I think the issue is that content creation and distribution has already been fully democratized. How many hours do people spend watching videos shot by individuals on their phones in their apartments?
Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.
Like I said elsewhere, I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. This is a broad category that I think people still want that's differentiated from 30sec vertical video, and that should exist in the cultural conversation.
It doesn't feel fully democratized because if it was, you'd see more indie things in this same format competing with "big budget" movies on the same playing field.
> I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling
Might be an anecdote, but I've noticed several friends and family unable to focus on a movie and lately even on a tv show without pulling their phones every few minutes.
> I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling.
I mean, "want to" is one thing, but the numbers show what they end up doing. Instagram and TikTok, like video games as someone else mentioned, have taken a significant share of the "entertainment hours" budget. I feel like the impact of the low-to-no-budget content creator is undeniable (this traces back to ebaumsworld and early YouTube, it was just internet dorks then, now it's been industrialized. Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content).
My point was that content creation has been democratized -- unfunded individuals can now compete -- not that making traditional Hollywood-style movies has been. It's gone so far they've been phased out, the entire premise is largely untenable at this point. That specific sector was actually somewhat more democratized in the late stages of the heyday, when a Hollywood movie called Dude, Where's My Car was made, and indie films did flourish because the industry was healthy enough to support them.
> Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content
I think it's virtually all demographics below 70.
My 60/70 years old family are all too distracted by the phones to watch a movie, and so are millenial friends.
True but I think a lot of them would be in the "I totally want to watch feature films" camp. By wholeheartedly I meant that the kids don't even have that pretense.