Yesterday's announcement that HBO Max was rebranding as Max didn't catch me by surprise; it's still baffling that a $30 billion corporation would be stupid enough to drop the "HBO" brand and name their new service after the main character in every preschool Step 1 reading book, but this has all been rumored for a while. What did catch me by surprise was that one of Max's marquee offerings will be a brand new Harry Potter TV show, retelling the first seven books in a scripted series produced over the course of a decade.
What also caught me by surprise was that Warner Bros Discovery had the delusion to believe we're supposed to get excited about this series based on a 40-second clip of pre-Y2K-quality animated candles spelling out the words "Harry Potter." Nice one, Davey.
This announcement in itself doesn't say a ton. Harry Potter is the fourth-highest grossing movie franchise of all time, so it would be genuinely un-American to not remake it every 20 years. Harry Potter fans are dairy cows that must be milked regularly to keep them profitable.
But you start to notice a trend emerging when you triangulate this announcement with a few other data points from music. The number of hit songs that feature a sample from another song was up 31% in 2022 compared to the previous three years, with the most frequently sampled decade being the 2000s. Taylor Swift, an artist almost 20 years into her career, recently broke the Ticketmaster record for most tickets sold in a single day with over 2 million tickets.
All of this seems to suggest that nostalgia is simply becoming a better business. Things that tickle the childhood memories in us are catching our attention more and more. I think part of this is because the generation of people 25 and under is likely the most insecure generation to ever exist in America, and being reminded of the pureness of childhood is nice and comforting. But I think the much bigger reason for this is the same reason I used to always buy Cinnamon Toast Crunch at the supermarket.
Walk to the cereal aisle of any American supermarket and you will find no less than 50 different cereals to choose from. Some that you love (Fruit Loops). Some that you don't understand how they're still in business (Kix). Some that you never actually realized were real cereals and you thought they were just internet memes (Count Chocula). All and all I've probably only tried a quarter of the available options. And if I really took the time and read through every single name and flavor in the aisle and picked the one I thought I would like best, I surely would find something that sounds more appetizing to me than Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
But who has the freaking time for that? I grocery shop on my days off work, so I don't want to make going to Safeway feel like billable hours. If I need to pick a cereal, I'm just going to pick one I have familiarity with because I really don't have the mental capacity to process the other 49 options. So I choose Cinnamon Toast Crunch every time.
I think nostalgia culture works largely the same way. The Spotify library is over 100 million songs at this point. There were 599 original scripted TV series released in 2022. We have virtually infinite content to consume at any given point in our day, but the reality of this is less "kid in a candy store" as much as "tired adult in the cereal aisle." You're so overwhelmed by the options that you're very likely to just stick with something somewhat familiar.
And thus how we get decade-long Harry Potter series and hit songs sampling Fergie. It's hard to sell people on a new idea, but it's easy to get them to recognize old ones.
Now I'm just bracing for Charlie Bit My Finger: The Movie.
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