Say Goodbye to Hollywood: The Death of an Institution

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The protagonist of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer finds solipsistic respite in the theater:

In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives . . . What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Sometimes I feel a similar temptation. A quick scan of the showings at my local theater quickly disabuses me of it. Nine movies are playing, seven of which are sequels, reboots, or rereleases (The Transformers: The Movie 40th Anniversary). The final two are an indie horror film (Buddy) and a mediocre crime drama (By Any Means).

When I think of Hollywood, I don’t think of movies. I see decrepit letters on a hill, crack zombies staggering around a slate of granite stars, “K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt”-style headlines.

When I think of going to the movies, I see the Regal Roller-Coaster, Nicole Kidman monologuing, a black screen, and the theater lights coming on — exposing the ransacked theater. Popcorn buckets overturned, Cokes spilled, and empty boxes of $6.50 Swedish Fish strewn everywhere. I don’t think of any movie in particular.

Hollywood is dead. Or — anything of value in Hollywood is dead, and we should ignore or dispose of its empty husk.

THE MOVIES ARE NOT ALRIGHT

I do not think that the recent Washington Post declaration that “Hollywood got its mojo back” disproves my point. The industry trumpets record ticket sales while the journalist is forced to sneak in the sobering “Accounting for inflation and higher ticket prices, it’s less of a record season.” Indeed, there were 248 million fewer movie tickets sold in North America for the first seven and a half months of this year compared to the same period in 2019. The decline pre-dates the pandemic. And despite the article’s claim (from the theater trade association) that attendance among Gen Z is up, annual theater visits per eighteen to twenty-four year old halved between 2007 and 2025, from roughly nine to four.

But playing the numbers game is precisely the problem. The movie industry knows that, on a financial level, they face a streaming-caused cataclysm; thus they have been doing everything in their power to avert total catastrophe, a strategy culminating in the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, likely to be followed by layoffs, streamlined operations, and “A.I. tools” in the writing room.

In fact, everyone knows this. Many people are writing obituaries for Hollywood. Many are also self-conscious enough to realize that people have been declaring Hollywood dead for the past half-century, and are rightfully wary to write it off once again. But we should, at least as an institution of any value.

American film was conceived in dirt and sin and over time has displayed a marked tendency downwards. Occasionally, an inspirited group of talented young people pushes the industry away from Sheol and back up towards the heavens, but I am skeptical that it will happen this time. Critics have squandered their credibility and are largely irrelevant; audiences prefer (or are addicted to) other forms of entertainment that they will not be easily weaned off of; and I am not sure that new, young talent exists and can maneuver itself into a position where it can make a difference.

THE OLD GUARD CAN’T SAVE HOLLYWOOD

The writing is putrid. The mise-en-scène in popular movies is often ludicrous and indistinguishable from daytime television shows. Hollywood cannot light movies anymore and all cinematographers can do is complain about the assembly-line approach and the compressed shooting schedules. At least the all-too-human love of money has finally strangled the equally ludicrous and idolatrous cult of the “movie.”

When Hollywood was “threatened” during COVID (never mind that ticket sales had begun to fall a decade before), its public savior was a narcissist whose reputation, for many years, was primarily based on his membership in a cult notorious for naked financial exploitation and scripture filled with sci-fi mumbo jumbo.

What was his solution? BASE jumps, car chases, pastiche fight scenes, endless homages, self-serious but unintelligible plots; sheer muck. Some say that Tom Cruise makes entertaining movies, but I am not really sure this is true — the recent Mission Impossible movies (and Top Gun: Maverick) are defensive maneuvers, the show of a rearguard force no longer confident that there is an intact main force to support: they sprint away from danger in an “organized retreat.” The characteristic mark of these films is their speed: you cannot catch them, so you cannot know if they are truly good or bad. The credits act like the hypnotist’s clap: in an instant your memory of what watching the film was like is replaced with the gracious friendly thoughts that Cruise stirred up, implanted in you through a direct appeal, before the film even began.

The director who sought to “save” movies fares little better. Oppenheimer was worse than cowardice, the sort of cinematic treachery that will define the next few decades as Hollywood retreats and cuts deals: Nolan’s chief innovation was the Faustian realization that, though shooting a drama like an action movie is trite, he could “make it fresh” by context overflowing across scenes. In the latter half, when Nolan cuts between scenes from four different timelines, as rapidly as a user scrolling TikTok, I felt like I was embedded in some web of superficial internet discourse — circling the same points without any real greater understanding or penetration of the issue at hand or even the illusion of such. Unlike bread, it apparently has not taken very long for a director in the age of social media to realize that movies can be made pre-sliced.

Beyond these supposed cinema-saving blockbusters, the rest of the film landscape post-COVID looks remarkably grim. A few indie movies have enjoyed short bursts of attention and awards, but in general they have been too heavy-handed or limited to have more than ephemeral value. The franchise workhorses have finally begun to groan — multipliers deteriorating in aggregate, attendance is down, but as long as there are winners like the new Spider-Man or Jurassic Park, the studios will continue to lay down their bets and draft the best acting and directing talent to do little more than babysit their I.P.s.

