It’s a bumper year for cinema. This year’s most popular blockbusters tell us something we can’t ignore about the era we’re living through.
Five-minute read – 100% written by humans
According to industry analysts, 2026 is on course to become the strongest year for cinema since the pandemic, with this summer’s box office expected to surpass 2019 levels.
But what do you notice about the year’s most popular movies? The Odyssey; The Hail Mary Project; Dune Part 3; Moana and Supergirl.
Cultural commentators on both sides of the Atlantic are noticing a common theme, one that may tell us something about the times through which we are living. It seems that we can’t get enough of the hero’s journey.
American mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell first coined the term in his seminal 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell identified a recurring theme in popular stories whereby our hero answers some sort of calling – often reluctantly and fearfully – ventures from their familiar world, faces decisive trials, and returns transformed.
What it tells us
Beneath the perennial appetite for entertainment, does the trend reveal something more symptomatic about the collective psychological landscape in which we are all currently living?
Homer’s The Odyssey — currently dominating the summer programme in the form of Christopher Nolan’s three-hour opus — arguably provides us with the source code for the hero’s journey. For millennia it existed purely in oral form. Yet the impulse to tell stories of peril, transformation and return is far older still, stretching back to the cave paintings of Lascaux in France, created around 17,000 years ago.
Heroes rarely start as heroes. Moana has never crossed the reef. Ryland Grace is terrified. Supergirl must find her purpose before she can become the hero others believe she already is. Even Odysseus struggles and makes some howlers along the way, before returning home sadder and wiser (oh come on, it can’t be a spoiler if it’s 2,700 years old.)
Perhaps the darkest and most powerful of all will appear not as a summer blockbuster but in the depths of winter. In Dune Part Three, Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, must grapple with the corrupting effects of absolute power and its potential to corrupt absolutely.
The Storytelling Brain
As a species, stories are our primary sense-making vehicle. Over the last 12 months the Storytelling Brain has emerged as Threshold’s most requested leadership workshop.
It’s hard to overstate the universality of stories. Common themes and structures appear to have emerged independently across cultures and continents in the absence of any known human contact. This reinforces the idea that the mental module for stories is hardwired and into our neurobiology.
Stories don’t only help us make sense of the world around us. They enable us to create a sense of self, from an evolved yet disorganized jumble of cognitive and emotional drivers and instincts. To put it another way they enable us to captain our own ship. And there is increasing evidence from clinical psychology that they play a marked role in the outcomes that we achieve.
Darkness and light
Hollywood’s best-known screenwriting coach, Robert McKee, argues that the strongest stories contain a journey from darkness to light—and that this contrast is what captures our attention.
Professor Dan McAdams, Department Chair of Clinical Psychology and Personality Psychology at Northwestern University argues that ‘The self comes to terms with society through narrative identity.’ Put simply, stories exist to help us make sense of ourselves and the world around us.
Now, let’s take a real-world example. Few people undergo the challenges and struggles faced by refugees. But are they victims or survivors? To find out how this group answered this simple question about themselves, researchers at the Free University of Berlin recruited nearly 100 refugees who had arrived in Europe four years earlier.
They were split into two groups. One group was invited to reframe their experience by reading statements written by what appeared to be previous refugee students about how their experiences had made them more resilient and independent. They also wrote about incidents and lessons learnt in their own lives that might help them to become good students. The other refugees, the control group, were asked to focus on good study techniques only.
Both groups were then invited to choose a logical thinking exercise of varying degrees of difficulty. The reframing group opted for more challenging exercises than the control group. Their written activity based on their own lives was then independently analysed. For the reframing group, their writing was considered to be more motivating and empowering and it suggested that they felt that they had greater control over their lives.
When this idea was applied to a group of over 500 refugee students a year later, they were found to have engaged with the learning 23 per cent more than the control.
So… the refugees who had reframed their story to see themselves as survivors were more motivated and keener to learn.
But a ‘story of self’ that contains the dark without the light tends to be counterproductive. To understand what we mean by this it’s worth taking a detour into the story of Scared Straight. It’s an American programme targeted at those juveniles identified as being at higher risk of slipping into criminality. The rationale being that teenagers slip into a life of crime because they don’t truly understand the consequences, so it makes sense to confront them with those consequences. And that’s what Scared Straight does. Teens whose profiles show they’re likely to drift into criminality are taken to state prisons where they meet hardened criminals. They are taken to the hospital and to the morgue to see the effects of knife and gun crime. They meet people whose lives have been ruined by gang violence. Scared Straight has been the subject of several award-winning documentaries.
But there’s one problem with Scared Straight – it doesn’t work. In fact, the truth is even more jaw dropping: it actually makes young people more likely to become criminals. Experts calculate that the programme has caused 6,500 kids to commit crimes they would not otherwise have committed.
How did Scared Straight get it so badly wrong? The programme leads the young people to focus on a story about themselves that’s all about criminality; the darkness without the light.
Interestingly, there is a programme that does work. It’s a mentoring programme called Big Brothers or Big Sisters of America. Here, young people are given older kids as a mentor and the mentor encourages them to see a more positive and productive story for themselves; a realistic story that emphasises their agency and sees them ending up in the light.
Why this now?
Of course, none of this answers the question, why this now? Why the renewed cultural appetite for the hero’s journey? To answer that question, we need to home in on two concepts that sit at the heart of the explanation: technostress and human agency.
Technostress
Craig Brod coined the term “technostress” in 1984, describing the psychological strain created when technological change outpaces our ability to adapt. Today’s AI revolution represents another period of unusually rapid technological disruption.
Technostress is not luddism or technophobia. It reflects feeling overwhelmed by relentless technological change rather than hostility towards technology itself.
Researchers consistently identify uncertainty, overload, constant change and reduced perceived control as the principal drivers of technostress.
Human agency
At its heart lies a threat to human agency: the feeling that events increasingly happen to us rather than because of us. Alarmingly, studies repeatedly show that employees believe that their bosses consistently under-rate the element of human agency required to do their job. We crave agency and it feels as though it’s under threat more than ever before.
Perhaps this explains the renewed appeal of the Hero’s Journey. Every great hero confronts forces beyond their control but never relinquishes the freedom to choose. In short, they act with agency.
For leaders, the lesson is profound: AI creates greatest value when it amplifies human agency. Organisations flourish when technology expands people’s capacity to think, choose and contribute—not when it erodes it.
Shape your story proactively
At Threshold, we encourage people to recognise that we can only truly grow as leaders and as people, when we recognise the story that we are telling ourselves and then we choose to shape it proactively.
Act your way into a new way of thinking
And what’s the best way to re-shape your story? Well, this is one of many areas in psychology where the adage holds true: Feelings follow behaviour. It’s better to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting. When we take tangible actions, even small ones, our minds will tend to align our thoughts and attitudes behind them.
At-risk teens in the US who participate in volunteering, are significantly less likely to drift into crime because they see themselves as people who have a stake in the community. When they start behaving differently, they then think and feel differently because of that behaviour.
What story are you telling yourself? What do you want your story to be instead? And what actions can you take that will help you to move your own story in that direction?
Every Hero’s Journey is at heart, a story about human agency. We lose sight of this at our peril.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
