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.
Every year people talk about the gap between movies that garner big box office returns (e.g., Deadpool & Wolverine, Inside Out 2) and those that win awards with smaller, more cineaste audiences (e.g., Anora, The Brutalist). Those in the former category are practically everywhere, while many would be moviegoers have never even heard of the latter.
Are movies just becoming less mainstream? Is it an art form in cultural decline in favor of TV, music, gaming, and other forms of entertainment?
Box office and moviegoing habits point in this direction. Most people are heading out to theaters and splurging on PVOD less often, focusing mostly on huge blockbuster “events”. The rest of their free time goes elsewhere. If a movie doesn’t end up on their streaming service of choice, it ceases to exist.
I’ll never forget my first David Lynch movie and the one time I saw the visionary director in person.
Like many other budding teenage cinephiles, I was in a phase where I was actively seeking out “edgy” and “messed up” movies. It was the mid nineties, and I was on a tear: Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, unrated cuts of Natural Born Killers, Scarface, and RoboCop. A friend recommended Blue Velvet as “dark shit”, so I rented it on VHS.
The film’s Rockwellian intro left me a little baffled. White picket fences, red roses, blue sky, fireman waving in slow motion — this was a dark film? But then a man watering the lawn had a stroke and fell to the ground. A nearby child looked confused by what was happening. A dog growled in slow motion as the camera pushed into the grass and the sound gave way to bugs gnawing and one of Lynch’s trademark drones. The transition from idyllic suburbia to dread piqued my interest. Lynch’s direction left me unsettled, even though nothing on screen was as explicit as the many other ultra violent movies I had watched prior.
While their aesthetic and thematic elements differ, small scale, character-driven drama ties together most of my top ten this year. It’s a mostly international list, with only three of my ten picks from American directors, and majority set beyond US borders. I’m unsure if these commonalities reflect the recent guild strikes, my shifting tastes away from big studio offerings, or just random happenstance of what stood out this year, but it’s a trend I wouldn’t be shocked to see continue into 2025.
My list is in alphabetical order; the wide range of genres and subject matter makes pitting individual choices head to head too challenging. While mood and time available may dictate which among the below I revisit, I’d still highly recommend all of them.
The holidays bring extra attention on 4K Blu-rays; gift guides and new studio releases abound, with sales on discs and players commonplace. With a parallel enshittification across many streaming services, is now the time to start investing in physical media?
For most, no. Streaming remains a ubiquitous format, its advantages of convenience and accessibility undeniable. Physical media is for film enthusiasts, with 4K Blu-rays being to movies what vinyl is to music. The format provides the highest echelon of quality available at home, but it’s only discernible to those with the equipment and tastes to appreciate it.
That said, 4K Blu-rays can be a great investment if you like to rewatch movies and own a high end video or audio movie watching setup. For audio, that means a soundbar or receiver that transmits sound through HDMI to support uncompressed audio formats. For video, you’d want a midrange to high end HDR (OLED or LCD) TV or 4K projector to notice the subtle improvements of a 4K Blu-ray’s higher bitrate.
After weeks of research and anecdotal experience navigating local multiplexes, it’s painfully clear that small movies have largely disappeared from theaters. If you enjoy original, small, or otherwise offbeat movies that don’t follow the franchise IP or horror templates, you’ll likely be watching them at home.
The clearest evidence of this phenomenon comes from analyzing global box office returns against budget, for which the traditional industry rule is to aim for a worldwide box office of two to 2.5 times budget to ensure profitability. I focused my research on small to medium budget movies ranging from under 10 to 50 million.
The success stories are almost always horror movies that open wide and easily recoup their budget by opening weekend. MaXXXine took a 1 million budget and lukewarm critical reviews yet still made 22 million in theaters. Longlegs was made for under 10 million and generated an astonishing 109 million at the box office. A 2024 remake of Speak No Evil has made 76 million worldwide against a budget of 15 million.
There’s never been a larger concentration of movies available. Paradoxically, it’s often hard to actually find something you want to watch. The enshittification of streaming is the most prominent obstacle; movies disappear without notice, price hikes occur regularly, and engagement tactics prioritize the bottom line over your satisfaction.
