As Diddy awaits verdict, here's where his business ventures stand
Combs, 55, who is one of the most influential figures in hip-hop history, now faces charges, including racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking involving two former partners and transporting people across state lines for prostitution. Prosecutors have painted a dark portrait of the mogul, whose alleged pattern of violence included drug-fueled sex parties he reportedly called 'freak-offs' or 'hotel nights.'
If convicted, the three-time Grammy winner could face life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.
Here's a closer look at how Combs' business portfolio and public image have crumbled under the weight of the allegations.
What has happened to Combs' business empire?
Before Combs was arrested and charged, his major business ventures had collapsed: He stepped down and later fully divested from Revolt TV, which was founded in 2013. The network offered a mix of programming focused on hip-hop culture, R&B music, social justice and documentaries.
He also reportedly lost a Hulu reality series deal and saw his once-iconic fashion brand Sean John vanish from Macy's shelves.
After surveillance footage surfaced last year showing Combs physically assaulting singer Cassie, his then-girlfriend, in 2016, consequences mounted: New York City revoked his ceremonial key, Peloton pulled his music, Howard University rescinded his honorary degree and his charter school in Harlem cut ties.
Last year, Combs settled a legal dispute with Diageo, relinquishing control of his lucrative spirits brands, Ciroc and DeLeón. While many of his ventures have unraveled, his music catalog — for now — remains intact.
Where does Combs' music stand?
Bad Boy Records may be synonymous with 1990s icons like The Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, Ma$e, and 112, but Combs kept the label relevant before his arrest with high-profile releases.
In 2023, Combs dropped ' The Love Album: Off the Grid,' which was his first solo studio album in nearly two decades, and Janelle Monáe released her critically acclaimed project ' The Age of Pleasure" through Bad Boy. Both albums earned Grammy nominations, with Monáe's effort recognized in the prestigious record of the year category.
Ahead of the 'The Love Album' release, Combs made headlines by returning Bad Boy publishing rights to several former artists and songwriters, years after he was criticized for how he handled their contracts.
Bad Boy Records remains operational, but the label has been significantly shaken by Combs' legal firestorm and it hasn't announced any major upcoming releases.
Last week, a surprise EP called 'Never Stop' released by his son, King Combs, and Ye (formerly Kanye West), showed support for the embattled mogul. The project was released through Goodfellas Entertainment.
Bad Boy Records remained active through 2022, backing Machine Gun Kelly's 'Mainstream Sellout' under the Bad Boy umbrella. He was a producer on MTV's reality television series 'Making the Band,' and 'Making His Band,' launching the careers of artists like the girl group Danity Kane and male R&B group Day 26.
Could Diddy's fortune be at risk?
Combs has been sued by multiple people who claim to have been victims of physical or sexual abuse. He has already paid $20 million to settle with one accuser, his former girlfriend Cassie. Most of those lawsuits, though, are still pending. It isn't clear how many, if any, will be successful, or how much it will cost Combs to defend himself in court. Combs and his lawyers have denied all the misconduct allegations and dismissed his accusers as out for a big payday.
Federal prosecutors have also informed the court that if Combs is convicted, they would seek to have him forfeit any assets, including property, 'used to commit or facilitate' his crimes. They won't detail exactly what property that might involve until after the trial is over.
How is Diddy's music faring on streaming?
Despite the legal turmoil surrounding Combs, his music catalog remains widely available on major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. None of the streamers have publicly addressed whether they plan to adjust how his music is featured if Combs is convicted.
Interestingly, Combs' music saw a roughly 20% boost in U.S. streaming between April and May 2025, his biggest monthly spike this year, according to Luminate. The numbers jump coincided with key moments in the trial, including testimonies from Cassie and Kid Cudi.
However, there was a slight drop-off with a 5 to 10% decrease in June compared to the previous month's streams.
Streaming makes up a fraction of an artist's revenue and is calculated through a complicated process called 'streamshare." Most artists see very little pay from digital services.
What happened to other businesses like Sean John?
Sean John, founded in 1998, has gone largely dormant, with its presence disappearing from major retailers like Macy's. There are no clear signs of a relaunch on the horizon.
In 2023, Combs launched Empower Global, an online marketplace designed to uplift Black-owned businesses and strengthen the Black dollar. He positioned the platform as a modern-day 'Black Wall Street,' backing it with a reported $20 million of his own investment.
