What happened to movies?: Medium evolutionists
New to streaming media
The standing ovation that taught nothing
The night Parasite won Best Picture, the Dolby Theatre applauded a Korean-language film with no stars, no franchise, no source IP, made for $11 million. The American film industry gave it a standing ovation and spent five years not learning the lesson. We have been laughing about this ever since.
The cultural declinists mourn American cinema’s golden age. The grief is sincere. The scope is provincial. American cinema was the largest national industry for roughly fifty years and also the best. Those were never the same fact.
Korea invested in film education, subsidies, and screen quotas guaranteeing domestic films a minimum share. The government treated cinema as infrastructure. The result: an $11 million Best Picture and Squid Game — the most-watched Netflix show in history. The market realists say the model doesn’t port. The American model — cinema as pure commercial product with no public investment — is the one that failed.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was directed by Americans of Asian descent drawing on Hong Kong cinema, anime, and immigrant dynamics. The future of cinema looks like this. Directors working across borders, mixing traditions, ignoring national categories.
The audience skeptics are worth hearing — streaming is shifting economics in Korea and India too. If Netflix and Amazon become the primary global channel, the homogenizing pressure we describe as uniquely American may turn out to be universal.
Where we concede ground: Korean cinema’s excellence doesn’t fill the gap for a person in Omaha. The American loss is real and local.
What would change our mind: Original films declining across five major national industries simultaneously under streaming economics.
Read the full synthesis: What happened to movies?