Why The Movies Will Never Feel The Same Again

This essay was adapted from my video essay “Why The Movies Will Never Feel The Same Again” available on YouTube and Nebula without ads. I’m providing a written version because it will reach a different audience and is easier to reference or cite, but the video version contains a fair amount of archival footage and references that help support my narrative, so you may prefer to watch if you’re so inclined. As always I couldn’t do work like this without the support of my patrons and Newsletter subscribers: I. The Exorcist Sparks Moral Panic In 1973 David Sheehan went out to capture the audiences reactions to a movie that was becoming wildly popular. Reporting for KNXT-TV he said: "The manager of the National Theatre in Westwood says that there indeed are at least a dozen people who faint or become ill during every showing." A hit that took Hollywood by surprise, The Exorcist quickly set box office records, becoming one of the first “Blockbusters” of the New Hollywood era. It also cause people to freak out. There were reports of people screaming and running out of the theater, becoming ill and vomiting, being carried out of the theaters on stretchers. It incited a genuine moral panic with some religious groups believing the movie was causing demonic possessions. None of this seemed to hurt its popularity (it probably helped it). Scalpers reportedly would sell tickets sometimes for hundreds of dollars. The movie ran in the theaters for two years. And its cultural impact has been lasting. A lot of people credit The Exorcist for playing a big role in starting up the satanic panic, something that was still going on 20 years later when I was born in the 90s. But if you released this movie now, in 2025, what would happen? It would probably do well at the box office, horror movies are still a good bet, and The Exorcist is a well constructed scary horror movie. But I don't think it's hard to argue that it wouldn't have anywhere near the same cultural impact. And this isn't just because culture has become less religious. Jaws, which was released just a few years later, inspired a similar kind of cultural panic. One that also had such a profound effect that to this day, some scientists call our collective irrational fixation on shark attacks (relative to other more dangerous things) “the Jaws effect.” The reality is in the 2020s, Movies just don't have the same kind of cultural impact that they used to. Sure, people still might flock to the theater for a Minecraft movie or Barbenheimer, but they're being drawn in by massive marketing budgets and stories that draw from existing intellectual property. I could be wrong, but while Barbenheimer might have trended on Twitter and TikTok for a week, it doesn't seem like either movie will inspire a shift in mindset on Barbies or nuclear bombs that will echo through the culture for decades. At least not anywhere near the scale we saw with something like The Exorcist or Jaws. A very common explanation for this is that movies just aren't as good. And sure, The Exorcist and Jaws are incredibly well-crafted films. Friedkin and Spielberg were basically at the top of their game technically. They knew how to wield all the forces of cinema that were available to them at that time for maximum effect. I will admit that in some ways, the major day-to-day fair at the box office is below the quality level of The Exorcist or Jaws, but there are still incredible major movies being made today and I don't think the shift in average quality is enough to really, truly explain the dramatic shift in cultural impact that has happened over the last 50 years. And ultimately even if you somehow could release The Exorcist for the first time today, it just wouldn't have the same impact. That means something else has changed. We've changed, the culture has changed, how we respond to the movies has changed. And I'm not saying going to the movies isn't fun anymore or has no value now. There are plenty of movies that provide cool, entertaining, even awe-inspiring experiences at the cinema. But on average, for me (and I gather for many others), it just doesn’t feel the same as it used to. This essay is my attempt to explain this shift, and to do so we’ll have to dig into a media theory that I think is vital for truly understanding—not just the movies—but the shifting media landscape that we’re living through and some of the changes that are happening in our culture right now. "You see, suddenly, if you've noticed, the mood of North America has changed very drastically." —Marshall McLuhan (1967) Chicago, January 6, 1951. The Zenith Radio Company begins testing an exciting new technology. If you’re one of 300 test households, for $1, you can order a movie directly to your home television set simply by sending a phone signal. Seeing this, movie theaters and studios already feeling pressure from antitrust regulations and the rapid explosion of home television feared phone vision posed an existential threat. What will happen to the industry, they wondered, if movies can skip the theater and go straight to people's televisions at home? The industry pushed back, even lobbying the government to try to ban early pay-per-view movies. And while the technology didn't take off at the time, their fears were not unfounded. TV would not spell ultimate death for cinema, but by the 1950s, theater attendance was already in decline from its peak in the 30s and 40s. It's hard to overstate just how big a deal movies were in the first half of the century. Theaters were a foundational American institution. In 1940, some reports indicate that over 60% of Americans were attending the cinema weekly, 20% more than were attending religious services each week.1 The cinema was a community gathering place. Small local neighborhood screens would show one movie at a time. The newsreels that ran before films were often the only opportunity citizens had to get a glimpse of the second world war as it unfolded abroad. This was the era of the Hollywood studio system with each of the big studios cranking out over a hundred movies each year. But by the 50s, cinema attendance was in free fall. The Hollywood clergy and theater owners were panicking. Could cinema compete with the ease and convenience of the entertainment now available in the comfort of people's homes? Some in the industry attempted to ease their worries by recalling how Hollywood had already overcome significant threats. One exhibitor told Box Office Magazine it was "new and improved methods of presentation that had turned the tide in cinema's costly, discouraging, and prolonged fight against radio entertainment."2 TV shook the industry. And with antitrust regulations that made it so the studios couldn't own their own theaters anymore and other post-war cultural changes like suburbanization happening at the same time, by the 1970s, the number of theatrical admissions had fallen over 70%. But the movies wouldn't go quietly. To try to win back audiences, theaters and the studios made the movies bigger and more exciting, implementing widescreen cinemascope, 3D, and better sound. Movies like Jaws, The Exorcist, and Star Wars found people lining up around the block. These new, bigger, bolder, blockbusters gave cinema attendance new life, and by the 80s, movie-going had stabilized, and with rising ticket prices, box office income was hitting all-time highs. But even though this new world of multiplexes and blockbusters still had significant cultural influence, the movies and Hollywood had changed forever. They would never again represent the same thing to society that they had in their golden era. In January 2007, just six days after Steve Jobs announced a technology that would shape the coming decades, a company that mailed DVDs to subscribers announced Watch Now, a service that would allow consumers to instantly watch a movie on their computer. These two technologies together would set in motion a transformation in how we consume me…