Hollywood is stuck making the same lame movies over and over again

Over the past few weeks, Hollywood has announced major new project after major new project.

The thing is, they’re all old.

Warner Bros. is said to be close to a deal for a seven-season TV series adaptation of the Harry Potter books … only 11 years after they completed a massively popular eight-film adaptation of those same novels, which loads of people are still watching. 

Disney is planning a live-action version of its musical cartoon “Moana,” which hit theaters in 2016 and is best known for its suddenly threatening song title “How Far I’ll Go.” It will star famed Disney princess Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

And — in a galaxy, far, far away that’s become far, far overstretched — Daisy Ridley is returning to play boring Rey in yet another “Star Wars” film, even though we were adamantly told that the Skywalker Saga was over back in 2019. 

Hollywood is suffering from a far more insidious disease than a simple bout of sequelitis. And its symptoms are much worse than those of the Nostalgiavirus. Hollywood is bedridden and incapacitated with Nothing-new-monia.

In short, the industry’s totally run out of ideas.  

Audiences are stuck watching the same stuff, only worse than before, over and over and over again. Welcome to the Age of Intellectual Property, in which a handful of top entities are greedily recycled, plundered and sapped of heart until we start to resent their very existence.

In June, Disney and Lucasfilm will provide the masses with an unconscionable fifth “Indiana Jones” movie with the video-gamey title “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” starring an 80-year-old Harrison Ford. 

The last entry from 2008, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has a 53% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes — probably because it featured Indy absurdly surviving a nuclear blast by hiding inside a refrigerator.

Who cares? Here’s another.

And next month comes “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” the 32nd — ?!?!? — Marvel Cinematic Universe film in 15 years. In lieu of unprintable expletives, all I’ll say is “Groot!”

From a business perspective, sad-sack movie studios not being able to move on from their sexy exes makes sense. 

They’re struggling — losses from the pandemic shutdowns and a foolish over-investment in unprofitable streaming products have led to layoffs and restructuring — so they’re reaching back to happier times when they had huge hits and are essentially repeating those in hopes of the same outcome. And sometimes, it works.

However, there are signs that audiences are getting bored of endless repetition.

For instance, the last MCU movie, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” got terrible reviews and performed poorly at the box office. 

More and more, it seems as though regular $1 billion worldwide grosses are becoming out of reach for Marvel unless the title starts with “Spider-Man.” Even “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” came in below expectations last year at $859 million.

Disney and Pixar’s attempted 2022 “Toy Story” spinoff, “Lightyear,” was a huge flop.

And the attempt by Warner Bros. to drag out Harry Potter’s so-called Wizarding World — the “Fantastic Beasts” series — has been such a disaster that the final two films were scrapped before the story was even finished. It’s like ending a TV series without the finale.

Speaking of television, the small screen has, for years now, usurped the cultural and artistic dominance of movies largely by (save for a few examples) embracing exciting, original discoveries. 

Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and “Squid Game” and HBO’s “Succession” and “The White Lotus” aren’t based on a comic book or a 1990s blockbuster, but nonetheless keep viewers talking and drive subscriptions. They’re smart and gripping.

“What should I watch next?” is such a common question among people looking for adventurous, challenging, relevant new TV shows that The Post’s sister site, Decider, was built around helping them answer it.

Meanwhile, what’s the movies’ big, hot, groundbreaking idea to lure in consumers? A live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” 

Talk about under the sea.