The platform debuted with 70 brands and planned to expand by onboarding new Black-owned businesses each month, aiming to feature more than 200 by year's end.
However, as 2023 came to a close, several brands cut ties with Empower Global. It was reported that some cited disappointing performance and growing concerns over the misconduct allegations surrounding Combs.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world
Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can't graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, 'not because I didn't complete the requirements', she told me, 'but because I stood up for Palestinian life.' Haddad, who is Palestinian American, had been raising awareness on her campus about the Palestinian fight for freedom as part of her university's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The struggle is also personal for her. With roots in Gaza, she has lost more than 200 members of her extended family to Israel's war. She was part of a group of VCU students and supporters who attempted to set up an encampment in April 2024. The university called in the police that same night. Protestors were pepper sprayed and brutalized, and 13 were arrested. Haddad was not charged, but she was taken to the hospital 'because of the head trauma that I endured', she told me. 'I was bleeding. I was bruised. Cuts everywhere. The police slammed me down on the concrete, like, six different times.' But last year's attempted encampment wasn't even the reason Haddad's degree is being withheld. This year's peaceful memorial of it was. And how that scenario played out, with the university and campus police constantly changing the rules, illustrates something worrisome far beyond the leafy confines of an American campus. Israel's war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other. This collapse began with the liberal world's lack of resolve to rein in Israel's war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel. The implications of this collapse are profound for international, regional and even domestic politics. Political dissent is repressed, political language is policed, and traditionally liberal societies are increasingly militarized against their own citizens. Many of us disregard how much has shifted in the last 20 months. But we are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril. On 29 April 2025, a group of VCU students met on a campus lawn to remember the forcible dismantling of an encampment briefly erected on the same space the year prior. The gathering was not a protest. It was more akin to a picnic, with some students using banners from past demonstrations as blankets. Others brought actual blankets. Students sat on the grass and studied for their finals, tinkered with their laptops, and played cards or chess. A handful of the 40-odd students sported keffiyehs. It turned out the blankets were a problem. Almost two hours into their picnic, a university administrator confronted the students over a social media post that had advertised the gathering. ('Come be in community with one another to commemorate 1 Year since VCU's brutal response to the G4Z4 Solidarity Encampment. Bring picnic blankets, homework/finals, art supplies, snacks, music, games,' a local Palestinian solidarity group had posted.) Because of this post, the university considered the picnic an 'organized event', and since the students hadn't registered the event, it was deemed a violation of the rules. The rules at VCU had been changing because of protests for Gaza since February 2024. The administrator told the students they could relocate to the campus free-speech zone, an area that had been established in August 2024 because of the protests of that year. 'An amphitheater next to four dumpsters' is how Haddad described the area to me. The campus free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) is critical of free-speech zones because they 'function more like free speech quarantines, banishing student and faculty speakers to outposts that may be tiny, on the fringes of campus, or (frequently) both'. Rather than move, the students announced a formal end to their gathering, and they remained quietly on their campus lawn. But since the banners they were sitting on expressed a political point of view, the administrator told the students they would have to take them to the free-speech zone, according to Haddad. The lawn should be for everybody, the students countered. Several different conversations with campus police officers and different administrators ensued, with the students being told different rules each time. Over a dozen campus police officers appeared later that afternoon (as seen in this video). 'You've been asked not to have any blankets in the park. You have one minute to collect the blankets and to leave the park. Otherwise, you will be arrested for trespassing,' an officer told them. But the police continued to change the rules. First the students were told they would have to roll up the blankets and leave. Minutes later, police said they could stay if the blankets were gone. The students removed the blankets and, as the officers were leaving, the students began chanting: 'Free, free Palestine!' One raised a sign, referencing last year's protestors being pepper sprayed by police, that read: 'Gonna gas us again, you fucking monsters.' He was arrested. The others became angry and frustrated. 'You know what made this a demonstration?' a student yelled at the police. 'When you bring fucking cops to a picnic! That's what turns it into a fucking demonstration!' Eight days later, Haddad and another student, identified by the university as leaders, were served notice of policy violations due to the unauthorized gathering. Their degrees were being withheld. 