboot the original. Reboot struggles? Add a younger actor, a knowing joke, and a soundtrack from an artist your daughter once mentioned at breakfast.

Consider Supergirl. Warner Bros. and DC Studios opened it on Friday. Production budget $170m, marketing around $125m on top. It is the sequel to last year’s Superman, which was itself a remake of Man of Steel with Henry Cavill, which was a remake of Superman Returns, which was a remake of Superman I, II, III and IV with Christopher Reeve. Supergirl opened to $38m domestic and $68m globally, below tracking. The worldwide break-even point is somewhere above $315m. It might not make it.

It is a bit like your father forcing you to listen to Joy Division until you get it. The first song, you don’t like, so he puts on another single. You still don’t like Joy Division. So he plays you a third with the volume up. Then he turns to you, exasperated, and asks why you don’t like music.

This pattern extends beyond cinema. The drinks industry has spent five years explaining that the young drink less alcohol. Health-conscious. Less social. Into other substances. All probably partly true. But the mainstream beer industry has spent a decade extending Bud Light, Coors, and Miller into different cans. The wine industry continues to sell Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc in the same bottles. Spirits brands launch line extensions of line extensions. But the more they dress up their existing portfolios with new colors, co-brands, and pop stars, the more the new generation of drinkers will drink elsewhere. Or not at all. The under-30s buy mezcal, hard seltzer, agave RTDs, premixed cocktails, Athletic non-alcoholic beer, hemp-derived drinks, and CBD seltzers. Their behavior is better understood as boredom than abstinence.

Soda is the same. Coca-Cola and Pepsi domestic volumes have softened for years. The standard explanation: Gen Z health concerns. Then Olipop crossed $200m in annual sales and was last valued at $1.85bn. Poppi was acquired by PepsiCo for $1.95bn in May 2025. Gut-health soda dollar sales grew 301% in 2023. Coke and Pepsi have both now launched their own prebiotic ranges, chasing a category they spent years insisting did not really exist because Gen Z had given up on fizzy drinks. Gen Z had not given up on fizzy drinks. They had given up on Coke and Pepsi.

In each case, the legacy industry diagnosis is lifestyle. The actual cause looks more like portfolio: a 30-year-old product assumption with the labels lightly redesigned, and a generation that has decided it would rather not. It’s not them, the consumer. It’s us, the lazy marketers.

Elberse’s blockbuster strategy is not wrong. It’s brilliant. Concentrating big bets on likely winners is still a defensible portfolio approach. But after two decades, what was meant to be a way of placing bets has become a way of avoiding them. You cannot find the next category-defining hit if all you fund is variations on the last one. At some point, it becomes old. It becomes derivative. And you see it first with a younger, disinterested consumer who was not made that way. That is their response to the crap of the past presented as new.

Marty Supreme, Backrooms and Obsession should be read as signals rather than blueprints. The box office, the brewery, the bottler and a host of other companies still have access to the youth market. What they lack is the capability of the new.

The new consumer is still there. She is just waiting for someone to bring her something she has not seen before. Something that speaks to her, rather than something that spoke to her grandparents and was resurrected a dozen times.

It’s not them. The problem has been sitting inside the marketing department all along.