I am sick of all this.

I am sick of all the unnatural-looking people prancing about the red carpet or made up into characters with contorted faces, the same ones I have seen for my entire life, who look the same as they did when I was unable to walk or talk. Why aren’t we shuffling them away in a dignified manner like elderly incontinent Chinese politburo members dozing off in meetings?

I am sick of the seven or eight marquee actors and actresses marketed for my generation who are all in their thirties and, for all their supposed talent and clout, still slave away in sputtering franchises looking for the big pay-check.

I am sick of the glib speeches to a shrinking audience — which, though certainly not new, have gotten stale and lazier — and their ever-predictable clap lines, like Javier Bardem’s naked “No to war and free Palestine.”

I am sick of the laziness I see in the shots, lighting, writing, and costumes of films that cost more than the G.D.P. of a small nation. Everything has been streamlined and flattened across genres and across studios. In 1969, while defending trash cinema, Pauline Kael could write in Harper’s Magazine that:

“Hollywood movies often have the look of the studio that produced them — they have a studio style. Many current Warner films are noisy and have a bright look of cheerful ugliness, Universal films the cheap blur of moneysaving processes, and so forth. Sometimes there is even a spirit that seems to belong to the studio. We can speak of the Paramount comedies of the thirties or the Twentieth-Century Fox family entertainment of the forties and CinemaScope comedies of the fifties or the old M-G-M gloss, pretty much as we speak of Chevvies or Studebakers.”

What wonderful dimensions on which to enjoy trash that we no longer have! Even our trash is joyless and corporate, made without any semblance of enthusiasm by actors; our imagined vision of the director is of a ruthless hall-monitor; of the cinematographer: a joyless, but inept technician.

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Like many ostensibly democratic projects, contemporary Hollywood has succeeded by dragging everyone down together: not just the films, but also the viewers. This is not to treat the movie industry as undergoing some inexorable decline as we got stupider and stupider. There were periods: “Classic Hollywood,” “New Hollywood,” and the rise of independent cinema in the 1990s, where small groups of intelligent people were sufficiently aligned with the commercial incentive-structure to produce interesting movies that were often very popular.

But, I suspect less people go to the theater today for the same reason that no druggie goes to visit the opium den like it’s 1875: there’s better product out there and you don’t even have to deal with other people to get it. When not in the theater, three-quarters of Americans use another screen while watching a movie or TV show!

In the Norse poem Poetic Edda, three brothers kill the primordial god Ymir and fashion the world from his corpse. With his flesh they make the Earth; with his blood they make the lakes and seas; with his bones they make hills; with his hair they make trees; and with his skull they make the heavens. For the last century, we have been slicing up cinema — pulling off its less savory parts and fashioning our media world out of it, and now we wonder why film itself is now a rotting corpse.

There are intellectuals who thought that film would be good for the masses, who thought that television would be good for the masses, and who thought that social media would be good for the masses. I would like to see a Sankey diagram of this population, because I am certain it has shrunk drastically through each permutation of mass entertainment and will shrink even further for the next one. Through these transitions, art has been fighting a rearguard action: occasionally raiding a blockhouse, occupying a contested trench, sallying out to counter-attack. The battle has been fought and lost and lost again.

Netflix is now writing shows and movies for people they assume are not paying attention. The proliferation of glowing phone-screens inside theaters is one direct effect of the attention-stunted audience, but, indirectly, I’m sure that through test screenings or Popcorn scores, we will — if we have not already — see further pressure for simplification and abridgement even in theater films. The studios, I’m sure, would be thrilled to give this to them.

THE DEATH OF THE MOVIE CRITIC

Unsurprisingly, as Hollywood has languished and audiences deteriorated, movie criticism has degenerated into trade press. And to make matters even worse, we suffer from “Rotten Tomatoization” — the most popular method for rating movies is an unfettered aggregation of voices, each review categorized by an algorithm into either a positive or negative set. For several years, Paddington 2 was the highest ranked movie on Rotten Tomatoes, the only perfect score.

How utterly useless are Rotten Tomato scores? For the top-ten grossing movies, 1977 and 2024 have the same average score — seventy-six percent and a similar median. Here are the respective movies:

• 2024
  • Inside Out 2
  • Deadpool & Wolverine
  • Wicked
  • Moana 2
  • Despicable Me 4
  • Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
  • Dune: Part Two
  • Twisters
  • Mufasa: The Lion King
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3
• 1977
  • Star Wars
  • Smokey and the Bandit
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  • Saturday Night Fever
  • The Goodbye Girl
  • A Bridge Too Far
  • The Deep
  • The Spy Who Loved Me
  • Oh, God!
  • Annie Hall

It would be excessive, I think, to point out that not a single movie in the 2024 list is an original intellectual property. Why should critics, when their voice is compressed into a bit and thrown into a blender with fifty others, even bother? Many don’t.

