The Apocalypse Industrial Complex: How Dystopian Sci-Fi Has Hijacked the Future

Hollywood’s addiction to formula destruction has eclipsed science fiction’s true value—the capacity to dreamthink new worlds into existence.

Stardate 2019: Avengers: Endgame blasted into the pantheon of profit, becoming the highest-grossing movie in history. For $2.8 billion the Earth didn’t explode, the entire universe did. Poof — half of all life’s gone in a blink of a tired eye. Its heroes spiraling through decades of trauma only to obliterate Thanos’s army on junkyard moonscape battlefields littered with neotech Gothic rubble. Their mission: Restore what was lost. The credits roll. The universe is “saved.” We’re “saved.” Alleluia.

The problem is we’re not. Saved that is. Our applause is more an exhale than a cheer. The victory feels suspiciously like fatigue. Now if what we call an ending only leaves us drained, maybe it isn’t an ending at all—just the opening scene of the next collapse. The story loops back on itself, like a sequel already rehearsing its destruction, ashes still glowing across the rubble.

Exhaustion is the key clue here. Endgame is not a conclusion. It is the perfect specimen of how mainstream science fiction has evolved in the past two decades: a genre now largely colonized by the profitable fixation onrepetition with plots trapped in an endless cycle of collapse and revival. Film after film, novel after novel and still another apocalypse is staged, reversed, and staged again — a treadmill with perhaps the hope of still better special effects this time around.

According to Box Office Mojo, over 70% of top-grossing sci-fi films since 2000 revolve around end-of-the-world scenarios. From The Hunger Games to World War Z, even children’s fare like WALL-E, the genre that once launched us into uncharted futures of new thoughts now keeps us circling the same old smoking crater.

The point here isn’t about the vagaries of cultural tastes—it’s about how media capitalism is colonizing the imagination itself. I call this marketing pattern The Apocalypse Industrial Complex. Its job is to put eyes on the gradual market discovery that catastrophe now outsells possibility, that trauma has become a renewable commodity as dutiful audiences addictively pay for scheduled cycles of destruction and restoration. This complex converts despair into a resource in which we’ve become consumers of our own anxieties, purchasing package despair while the whole lot of us remain unaware of how genuine transformation remains perpetually deferred. As Mark Fisher observed, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In Endgame, we see how deep the colonization runs: the world is saved, but only to be ended again. The credits roll, the loop resets, and the next annihilation is already in pre-production. It’s one thing to control the means of production, quite another to control desire and the imagination.

Let’s trace this evolution—from the optimism of mid-century future-building to the post-9/11 turn toward “collapse porn”—the media’s fetishizing of societal disasters. We’ll examine how violence became the genre’s default export, why hopeful futures now feel alien, and where resistance is already taking root in movements like Solarpunk, Afrofuturism, and Indigenous Futurisms. Finally, we’ll pose two important questions: if science fiction has always been a cultural and intellectual rehearsal space for the future, then what futures are we now rehearsing—and which ones have we abandoned? And, secondly, how does the hijacking of the genre’s commitment to  intellectual and moral reflection mirror a far larger socioeconomic and political agenda, promoting the current bread-and-circuses economy now saturating the public mind with spectacles that devalue deliberate inquiry. Science fiction’s legacy has largely been repurposed into a perfect tool for keeping us entertained, compliant, and incurious. This genre hijacking is arguably the hijacking of the public mind itself. When the rubble clears, spectacle prevails, and substance perishes.

Violence as Default

Marvel alone has released over 30 films since 2008, most hinging on planetary or cosmic annihilation. The formula is like bar pickup line, it rarely changes: a damaged (usually male) protagonist uses violence to restore a familiar status quo. Transformation, if it arrives, comes through destruction—not evolution.

Television is no different. The Walking Dead sprawled into five spin-offs over 12 years. Movies like The Last of Us and The Handmaid’s Tale channel real-world anxieties through scenarios of collapse. Even children’s shows like Steven Universe often grapple with cosmic trauma and planetary ruin.

