The Quiet Death of Movie Culture
Or a follow up to Movies Aren't Cool Anymore
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If We Don’t Fight for Movies, We’ll Lose More Than Just a Medium
Cinema used to be the beating heart of culture. A film didn’t just entertain you—it changed how you talked, dressed, thought, and dreamed. Clueless rewrote the way teens spoke. Moonlight reshaped the Oscars. Get Out cracked open conversations about race, horror, and genre in one swing. Everything Everywhere All At Once took maximalist storytelling and made it personal, weird, emotional, and somehow universally felt.
Even just last year, Barbie and Oppenheimer reminded us what movies could still be: not just content, but events. Cultural touchstones that brought people out in droves. Double features, memes, costumes, discourse, thinkpieces, TikToks, lines out the door. It was thrilling for a moment. But that moment feels like a lifetime ago. Because what’s followed? Silence. Misses. Movies that drop without making a sound. Theaters half-full. Films you didn’t even realize had come out.
And the scary part? We’re getting used to it.