'When students expose the violence of Israel's occupation and genocide, institutions like VCU, which are deeply entangled with weapon manufacturers and corporate donors, become fearful,' Haddad said. 'So they twist the rules, they rewrite the policies, and they try to silence us … But it's all about power. Our demands for justice are a threat to their complicity.' The strategic rewriting of the rules isn't unique to VCU. It's taking place across the United States as university administrators clamp down on protests supporting Palestinian rights. In one of many other examples, dozens of faculty members and students were temporarily suspended from Harvard's library in late 2024 after they sat quietly reading in the library with signs that either supported free speech or opposed the war in Gaza, though a similar protest in December 2023 carried no such sanction. Had any of these students been protesting Russia's war on Ukraine, you can be sure these administrations would have responded with adulation. Universities, after all, pride themselves on being the testing grounds for society's collective values. As sites of contemplation and exploration, they function as incubators for future leaders. But when it comes to the question of Palestine, a different pattern begins to emerge. Rather than listen to students who want to hold Israel accountable for its actions, those in positions of power in the university are opting to change the rules instead. Such dubious rule changes are not just for our students. In a damning report published in January, ProPublica dissected the many ways that the Biden administration kept shifting the goalposts in Israel's favor after 7 October 2023. Remember the threats of sanctions against Israel for invading Rafah? (It's a 'red line,' Biden said.) Or the 30-day ultimatum placed on Israel to dramatically increase the food aid? But nothing happened. Outside briefly pausing a shipment of 2,000lb (0.9 tonne) bombs, the military hardware kept on coming. The Leahy law requires restricting assistance to military units of foreign governments engaged in gross human rights violations. It has never been applied to Israel. In April 2024, it looked like secretary of state Antony Blinken was about to sanction Netzah Yehuda, a notorious battalion in the Israeli Defense Forces, under the Leahy law. In the end, he punted, and the battalion not only escaped US sanctions, but according to CNN, its commanders were even assigned to train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. 'It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,' Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told ProPublica. 'The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.' Leahy isn't the only US law that Israeli impunity is pushing to a breaking point. In late April 2024, the US government's leading agencies on humanitarian assistance concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking entry of food and medicine into Gaza. The US Foreign Assistance Act requires the government to suspend military assistance to any country that 'restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance'. Blinken just ignored the evidence provided by his own government. 'We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,' he informed Congress. The rules bend like reeds when it comes to Israel, which in March 2025 also broke the ceasefire that the Trump administration had helped negotiate in January. And now we are witnessing a new level of cruelty: the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Meanwhile Israeli politicians openly call for ethnic cleansing. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, bragged that Israel is 'destroying everything that's left of the Gaza Strip' and that 'the army is leaving no stone unturned.' He added: 'We are conquering, cleansing and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.' And his idea of Hamas is expansive. 'We're eliminating ministers, bureaucrats, money handlers – everyone who holds up Hamas's civilian rule,' he explained. Killing civilian members of government (as they are not combatants) is a war crime. The US and the international community, again, do nothing. Every day, the previously unheard of is not just spoken aloud but also acted upon – precisely because it elicits little reaction. Two retired Israeli air force pilots wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz's Hebrew edition that 'a member of the Knesset even boasted that one of the [Israeli] government's achievements is the ability to kill 100 people a day in Gaza without anyone being shocked' (an excerpt of the Haaretz article was quoted by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.) This steady shift of the acceptable has resulted in criminal policies and practices of forcible displacement, mass suffering and genocide, all conducted under passive acquiescence or active complicity of powerful countries. Even the normally reticent Red Cross is speaking out in horror. 'Humanity is failing in Gaza,' Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, president of the International Committee for the Red Cross, told the BBC's Jeremy Bowen recently. 