Take the New Yorker’s review of The Odyssey, by long-time critic Richard Brody. He builds his review out of ham-strung lines that would have been cut on Ebert & Roeper (“an exciting adventure,” “Nolan advances his vision, however crowd-pleasing and anachronistic, with vigorous confidence and unimpeachable clarity,” etc.) while burying the lede: “As a director, Nolan seems to have paid much more attention to the plot, the dialogue, the performances, the landscapes, the settings, the décor, and the costumes than to the images in which he presents them.” For a movie, this seems like a bit of a problem.

The problem with writing about popular movies seriously is that there is always an escape hatch. A film’s apparent popularity will drive the critic to either position himself as a sophisticate in a sprawling land of morons, or make concessions and cut sordid deals with popular taste as Brody does here. He thinks that this movie is terrible, but he won’t say so — he uses the process of seeming to transparently think through every aspect of the film, the approach of trying to tutor the audience towards taste, to disguise the fact that he knows the work itself is laughably shoddy: he ends the review by praising Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex and Medea, which feels a bit like ending a review of Excalibur by directing readers to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — a laughably doomed sortie on the reader’s taste.

Today there is probably not a single critic who is both tasteful and honest, but there is still, at least, one semi-entertaining one: Armond White — an aesthetic schizophrenic who has been stowed away at that crotchety conservative stalwart magazine National Review for many years. There he deploys his erudition to write paeans to Godard and Michael Bay and baffle the magazine’s wrinkled audience of Goldwater Girls and Barry Boys.

Why does White reference Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System in a slobbering review of Melanie — the First Lady’s terrible documentary? Why do Rimbaud and Li Bai need to make an appearance in an essay that is ostensibly a critique of Toy Story 5? Does Happy Gilmore 2 really need to be elevated to put down One Battle After Another?

White may be a notorious troll whose modus vivendi is a grotesque parody of the age-old tendency in film criticism to ascend to the heavens of theory and aesthetics and return to put the vulgar first and the self-sophisticated last. But he is sometimes amusing and occasionally insightful, little different from the lower-range of Pauline Kael. Reading Armond White is like watching the last barbary lion, inbred and emancipated, about to lie down to die.

NO, BABY, THE YOUTUBERS WON’T SAVE HOLLYWOOD

The movies are bad, the audiences worse, and the critics are phoning it in.

The situation in the 1970s and 1990s was puzzle perfect — the skills the young directors brought were precisely what Hollywood needed: more consummate craftsmanship, smaller budgets, willingness to take creative risks, ability to appeal to young audiences. And there were critics ready to crown them for all of this. Are the studio’s current efforts to pull former Youtubers in (Obsession, Backrooms) going to yield the same fruits?

I suspect not. Instead these films expose the risks of pulling from a medium already more optimized to please than Hollywood, and yet also less capable of producing something interesting on a large-scale. Whatever the value of the concept — and “the backrooms” is a truly homegrown and authentic piece of internet mythos — Backrooms was undone by both a terrible script and an overreliance creating an effect of uncanniness that smothered both plot and cinematography — the film had decided what it wanted to do: create the effect of a series of YouTube videos stretched out over two hours and then lazily built a movie around this experience.

Obsession is even more ridiculous — importing the vicious and never-ending struggle between the worst of the sexes online into the theater for cheap relatability. My friend Theo Gary, reviewing it for The New Critic, rightfully notes that “Obsession is a story about young people, and about the ways that young people experience the world, which means, like all things in America, that the discussion about it is set by the most deranged people in our society.” But there is no reason it has to be this way, not least in our movies.

I have no doubt that studios will scramble and race to the bottom with their own content against movies offered on other streaming services, TV, YouTube, live-streaming, and short-term video content — limited only by the memory of old Hollywood and their clumsy size.

IN THE END

At every AMC theater, before the movie starts, Nicole Kidman recites this monologue:

We come to this place . . . for magic.We come to AMC theaters to laugh, to cry, to care.Because we need that, all of us,that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim.And we go somewhere we’ve never been before;not just entertained, but somehow reborn.Together.Dazzling images, on a huge silver screen.Sound that I can feel.Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place likе this.Our heroes feel like thе best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful.Because here, they are.

Unwittingly, AMC tells us why we will stop coming. We can get “that indescribable feeling” elsewhere, the images are no longer “dazzling,” and the movies no longer necessarily made for “a huge silver screen.” Where is the magic, that alchemical transmutation that can make heartbreak feel good? Not here.

In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris describes the director as:

the least necessary and most important component of film-making. He is the most modern and most decadent of all artists in his relative passivity toward everything that passes before him. He would not be worth bothering with if he were not capable now and then of a sublimity of expression almost miraculously extracted from his money-oriented environment.

I say down with Hollywood because I believe that the money-oriented environment has, or will soon, do away with this sort of director. There will be no sublimity of expression “now and then,” just a dull sewage flow of garbage year-in-and-year-out for as long as Hollywood survives, kept alive by memory, inertia, and our collective tic to pop in a few times a year to see if anything has changed. It probably won’t.

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The psychedelic video Regal Entertainment Group plays before movies begin — recently “updated” and shortened, maybe because of attention-space issues.

And why then is he reviewing such films at all unless he suffers the condition that was peculiar to a few critics like John Simon who were content to bemoan the lack of real artistry in Hollywood, but continue to review popular films until their death?