Wealth & Money Quote by Jonathan Frakes

Frakes lands the line like someone who’s been inside the machine long enough to stop taking it personally. “Unfortunately or fortunately” is the tell: he’s not pretending sequels are an artistic crime, but he’s also not romanticizing the system that produces them. It’s a shrug with teeth. The real subject isn’t “Hollywood” as a place; it’s Hollywood as a decision-making algorithm, where the greenlight comes less from taste than from proof-of-revenue.

The quote works because it’s blunt without being bitter. Frakes frames the sequel impulse as a kind of weather: predictable, impersonal, and impossible to argue with once the forecast is in. That “if” is doing the heavy lifting. Success isn’t just celebrated; it becomes a mandate, a data point that turns one story into a repeatable product line. In a business built on risk management, money isn’t the reward, it’s the permission slip.

Context matters: Frakes is an actor-director whose career sits at the intersection of fandom, franchising, and long-running IP (hello, Star Trek). He’s not speaking as an outsider sneering at blockbusters; he’s speaking as a working professional who understands why the studio reflex exists, and how it can be both stabilizing (jobs, budgets, audience demand) and creatively flattening (safe bets, diminishing surprises).

The subtext is pragmatic: don’t confuse cultural conversation about “what deserves a sequel” with the industry’s real question, which is “what has already sold.”