What happened to movies?: The Story

The lights go down

For a few seconds the theater is just breathing — strangers settling into the dark together, the screen not yet lit. That silence used to be one of the most democratic spaces in American culture. Then the projector catches and you are somewhere else.

That experience is vanishing. The mid-budget original — the $30-to-$70 million adult drama that produced The Departed and No Country for Old Men — effectively disappeared from major studio slates between 2015 and 2023. What replaced it was recognition: sequels, reboots, cinematic universes.

The economics and the loss

In 2019, Avengers: Endgame earned $2.8 billion. In 2023, The Marvels earned $206 million on a $275 million budget. Same studio. Same franchise. The market realists can explain why the economics shifted — an original drama costs $40 million to make and $30 million to market, and if it isn’t The Departed, everything is gone. A franchise sequel provides a floor.

The cultural declinists can tell you what was lost. The first time a movie wrecked them — left them staring at the ceiling rearranging what they understood about people — it was something like Chinatown. A film that assumed its audience could handle ambiguity and offered no catharsis. That assumption no longer exists at major studios.

The medium evolutionists keep pointing out that Parasite won Best Picture, Korean shows colonized Netflix, and the art form may not be dying — just leaving the country. The audience skeptics ask whether the audience changed first or the studios did.

The movies that break through — Everything Everywhere All at Once, Past Lives, The Holdovers — keep being the ones nobody would have greenlit under the franchise model. Whether that pattern is proof of life or a hospice ward for a tradition that lost its business model depends on who you ask.

Sixty-seven percent of American adults now have a streaming subscription. A twenty-four-year-old in 2025 does not have the habit of going to a theater. By the time theaters reopened, the living room had become good enough.

Perspectives:
- Market realists
- Cultural declinists
- Medium evolutionists
- Audience skeptics