The Decline of Movies Harms Our Community and Culture

Both content and process foster fractures.

The American motion picture industry appears to be dying – it is currently on the floor with more than one knife in its back - and by the time the detective arrives there will be more suspects assembled in the parlor than in an Agatha Christie novel.

That sad story is relatively new. Flash back to when films were great and the opening of a movie was a big event. The mega-year for great pictures, of course, was 1939 when the Best Picture competitors included Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights, just to name a few. [Gone with the Wind won.]

But march forward to the Best Picture contenders in the Sixties (winners in bold):

1962: West Side Story; Fanny; The Guns of Navarone; The Hustler; Judgment at Nuremberg.

1963: Lawrence of Arabia; The Longest Day; The Music Man; Mutiny on the Bounty; To Kill a Mockingbird.

1964: Tom Jones; America, America; The Great Escape; Shock Corridor; The Cardinal.

1965: My Fair Lady; Becket; Dr. Strangelove; Mary Poppins; Zorba the Greek.

1966: The Sound of Music; Doctor Zhivago; Darling; Ship of Fools; A Thousand Clowns.

Not a bad bunch. You can see that depth and a knowledge of history were required for their appeal. In contrast, many of today’s films are focused on dysfunctional lives, science fiction, or comic book characters.

One wonders how Lawrence of Arabia, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Dr. Zhivago would appeal to the history/attention span-deprived segments of today’s audiences.

How many of the Best Picture contenders for 2025 can you name? The list is Anora; The Brutalist; A Complete Unknown; Conclave; Dune: Part Two; Emilia Perez; Nickel Boys; The Substance; and Wicked. [Anora won.]

I understand that some of these are serious films, but if they hold less of a grasp on the public consciousness it’s because they weren’t in the theaters that long.

IMDb columnist Jalyn Smoot notes that “Roughly 20 years ago, blockbusters would stay in theaters for months before being converted to physical media or added to television packages.” She then announces the sad news that now the theaters “only have exclusive rights to a film for about three weeks before it can be streamed on demand.”

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino believes that such streaming is killing the film industry. He may be right. But there is something else that is being diminished: the American community. The Academy Awards programs used to be a national event. A broad audience tuned in to see which one of the big films – ones that the majority of serious movie-goers had seen in the theaters - would win.

Streaming has turned the making of movies into a diminished endeavor that is closer to the making of a television program. By doing so, the films are seen by a fraction of what in the past would have been their audience and, in the whole cold-blooded process, acquire less prestige.

If I may use a dated image, it’s as if the old blockbusters went to the drive-in theaters after three weeks in the theaters.

When the local movie theaters fade away, we not only will have lost another community experience, another binding thread in our national unity, we will have also begun taking scissors to those threads.

Why? Because streaming makes it easier to produce films that are intentionally designed for a far smaller audience. That, of course, can be a big advantage to independent film makers with small budgets but it also reduces the number of films of broad interest that “everyone” saw, ones that brought people together in more than one way.

In short, we now have a motion picture industry that is trapped in a process that diminishes audience size, narrows the appeal of its products, hastens the fall of theaters, and weakens communities by removing what once was a vibrant part of the town squares.

Someone should make a movie about this. Call it “Mr. Smith Goes to Hollywood.”