This year, you are going to see a lot of familiar people and places. They won’t be real people (and in most cases) they won’t be real places. This is because 2015 is the year of the movie reboots and/or sequels.

Avengers 2, Star Wars 7, Terminator 5, Rocky 7, Insurgent (Divergent 2), Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, Magic Mike 2, Mission Impossible 5, Ted 2, the 24th James Bond film, Jurassic Park 4, The Fast and the Furious 7, and Fantastic 4, Sherlock Holmes and the Mad Max reboot.

I could go on.

Most reboots or sequels are cash grabs by a studio, with very few having thought or love put into them. However, several thousand franchises seem to be upsetting that stereotype: the new Avengers movie will probably be just as good as (if not better than) the first, and the James Bond movies have been consistently pleasing since their birth.

Quality of all the films aside, why all the reboots? The only answer that I can find is cash. Rare is the wildly inventive, Oscar-quality film that is also a surefire hit at the box office. People want to see a film that they’ve already enjoyed, and sequels satisfy that need.

Take this year’s Best Picture winner, Birdman. I’d be willing to bet that you only heard of it after it won the award, and probably haven’t seen it in favor of rewatching Guardians of the Galaxy, or some other comic book movie. The only Oscar-caliber film that was in the top box-office hauls of 2014 was American Sniper, which is still in theaters.

Creativity and profit have always been at odds with each other. Jurassic Park 4 is trying to innovate by making the main dinosaur a genetically-modified, man-made monstrosity. Will this garner praise and cash? We’ll have to wait and see.

All of the sequels and reboots that are being released only lead to Hollywood being further accused of running out of ideas. Critics weep over the loss of inventiveness while an eager public streams into Transformers 4. However, is there really a crime here? If the public enjoys its rehashing and the critics love artsy Sundance films, is there  really a cause to complain?

As Michael Bay once said, “I make movies for teenage boys. Oh dear, what a crime.”