It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
Eg I've just finished watching Andor for the 3rd time, normal speed.
Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end.
But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content.
Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.
Movies meanwhile had a long time between the next one and so you couldn't get people deeply involved in the characters. However you had enough to pull off a slightly complex plot and so that is what movies did.
Short form video on YouTube, TikTok, and various AI short form video apps are also spiking in popularity.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary
Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
/s
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
> Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.
I could watch TV passively (I don't watch TV, but I could). However if you switched my TV for one that received only Spanish - I have enough Spanish that I could understand, but it wouldn't be passive for me, it would be hard work to understand.
How did people get worse at reading, other than choosing to spend time on the alternative activities that I listed? You may be reversing cause and effect.
Obviously I meant mentally passive, not physically passive.
Neither did I.
Anyway, I don't buy the "energy" story, that doomscrolling is somehow low-energy, or even that people can't muster the energy for any activity other than doomscrolling.
Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000.
Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.
And beyond that if you go deeper, the revenue growth is almost entirely attribured to higher prices in ticket sales while attendance in real terms continues to decline.
What are you struggling with here?
Popularity is a contributor to 'life' aka not dying.
Revenues are down Ticket sales are down Popularity is down.
Stop my guy you're just showing yourself to be foolish
Apparently the peak year for Hollywood was 2002, with $9.2b domestic box office (16.1b inflation adjusted).
Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.
Even the word 'nerd' got reduced to Trekkie and Star Wars fandom when it used to mean tech enthusiast.
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.