'The fact that we are watching a people being entirely stripped of its human dignity should really shock our collective conscience,' she lamented. Yet, official outrage is at best muted as all that was once considered institutionally solid melts into air. What is it about Israel that enables it to get away with murder? The United States has long shielded Israel from international criticism and supported it militarily. The reasons offered for that support usually range from the 'unbreakable' bond shared between the two countries to the power of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in Washington. One could reasonably argue that the only thing different about this current war is the scale. But it's not just Washington. Israel and the question of Palestine produce incredibly fraught divisions throughout much of the western world. Denmark recently banned children gearing up to vote in a nationwide youth election from debating Palestinian sovereignty. Why? In a conversation with the New York Times' Ezra Klein, professor of international human rights law Aslı Bâli offered one explanation for what's different about Palestine. In 1948, she notes, Palestine was 'the only territory that had been slated to be decolonized at the creation of the United Nations … that has [still] not been decolonized'. South Africa was once in that category. For decades, Palestine and South Africa were 'understood as ongoing examples of incomplete decolonization that continued long after the rest of the world had been fully decolonized'. Today, Palestine is the last exception to that historical process – a holdover plainly clear to the people who were once subject to colonization, but that the western world refuses to acknowledge as an aberration. In other words, for many in the US and much of the western world, the creation of the state of Israel is understood as the fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations. For the rest of the world, the same fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations has rendered the decolonization of Palestine incomplete. In 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the 'problem with Israel [is] … that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state' – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.' Judt's idea that Israel is a relic of another era requires understanding how the global push for decolonization significantly accelerated after 1945. The result was a new world – but one that forsook the Palestinians, leaving them abandoned in refugee camps in 1948. This new world, emerging out of the ashes of the second world war, became what we today call 'the rules-based international order', of which international law is a key component. International law became much more codified in this time as well. The year 1948 was not only the date of the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe:) and Israel's independence. It was also the year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was passed. Along with the UN Charter of 1945, the UDHR serves as the principal basis of international human rights law. But what good is a 'rules-based international order' if the rules keep shifting? The truth is that we've never really lived in a 'rules-based international order', or at least not the one that most people imagine when they hear the phrase. The idea that international law establishes limits on the actions of states did not prevent the Rwandan genocide. The 'rules-based international order' didn't stop the US's 'illegal' invasion of Iraq in 2003. Long before 2023, Israel routinely violated Security Council resolutions. It didn't stop Hamas from committing its war crimes on 7 October. The problem with international law is not just the lack of an enforcement mechanism to compel compliance of rogue states. The problem with international law is that 'it is more likely to serve as a tool of the strong than of the weak,' the legal theorist Ian Hurd writes in his 2017 book, How to Do Things with International Law. We tend to think of the law as an agreed-upon limit on our actions. As Dwight D Eisenhower famously said: 'The world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.' But what if law is better understood as a system that, yes, restricts behavior but more importantly validates what's possible? Whoever gets to define the limits gets to define what's acceptable. As such, the powerful are far more likely to shift the ground of what's acceptable to their advantage. As Hurd explains, international law 'facilitates empire in the traditional sense because strong states … shape the meaning of international rules and obligations through interpretation and practice'. Though international law generally bans warfare, it carves out an exception for self-defense, and powerful states are the ones that can shift the line on what constitutes legitimate self-defense. (Israel broadly claims self-defense for its aggression on Iran, for example, as Russia explicitly claims self-defense for attacking Ukraine.) In his book, Hurd examines how the US has justified its use of drone warfare and even torture by appealing to international law. International law, for Hurd, is not a system that rests above politics. It is politics. The point I take from Hurd is not that international law doesn't exist or that it's not valuable. Clearly, there's a need for rules to protect civilians and prevent war. International humanitarian law is also a living and breathing thing that adapts and expands. Additional protocols to the Geneva conventions were adopted in 1977. The Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court was passed in 1998. But international law is also repeatedly put under stress, routinely violated, and consistently pushed into the service of strong states. As such, international law in practice is better understood as a constantly shifting line of acceptable behavior. We may now be reaching the point where that line has shifted so far from the founding intentions of international law that the system itself is on the brink of collapse. Israel's campaign in Gaza carries the terrifying possibility of such a radical shifting of the line of acceptability that it makes genocide a lawful weapon of war. