I’ve written here about film’s changing cultural cache and the evolution of what it means to be a devoted cineaste in 2025. But the subject extends far beyond film. In the on-demand attention era, with its endless variety of entertainment, audiences are fragmenting, widening the gap between casual fans and hardcore enthusiasts.
To predict the future of any media form — TV, gaming, music, movies — one must examine what’s most convenient for the casual audience to adopt, along with the depth and availability of content available for enthusiasts. (I hesitate to use the word ‘content’ given its tendency to devalue or anonymize artistry, but it’s the most concise way to describe such a wide variety of entertainment.)
Let’s break this logic down further. Time and money have always distinguished newcomers from superfans, from NFL football to indie horror movies. Someone dabbling with dance pop listens occasionally to Charlie XCX on a mixed playlist, while the obsessive house head buys a crate of DJ sets on vinyl.
A decade or two ago, content availability was largely dictated by local resources, requiring a similar minimum effort regardless of your commitment. Whether renting one movie or a hundred, you had to visit a store or wait for a delivery. Practically everything was paid for a la carte.
Today on-demand media offers an endless supply of entertainment, accessible anytime across every form and genre: books, social media, gaming, movies, TV, music, and wellness, to name a few. Different subgenres are a tap, a scroll, or algorithmic suggestion away. A streaming service’s home page exemplifies this, typically blending suspense, horror, and comedy from every country and decade imaginable to keep viewers engaged.
Crucially, the size and variety of available entertainment continue to expand. From a consumer standpoint, much of it feels practically “free”, either in the form of ad-supported platforms (e.g., Instagram, YouTube, Tubi), or as part of an existing monthly subscription (e.g., Netflix, Spotify, The New York Times).
This accessibility allows us to dabble in more casual areas of interest than ever before. Everyone can easily “go wide”. Convenience and accessibility are addictive, and we prioritize them above all else. If an activity isn’t engaging — be it doomscrolling, mobile gaming, or Spotify playlists — it’s trivial to turn to something else. This makes the casual market susceptible to algorithms and AI-driven recommendations. In contrast, a comparatively small enthusiast market can explore a much deeper, long tail selection of material.
As a result, consumers are simultaneously engaging with entertainment more broadly and more deeply than ever before. Technology enables us to jump between activities while also getting lost in specific domains.
To visualize this, imagine entertainment time as a two-axis graph. The horizontal axis represents every available activity, while the vertical axis measures depth and variety within a given activity. In the pre on-demand era, leisure time typically resembled a series of ‘I shaped’ vertical lines, given the intentionality, time, and resource constraints. Today that distribution is more ’T shaped’. Technology supercharges the ability to multitask and jump across various interests (the horizontal line gets wider) while also going down a rabbit hole on any given area (the vertical line gets taller.)
To understand how an entertainment medium is evolving, consider both convenience and accessibility for casual audiences and the long tail of content available for the enthusiasts. In most cases, the casual market drives larger trends as it tends to represent the majority of both the audience and revenue.
For film, the long tail of the on-demand age empowers cinephiles to track local repertory screenings, buy 4K Blu-rays, and discover obscure movies on niche streaming sites. Meanwhile, casual viewers rely on marketing, word of mouth, and familiar IP to decide on an occasional theater outing or PVOD rental. Beyond that, their choices are shaped by what appears on their preferred streaming service and looks interesting.
That convenience-driven shift suggests a continued decline for theaters (too expensive, too much effort), and more films getting lost in the algorithmic streaming shuffle. As platforms like Netflix diversify into live events and non-narrative content, this trend will likely accelerate.
For gaming, convenience fuels an expansion in the devices everyone owns — mobile and PC — along with the continued dominance of longstanding “black hole” games like Fortnite. While hardcore gamers will sustain console markets through high spending, these devices will look less accessible compared to mobile and PC. Dropping $700 or more on a dedicated gaming device just doesn’t compute for most customers. Bet on the Nintendo Switch 2 to be the one breakthrough exception, with its likely affordability, mass appeal franchises, and built in portability.
Ultimately, the on-demand era promises a messy future for entertainment. On one hand, the sheer diversity of available content is invigorating. We can discover interests that were once inaccessible and explore them with depth unheard of even a few years ago. I envy budding film lovers who stumble into an old indie movie, have their minds blown, and can access the director’s whole filmography on demand, alongside a hundred recommendations on Letterboxd.
But the ease of abandoning pursuits that don’t immediately click means convenience often overrides all other concerns. The resulting shortcuts aren’t always for the best. We’re all susceptible to doomscrolling, mindless autoplay, and swapping long form reading for quick hit explainer videos. I hope that as technology improves and we’re more aware of tradeoffs, we can find the right balance.