One of the best ways to navigate such a challenging landscape is a bit of introspection. Spend a few minutes to capture why you liked a movie, and you’ll likely find the long term quality of what you watch next will improve.
While introspective notetaking at first glance sounds like lightweight film criticism, it’s actually about saving you time and money. Five minutes now could save you two hours and twenty bucks later. Practically anyone, from home theater cineastes to casual watchers, will benefit by the practice.
The Fall Guy is a throwback, the rare high budget summer movie based on a quasi-original story, leaning on two likable stars to carry a PG-13 mixture of action, comedy, and romance. Helmed by a director who’s proven himself at the box office, it’s about as appealing a draw as you’re going to get that’s not based on four-quadrant-friendly IP.
But The Fall Guy is a flop. The movie made $28 million opening weekend and $110 million worldwide gross after its first two weeks, the slowest start to the summer movie season in fifteen years. With a reported $130 million budget, it’s a likely loss on Universal’s balance sheets.
Cue extensive online discourse regarding The Fall Guy’s stumbles: Ryan Gosling can’t open a movie. Universal should have released the movie in the spring with less competition. The budget was excessive. But the path to success for The Fall Guy, like most movies, was already narrow; for the last decade, the theatrical experience has gotten worse while home viewing has gotten better, and the studios have trained an audience that mega event franchise IP are the only movies worth leaving home for.
I recently watched Frances Ford Coppola’s Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now on the big screen. Like many other directors of his era, he charted his path through auteur runs: multiple movies in a row with wide distribution and a personal artistic vision. No extended detours into TV. No five plus year gaps between films. No anonymous paycheck gigs. Coppola’s output from 1972 to 1979 – The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now – was arguably the greatest auteur run ever. Such directorial stretches used to be commonplace but are rare today, especially for younger directors. It’s a trend that, left unchecked, can threaten film’s cultural relevance.
But before getting too pessimistic about the situation, I did some research. I looked at Sight and Sound’s 2022 critics poll alongside the most popular movies on Letterboxd for a more populist take. From these sources, I hand picked at least forty directors who each had at least one reasonable auteur run: three or no movies in wide release (e.g., available across your average American cineplex or widely popular for rental or streaming) with no gaps greater than five years and no obvious mercenary gigs.
Every decade, many influential directors have had auteur runs at their critical and financial peak. In the 50s and 60s, there was Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Wilder, Fellini, and Goddard. The 70s brought New Hollywood in with Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Friedkin, and Lucas. The 80s were defined by filmmakers as varied as Spielberg, De Palma, Stone, Carpenter, Cameron, Zemeckis, and Lynch. For the 90s we had Tarantino, Soderbergh, Lee, Linklater, Fincher, the Coen brothers, and Paul Thomas Anderson. I’d argue the 2000s saw a meaningful dip, but we still saw talent like Bigelow, Anderson, Wan, McDonaugh, and Iñárritu break out.
I have mixed feelings about 4K Blu-rays after plowing a lot of time and money into the technology. The format has significant hurdles for everyday TV watchers that make me question its longevity. Yet the upgrades have been substantial, at times incredible, even with a dated home theater setup.
That upgrade stems from Blu-ray’s unimpeachable picture and sound quality. In an era where most movies on streaming sites are compressed 1080p, where 4K streams may not even be an option unless you’re on a premium monthly plan, a 4K Blu-ray’s rock solid 4K HDR image looks sensational. The detail can be astonishing. In Blade Runner, as a character reads a newspaper, I can make out the text on individual articles. 4K Blu-rays also preserve the original film grain for movies shot on film stock, given the high quality scan. It’s a subtle effect that adds character, especially for older, classic films.
In fairness, you can purchase and rent many streaming movies in 4K. It’s also a commonplace resolution for streaming originals on services like Netflix and Apple TV Plus. However, because the data transfer rate on streaming is a third to a quarter of that on Blu-ray (streams top out at 40mbps, while Blu-ray maxes to 128mbps), the former relies on compression and other algorithmic tricks to deliver video.