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider what Colin Jones wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year. Jones consulted key lawyers in the American military establishment about their views on Israel's campaign in Gaza. What he found was a US military that is deeply concerned about being hobbled by international law when prosecuting a future war against a major power such as China – so much so that Israel's 'loosened restraints on civilian casualties' usefully shifts the goalposts for future US conduct. To the US military, Jones writes: 'Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public's tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.' What future hell are we currently living in? In his book, Hurd also illustrates a fundamental difference between domestic and international legal regimes. The expectation we have of domestic law, he says, is that it is 'clear, stable, and known in advance', whereas international law is up to the consent of states. Trump's contempt for institutions of international law couldn't be clearer. He placed sanctions on judges and jurists of the International Criminal Court after arrest warrants were issued against Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. (He issued similar sanctions in 2020.) He defied the UN Charter by bombing Iran, a sovereign nation not posing an imminent risk to the United States. The global response? A mild rebuke from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and full-throated support from Nato secretary general Mark Rutte. His disdain for domestic institutions of law is just as visible. He has invoked phony emergencies to claim 'emergency powers' like no president before him, enabling him to get around Congress and, essentially, rule by decree. He deployed military troops in California, against the wishes of its governor, and an appeals court has even authorized his decision. He is walking the line of open defiance of various judicial orders. What is happening? It's tempting to think that we are living in a new era of lawlessness, but that would fail to capture the change staring us in the face. This is not about the lack of law. It's about the remaking of the law. What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it, to possess the law by determining its parameters to serve their interests. For them, the law exists to bend to their will, to destroy their adversaries, and to provide an alibi for behavior which, in a better version of our world, would be punished as criminal. Maybe it's not surprising that something as vulnerable as international law could crack under today's pressures. What may be surprising is how we're also losing our domestic sense of stability, peace and security along with it and how connected the struggle for Palestine is to this domestic dismantling, especially when it comes to free expression. Just ask Sereen Haddad or Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist who spent 104 days in detention for his constitutionally protected political speech and still faces the prospect of deportation. The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide was, like the UDHR, approved in the fateful year of 1948. Its arrival was urgent and necessary after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people, and modern international law was constructed on the understanding that together we in the international community would work together to prevent future genocides. While we have failed to live up to that promise in the past, today it is Israel's acts of extermination and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, funded and enabled at every turn by a complicit west, that has contributed the most to the demise of the global, rules-based order. The way it looks today, the system won't make it to 100 years. And its collapse can be directly attributed to the hypocrisy with which the world has treated the Palestinians. No other group has been subjected to such a prolonged state of loss in the post-1945 liberal order. Palestinian refugees constitute 'the world's oldest and largest protracted refugee situation' in the modern world. And the demands placed on Palestinians simply to survive get more barbaric by the hour. In Gaza, desperate Palestinians are gunned down by snipers and drones daily as they wait for food. A drought is imminent because Israel's attacks have destroyed most of the strip's wastewater treatment plants, sewage systems, reservoirs and pipes. Up to 98% of Gaza's farmland has been destroyed by Israel. This is a form of total war the modern world should never see, let alone condone. No one knows what will come to replace the international system that is currently collapsing around us, but any political system that prioritizes punishing those who protest genocide rather than stopping the killing has clearly exhausted itself. If there's a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I'm not talking only about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn's progressive politicians, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza, and both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents' campaigns. Yet both handily won their races. Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we're on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics? Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Haddad told me, of how 'power feels threatened by the truth.' She continued: 'If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe.' She better be right. For all our sakes.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS NFL star wide receiver KaVontae Turpin arrested in Texas
Dallas Cowboys star KaVontae Turpin was arrested in Texas on Sunday morning. The wide receiver, 28, was booked into Collin County jail on charges of possession of marijuana and the unlawful carrying of a weapon, court records show. His bond was listed at $500. His arrest comes just four months after the Cowboys re-signed the TCU product to a an $18 million, three-year contract this offseason.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Reboots and remakes: why is Hollywood stuck on repeat?
