The Future of the Movies, Part 3 | Features

When I think of “the future of the movies,” I think less about the films themselves being made — as ever, a mixture of breezy corporate fare peppered with some insightful films from new, interesting voices that often slip under the radar — than about the way we watch, and talk about, them.

In my initial reckonings with this question, my mind initially turned to my ire at those who treat the movie theater like their own living room. The phone-scrollers, the loud-talkers. The incurious. The jaded. The TikTokers. The sludge of social media that indicates that more and more people would rather just check out and scroll than engage with the art form I love so much.

But that’s a bit snooty, really. After all, rolling our eyes at the youths is the inevitable fate of all of us who are more than a few years out from college, those who have a different relationship with the medium we’ve chosen to love than we do. Wagging our fists at them like we’re Grampa Simpson isn’t going to get little Braylyn to watch "Au hasard balthasar," no matter how much she says she loves the donkey in "Shrek."

For all the hemming and hawing about how kids these days don’t engage with movies anymore, I choose to give myself reasons to hope. Last year saw the comparative rejection of formulaic superhero movies for films like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” The tail end of the year had “Godzilla Minus One” and “The Boy and the Heron” topping the box-office charts — those who are going out to movies, at least, seem to be gravitating towards stuff that doesn’t feel factory-stamped like they used to. (Granted, recent evidence from “The Fall Guy” and “Furiosa” has put more than a little ice water on that hope, but it springs eternal nonetheless.)

Rather than pray that those numbers aren’t just a fluke brought on by an unusually thin blockbuster year, I’d rather take the momentum and run with it. The world today is one cloaked in climate change, genocide, and stochastic violence and is hostile to curiosity. If you see a spark of it emerge in such harsh climes, it’s your duty to blow on the ember. 

That’s a challenge I give other film critics, too; for as much as our cultural capital as tastemakers has rapidly declined in recent years thanks to the democratization of social media and the erosion of pop culture journalism, it’s also on us to meet general audiences — our audiences, I might add — where they are. We snipe so often at the average Joe, it’s easy to forget they don’t have the same relationship with movies as we do. (Hell, we spend so much time sniping at each other that we forget that we’re not meant to be the only audience for the work we do.)

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