Does anyone actually go to the movies anymore? I mean really go—not just show up to a theater-turned-restaurant where they serve you twelve-dollar nachos while you half-watch some computer-generated spectacle between checking your phone. I’m talking about going to the movies the way we used to: like it mattered, like it was an event, like there was something playing that you absolutely had to see on the big screen or you’d miss out on the cultural conversation for the next six months.

Because I’m starting to think those days are as dead as drive-ins and double features. And maybe it’s just because I’m old, but it feels like we lost something essential when we stopped gathering in dark rooms to dream together.

The Fractured Audience

Sure, COVID changed everything. Studios started dumping their movies straight onto streaming platforms, and suddenly the theatrical experience became optional rather than essential. But the rot started long before anyone had heard of social distancing. The real problem is that we’ve shattered into a million different micro-audiences, each consuming content from our own personalized silos.

There used to be three TV networks and maybe six movies playing at the local multiplex. If you wanted entertainment, those were your options. Now we’ve got seventeen different streaming services, each with their own algorithm-driven recommendations, each creating their own bubble of content designed specifically for you and people exactly like you.

When was the last time there was a movie that everyone—and I mean everyone—was talking about? Barbie, maybe, but that was as much cultural phenomenon as actual film, and it lasted about as long as a TikTok trend. Before that? I honestly can’t remember. The shared cultural experience of movies has been replaced by the personalized cultural experience of whatever Netflix thinks you might like based on your viewing history and zip code.

Don’t go in the water

I remember when summer meant something at the movies. June through August was blockbuster season, when Hollywood rolled out the big guns and we all lined up to be amazed. Jaws in ’75 invented the summer blockbuster. E.T. made us all believe. Raiders of the Lost Ark turned Harrison Ford into the coolest guy on the planet. These weren’t just movies—they were cultural events, shared experiences that defined entire summers and stayed with us for decades.

Now summer movie season feels like an assembly line of interchangeable spectacle. Marvel movie number 47 followed by DC movie number 23 followed by the inevitable reboot of something that was perfectly fine the first time around. They’re not events anymore—they’re products, designed by committee and tested with focus groups and optimized for global markets rather than crafted to capture imaginations.

The Formula Factory

Maybe it’s the formulaic approach that’s killing everything. Why take a risk on an original story when you can make another Marvel Universe movie? Why develop new characters when you can dust off an old franchise and slap a fresh coat of CGI on it? The studios have figured out the algorithm for guaranteed profit, and creativity has become a liability rather than an asset.

We’re drowning in sequels, reboots, remakes, and “re-imaginings” of properties that were already perfect the first time around. How many times can we watch Spider-Man get his origin story? How many ways can they find to resurrect franchises that died natural deaths decades ago? It’s like Hollywood has become a museum of its own past, endlessly recycling the same ideas because coming up with new ones is too risky for the shareholders.

The Personality Shortage

And the actors—what happened to the actors. Where are the personalities? The guys who could carry a movie just by walking into a room and being themselves? Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, sure, but even the more recent generation had something the current crop seems to lack: distinct personalities that made them impossible to ignore.

Harrison Ford was Harrison Ford whether he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones or the guy in Witness. You knew that voice, that slightly annoyed delivery, that way he had of making action heroes seem like regular guys who’d rather be somewhere else. Clint Eastwood squinted his way through dozens of movies, but that squint meant something different every time. Jack Nicholson could make ordering coffee seem dangerous. James Caan could break your heart or your nose with equal conviction.

Even Stallone and Schwarzenegger—not exactly Shakespearean actors—were originals. You couldn’t mistake them for anyone else, couldn’t imagine anyone else playing their roles. They had something you can’t manufacture: presence.

Now we’ve got actors who are pleasant enough, well-trained certainly, but as interchangeable as the movies they’re in. They hit their marks, say their lines, and disappear into the digital landscape without leaving much of an impression. They’re competent professionals delivering competent performances in competent movies that nobody will remember in six months.

The Economics of Extortion

Of course, part of the problem is that actually going to the movies has become an exercise in financial masochism. You want popcorn? That’ll be fourteen dollars for what used to be called a small but is now labeled “regular” because they’ve eliminated the actual small size to make the extortion seem reasonable. Add a soda and you’re approaching the cost of a decent dinner at a real restaurant.

The theaters themselves have become weird hybrids of restaurant and screening room, with reserved seating and reclining chairs and table service that costs more than most people used to spend on entertainment in a month. Sure, it’s comfortable, but comfort was never really the point. The point was the shared experience, the collective gasp, the communal laughter. Now everyone’s in their own personal pod, eating their own overpriced meal, having their own individual experience in a room full of strangers doing the same thing.

The Dumbing Down

But maybe the real problem is that they’ve dumbed everything down to the point where movies don’t ask anything of us anymore. The big studio pictures are designed to be comprehensible to a global audience, which means they can’t assume any cultural knowledge, any attention span longer than a commercial break, any appetite for ambiguity or complexity.

Everything is explained, usually multiple times. Every joke is telegraphed. Every plot point is spelled out in dialogue that sounds like it was written by a computer that learned English from instruction manuals. The movies don’t trust us to pay attention, to think, to connect dots on our own. They’ve become the cinematic equivalent of baby food: nutritious enough to keep us alive, but lacking any texture or flavor that might challenge us.

The Youth Movement

And maybe—just maybe—it’s because I’m old, and the movies now simply aren’t made for me. Maybe there’s a whole generation out there that loves the current state of cinema, that finds meaning and excitement in the twenty-seventh installment of whatever franchise is currently dominating the multiplex. Maybe they don’t need movie stars with distinctive personalities because they get that from YouTube and TikTok. Maybe they don’t need shared cultural experiences because they’re creating their own through social media.

Maybe the problem isn’t that movies have gotten worse—maybe it’s that I’ve gotten older, and the things that used to seem magical now seem mechanical. Maybe every generation thinks the entertainment of their youth was better, more meaningful, more important than whatever’s currently playing at the local theater-restaurant-experience-center.

The Ghost in the Machine

But I don’t think that’s it. Not entirely, anyway. I think something genuinely precious has been lost in our rush to optimize and monetize and globally market the movie experience. The magic of sitting in a dark room with strangers and being transported somewhere else entirely—that’s become increasingly rare in a world where everything is personalized and algorithmic and designed to be consumed on whatever screen happens to be most convenient.

Movies used to be dreams we shared. Now they’re products we consume, alone in our pods, connected to our devices, always half-distracted by the endless stream of other content competing for our attention. We’ve gained convenience and comfort and choice, but we’ve lost something harder to quantify: the collective experience of wonder, the shared cultural moment, the feeling that what we’re watching matters enough to demand our complete attention.

The movies aren’t dead, exactly. But the movies as a cultural force, as a shared language, as something that brings us together rather than divides us into ever-smaller demographic categories—those movies might be gone forever.

-Fin-