Before he was Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek films (a series for which Pegg is currently scripting the third installment) or the comic anchor Benji in Mission: Impossible III and IV; even before he was the star of cult British genre flicks like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Pegg was an up-and-comer in Britain’s 90s alt-comedy TV scene. He was part of the ensemble of the cult sketch show Big Train, and appeared in episodes of the news-magazine spoof Brass Eye, and the largely forgotten sitcom Hippies. All three trafficked in absurdity, cynicism and black humor, but it wasn’t until 1999 that Pegg found his true calling when he co-created the sitcom Spaced with Jessica Stevenson.

Spaced remains a brilliant love letter to the fandom of Pegg’s adolescence—Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, horror films, video games—that simultaneously poked at the arrested development of a generation that filtered everything through their experience of pop culture. In a follow-up post on his website expanding on his comments, Pegg noted his long exploration of this dichotomy in his work. “One of the things that inspired Jessica and myself, all those years ago, was the unprecedented extension our generation was granted to its youth, in contrast to the previous generation, who seemed to adopt a received notion of maturity at lot sooner,” he said. “This extended adolescence has been cannily co-opted by market forces, who have identified this relatively new demographic as an incredibly lucrative wellspring of consumerist potential.”

Indeed it has—and Pegg would surely be the first to admit he’s benefitted greatly from that market adjustment. Watching Spaced now, you can easily detect the visual verve of director Edgar Wright, who would go on to make three films with Pegg and the terrific comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, even if you’d hardly have predicted in 1999 that Pegg would be writing Star Trek movies for Paramount Pictures. But in the 21st century, Hollywood has learned to cater to a subculture previously treated as an irrelevant sliver of the box-office pie, and it shows no sign of wanting to stop. Fans used to cross their fingers that an attempt at a big-budget superhero movie—say, 2000’s X-Men or 2002’s Spider-Man—would do well enough to convince Hollywood to produce more along the same lines. Now, when a comic-book film is announced, it comes with a handful of sequels and spinoffs already in the pipeline.

“I guess what I meant was, the more spectacle becomes the driving creative priority, the less thoughtful or challenging the films can become,” Pegg wrote, while allowing that he’d been buoyed by the quality of the recent movies Ex Machina and Mad Max: Fury Road. Much like the author and Grantland contributor Mark Harris, he points to the 1970s as a golden age where Hollywood explored real issues such as the Vietnam War with films like Taxi Driver—challenging films produced by major studios for big budgets.