Last year, Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey argued that Sharknado is bad for people who love bad movies. “For those of us with a genuine love for bad movies, who seek out treasures of terribleness,” he wrote, “the Sharknado social media storm was kind of like when everybody discovered rap music via Vanilla Ice.” Bailey made the case that the appeal of so-bad-they’re-good gems like Manos, Miami Connection, or The Room is that they weren’t deliberately manufactured to be bad. Those cult hits came from people who truly believed they were making good art, and the gulf between their visions and the reality of their work was what made them enjoyable. The same cannot be said of the Sharknado films — “a plastic, artificial, manufactured substitute” made with “snickering, ironic snark-viewing in mind,” Bailey wrote.

But that doesn’t get to the bottom of why Sharknado is so pernicious. Imagine that you’re a top Hollywood executive — the kind that calls shots and greenlights projects. If you’re searching for the Next Great Box Office Smash Hit — especially one that’s cheap and likely to put butts in seats — you’d be crazy not to see the cultural phenomenon of Sharknado as an instant money-making opportunity. Hire some washed-out, B-movie stars on the cheap; attach a no-name director; commission a hastily written screenplay; and don’t break the bank on your cheesy, cheap special effects. If it’s half as successful as Sharknado, it’s a recipe for some serious cash money.

But what kind of precedent does that set? If studios succeed by making bad movies, other studios will follow suit. Social media buzz becomes more important to Hollywood every year, and it won’t take many more Sharknados before studios, filmmakers, and writers race to the bottom, creating terrible lowbrow art for the sake of irony (the one thing that we do not need more of these days).