On Monday, the director of the new Jurassic Park movie explained his aim for the seventh film in the series. Innovation it was not. Rather, said Gareth Edwards, it was karaoke. To prepare, he binged Steven Spielberg clips on repeat, hoping to accomplish genre cloning. 'I was trying,' he told BBC's Front Row, 'to make it feel nostalgic. The goal was that it should feel like Universal Studios went into their vaults and found a reel of film, brushed the dust off and it said: Jurassic World: Rebirth. 'And they're like: 'What's this? We don't remember doing this!' I wanted it to feel like a film they'd discovered from the early 90s.' Time travellers from that period to the present day would be forgiven for wondering whether their DeLorean was on the blink. Not only are Oasis and Pulp soundtracking the summer with hits from Britpop's golden years, but film-makers, too, are – to paraphrase another mid-90s cultural touchstone, the Ferrero Rocher ads – really spoiling us. In a fortnight, we return to the scene of the crime of 1997's ripe slasher sensation I Know What You Did Last Summer for a new movie boasting exactly the same title, as well as key cast Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr – whose very names act as a Smash Hits madeleine. The 2025 film continues the events of 1998's I Still Know What You Did Last Summer but – purists take note – ignores 2006's now non-canonical I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. Mind your adverbs. August brings The Naked Gun, with Liam Neeson slipping into the Swiss army shoes vacated by Leslie Nielsen's bumbling police lieutenant in 1994, as well as a remake of 1989's The War of the Roses, this time called The Roses, with Olivia Colman locked in marital battle with Benedict Cumberbatch. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return for a very belated sequel to their 2003 bodyswap comedy Freakier Friday, while currently marauding through cinemas is 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle's reanimation of the zombie horror series he started in 2002. Still hanging on strong across multiplexes, meanwhile, is Final Destination: Bloodlines, the first new instalment for 14 years of the franchise that's been confirming people's worst fears about tanning beds, log trucks and acupuncture since the turn of the century. Also on offer during the holidays are a rebooted Superman, a new Fantastic Four movie and assorted anniversary reissues including The Goonies (which turns 40), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (20), Human Traffic (26), Sense and Sensibility (30) and Spinal Tap (41). Hollywood, it appears, is stuck on repeat, sucked with an ever-more deafening gurgle into a death cycle of creative bankruptcy desperately presented as comfort food. That this packaging strategy works is thanks in part to the dire state of the world beyond the cinema; audiences are really eager for escape. 'It makes me think of that Gil Scott Heron quote,' says the veteran film journalist Steven Gaydos. ''Americans want to go back as far as they can, even if it turns out to be only last week. Not to face now or the future, but to face backwards'.' That they seem to be spending a lot of time in 1994 is because those people making decisions in Hollywood, and commissioning others to execute them, came of age around this time (Edwards turns 50 next weekend). They are therefore particularly keen to relive a more innocent pre-smartphone era – as well as introduce it to their offspring. Cinemas actively encouraging this sort of indulgence is not new. George Lucas's breakthrough, American Graffiti (1973), harked fruitfully back to his own youth, just as Back to the Future (1985) – which Spielberg executive produced – lucratively teleported parents to their mid-50s heyday. The difference is that those movies were developed in an entertainment ecosystem with sufficient ambition and capacity to support them. Both films advanced cinema accordingly. There is no way Back to the Future would be made today, said its writer, Bob Gale, on Thursday. Not just because of the colossal cost and reams of theoretical physics. 'We'd go into the studio and they'd say, what's the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc? They'd start interpreting paedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.' Small wonder studios today are so risk-adverse. This is an industry in freefall, clutching at the surest things in sight as it scrabbles to regain footing after Covid – which closed about 8,000 screens worldwide, half of them in the US – and the nearly six-month strikes of 2023 and subsequent dearth of content. Both these moments proved huge opportunities for streamers to stake a yet greater claim on the marketplace. Says Robert Mitchell, director of theatrical insights at Gower Street Analytics, playing safe is simply good business sense: 'Look at this year's biggest hits to date. [Chinese animation] Ne Zha 2, Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie. All are either sequels or based on a massive IP.' As Andrew Cripps, head of theatrical distribution at Disney, acknowledged at the CineEurope convention last month, the top 15 US releases of last year – including Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2 and Despicable Me 4 – clearly indicated 'the market reality of what consumers are looking for. On the other hand, you can't generate new franchises without launching original content.' And here comes the looming problem, as easy to spot and hard to dispatch as a hillside of zombies. Barrels can only be scraped so far – and many feel they long ago spotted the bottom. Original concepts strong enough to spawn spin-offs are not only costly, they are rare as hen's teeth. In the 15 top-grossing films of all time, only two non-sequels make the list: Titanic and Avatar, both by James Cameron and both today unthinkable to finance ('Everybody knows the ship sinks!' 'A paraplegic marine mind controls a CGI blue alien …'). Studios are in a bind, says Charles Gant of Screen International. 