Gaming has gone further still, turning apocalypse into an interactive habit. Players spend hundreds of hours in the wastelands of Fallout, Cyberpunk 2077, or The Last of Us, rehearsing the end over and over until survival becomes muscle memory.

This isn’t accidental. Violence travels well. A building exploding in Shanghai makes as much sense as one in San Francisco. International franchises reward spectacle over nuance, endings over beginnings.

From Future-Building to Collapse Porn

Now contrast this with science fiction writers and directors who challenged there readers and viewers to examine fundamental questions about the nature of humanity and society. Writers like Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Karel Čapek and films like Metropolis, Things to Come, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers preceded their offspring in the 1960s–80s. 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined humanity’s cosmic evolution. Star Trek presented a cooperative, post-scarcity society in which curiosity rather than capitalization fueled starships on missions of discovery. Close Encounters and E.T. framed alien contact as wonder, not war. Even Back to the Future used time travel to spark possibility, not dread.

The exhaustion rupture came in the early 2000s. After 9/11, the apocalyptic felt less like fantasy and more like what we witnessed on the nightly news. Under neoliberal austerity, collective problem-solving relinquished its value to an undated and improved myth of the rugged individual survivor. Climate dread sealed the shift—when solutions seem politically impossible, collapse becomes the default storyline.

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned that simulations can supplant reality. Now it feels ironically reversed: our fictional futures are so vivid they often smother our real capacity to create them. As media scholar George Gerbner showed, constant exposure to danger projected on screens shape our worldview, making crisis feel inevitable and construction foreign.

The Optimism We Buried

Ursula K. Le Guin imagines anarchist societies that functioned through cooperation. Octavia Butler treatsevolution and adaptation as survival tools. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation showed Captain Picard resolving conflicts through diplomacy, not firepower.

These weren’t naive utopias. They were rigorous thought experiments born from anthropology, history, and political critique. But franchise economics buried this tradition. Explosions cross borders far more easily than complex political ideas.

Notably, the apocalyptic turn isn’t universal. Japanese anime often pairs post-apocalyptic settings with stories of rebuilding—Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky. Africanfuturism and Indigenous Futurisms often root technology in community and ecological balance. The lesson: despair isn’t inevitable—it’s cultural conditioning.

The Resistance Is Here

Outside billion-dollar franchises, other futures are taking shape. Solarpunk and Hopepunk imagine sustainable, cooperative societies. Afrofuturist authors like N.K. Jemisin and Indigenous voices like Rebecca Roanhorse reject extractive capitalism with culturally rooted alternatives. Ted Chiang crafts deeply human stories about consciousness and connection without a single CGI explosion.

Small presses and literary magazines—Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Neon Hemlock—are incubating these visions. Call it all the birth of NeoSciFi: a conscious refusal to surrender the genre’s imaginative range to the corporate apocalypse.

The challenge is visibility. Insight and hope are harder to sell than fear. And after decades of conditioning, even hopeful futures can feel alien to audiences trained on collapse.

Why It Matters Beyond Fiction

Futures studies show that societies that can’t imagine positive change rarely achieve it. How we portray AI, genetic engineering, or space exploration will shape public opinion and policy. If every AI story ends in Skynet, if every genetic breakthrough turns into Jurassic Park, we constrain possibility before it begins.

Science fiction has never just been escapism—it’s been a rehearsal space for reality. At its best, it doesn’t predict the future; it expands the range of futures we can imagine and pursue.

Choosing Construction Over Collapse

Reclaiming this capacity requires work—from creators and audiences alike. We can seek out anti-dystopian fiction, champion diverse voices, and demand stories where collaboration is as compelling as combat.

The future isn’t a fixed point. It’s something we build—deliberately, together. The stories we tell about tomorrow become the blueprints we’ll use when we arrive. The Apocalypse Industrial Complex thrives on the assumption that an end, a predetermined bleak end, is inevitable. But inevitability is just another story. We need to a different one. We need new narratives that refuse  to turn the imagination’s workshop into a theme park where curiosity goes to die.