Patton Oswalt is about as respected as a geek can possibly be in the 21st century – not simply wearing his fandoms on his sleeves, but demonstrating intense and deep knowledge about what he loves and the ways in which those things have molded our world. With this long earned respect, he turned a lot of heads a decade-and-a-half ago saying in no uncertain terms that it was time for geek culture to die.
It was a sentiment right in the headline of a guest column Oswalt wrote for Wired that was published in December 2010: “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time To Die.” He argued that the internet has spoiled the kind of intimate obsession that existed before the technology became the center of our society, and that “everything we have today that's cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past.” The only solution: some kind of monstrous, ungainly multi-franchise crossover that would burn pop culture to the ground and let a new era be born.
This past December marked the 15th anniversary of that piece’s publication (an eventful 15 years that saw a lot happen in geek culture, from the rebirth of the Star Wars franchise to the rise and fall of the DC Extended Universe), so when I spoke with Patton Oswalt earlier this month during the virtual press day for the new animated film GOAT, I took the opportunity to ask him about it. How are we doing with the whole death of pop culture thing? Said Oswalt,
I think we’re still in it. The death that I envisioned was death by collision, death by everything morphing together. Every crossover possible. I just saw a thing that DC Comics is doing in their comics where it's DC comics, but also Sabrina The Teenage Witch, and Annabelle and Vampirella, and Mortal Kombat and this character from a little indie comic – they're all having this big battle royale. So I'm like, 'Okay, it's happening. It's all starting.'
The indie character in question in the event – titled DC K.O.: Boss Battle – is Samantha Strong from IDW’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, and Oswalt didn’t even mention that Homelander from The Boys is part of the mix as well. Perhaps it is indeed the cleansing fire that the actor/comic has called for?
For what it’s worth, we may still be waiting for Patton Oswalt’s “death by collision,” but he optimistically already sees growth in the current landscape. There’s no denying the outsized role that franchise movies presently have at the box office, but in 2025 alone, he witnessed multiple examples of quality, popular original storytelling on the big screen. He continued,
We need it all to overload and explode so that we can then start fresh with absolutely new visions. This year was really good in terms of movies like Weapons and The Plague and Sinners and One Battle After Another. Yes, Sinners was inspired by stuff. One Battle was inspired by stuff, but use these as springboards rather than do like when they made that movie The Flash, where it's just like, ‘Look at this thing. Look at this thing. Remember this? Remember this?’ Use it as a new thing that will get referenced.
It’s akin to one of the cardinal sins of sequels: when the audience is excited by something new, that same new can’t just be reheated and served back to them over and over. The key is to understand the audience and use that to both offer something new and subvert expectation.
As featured in the video up top, I suggested a post-modern perspective: taking awareness and then flipping it on its head. Oswalt concurred and took it a step further, saying,
Exactly. Or use it to inspire something completely new. You should be making the things that other people are referencing; you shouldn't be referencing other people's stuff.
True change is going to require both great imagination and, undeniably, some big risk, but as seen in referenced cases like Weapons and Sinners, there can be massive and wonderful rewards.
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