'They need fresh stories and characters to launch franchises and create new sequel opportunities – but landing that plane can be hard. It doesn't look like Elio is going to be creating much financial value for Disney, or yielding any sequels.' The long-awaited new Pixar innovation, Elio defied friendly reviews last month to be a hideous commercial bust, so far recouping just half of its (conservatively estimated) $150m production budget. Other high-end attempts to break new ground have suffered similar fates: Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh's glossy spy thriller with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, made back just two-thirds of its costs. Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho's sci-fi cloning thriller with Robert Pattinson, has done slightly better, but given its production budget was $120m, there's little chance it will end up in the black. These 'original disappointments from big name directors', says Mitchell, meant 'the mood music was: it's going to be even harder to tell original stories on a big or even medium budget'. The past tense is important. Since that pair of flops, new hope has glimmered: Brad Pitt's motor-racing drama F1: The Movie finished last weekend's box office race in top position, earning back $167m of its $300m budget. And don't forget that in April, Sinners, a supernatural horror directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B Jordan, took $365m from a $90m budget. These numbers, says Mitchell, 'demonstrate a clear desire among audiences for an original story'. Others are less upbeat. 'Describing either of those films as original is a red herring,' says Gaydos. Sinners was marketed as the latest reunion for the team behind Black Panther and Rocky spin-offs Creed. It was also, thinks Gaydos, 'highly derivative of From Dusk Till Dawn, and of Crossroads' – the 1986 Robert Johnson drama, not the 80s soap set outside Birmingham. F1 was bankrolled in part by a big, pre-existing brand, while its fittings stick rigidly to the template of a 90s action film, just as new release Heads of State is an unapologetic throwback to the White House thrillers of the same period, which generally starred Michael Douglas and half a ton of shoulder pads. Both F1 and Sinners, says Gaydos, have more in common with the latest Mission: Impossible and Avengers movies than they have differences. All are 'huge budget diversions: amusement-park procedurals, gigantic and colourful and built like video games. 'Whether the IP is fresh, reworked or recycled, they all conform to the same formula. The big change is in the indie and mid-market sector. Truly original, provocative mainstream drama which deals in recognisable human dilemmas no longer has a place in cinemas.' Instead, it has shifted to TV, where the success of Adolescence and Baby Reindeer, as well as boundary-pushing series such as The White Lotus, Severance and Black Mirror, seems to tell a more edifying story to that being offered by the big screen. At home, at least, dramatic engagement with the real world appears to be exactly what people want. 'Once upon a time,' says Gaydos, 'Adolescence would have been a hit movie. But imagine pitching it today: 'It's about the penal system and the desensitisation of kids.' The sound of crickets would be deafening.' Insulated from the brutality of weekly box office returns, their business model propped up by subscriptions rather than ticket stubs, streamers have scope to stretch the remit. Jesse Armstrong's urgent tech-bros satire Mountainhead was to all intents and purposes a film, but it was never in cinemas: backed and distributed by HBO and Sky and out just in time for contention at the Emmys – not the Oscars. Hoping there's a lesson for Hollywood in such successes is academic, says Gaydos. No notes will be taken, 'because there is nothing called film culture left in Hollywood'. This may be overegging the wake. They may not be megabudget, but there are still a handful of genuinely original movies in cinemas this summer to divert those weary of spandex and explosions. Celine Song's Materialists – a romcom starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans – leads the UK counter-programming push, as does Bring Her Back, a horror starring Sally Hawkins that has had early audiences alternately in raptures and retching. Eddington, Ari Aster's Covid western, also stars Pascal, alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, and tackles social media misinformation in an age of self-appointed messiahs. Some critics at Cannes were unconvinced, but studio A24 is nonetheless proceeding with a costly campaign – and no one could accuse the film of failing to offer audiences something chewier than the usual slop. Plus, sequels do not always result in inferior films – just ask The Godfather Part II director Francis Ford Coppola. 'I don't think it's fair to call all franchise films creatively bankrupt,' says Gant. '28 Years Later did feel something different from the two previous films, and I was ready to re-enter that world. I had a good time watching it – a better time than watching Black Bag or Mickey 17.' There may even be some fun to be found in the tumbleweed; the title of the forthcoming Spinal Tap sequel is Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Twenty years ago, Gaydos said he believed the new economics of the blockbuster meant Hollywood was as close as it had ever come to being in the packaged goods industry. Nothing, he says, has happened since to reverse that assessment – lending a strange validity to Donald Trump's perception of the industry, as outlined in his tariffs plan. By the end of the weekend, Jurassic World: Rebirth will have been exported to 82 territories and taken about $260m. At the cinema, anyway. Once you add the Nintendo games and Lego kits, official 'power devour' T-Rex toys and dad-targeted skin survival kits, special-edition 'big gulp' Slurpee cups and limited-release peanut butter M&Ms, the numbers start to really snowball. The future of cinema isn't just the sequels. It's the Slurpees, stupid. This article was amended on 6 July 2025. It is Dakota Johnson, not Dakota Fanning who stars in Materialists.
