I have taken note of pervasive trend in entertainment. I am tempted to say that it pertains to attention span, but I suspect there is a lot more to it than that. It boils down to this; an increasing number of people prefer short snippets of content rather than getting involved in a full-length feature film, whereas others of us (you all know where I come out on this debate) greatly prefer a good old 90-150 minute movie that takes you through a narrative arc that for over a hundred years has proven to resonate with the pacing of the human mind. There is such a richness of issues at play in this dichotomy of entertainment formatting, and it seems to be a bigger and bigger part of human existence as screen time takes over as the dominant user of mankind’s day, that it seems an important topic to dissect. That seems particularly to be the case as AI takes center stage in our lives and the biggest practical and philosophical (some would say existential) topic in global entertainment and human consciousness is about how and perhaps why we tell stories and crave storytelling.
Movies combine nearly every artistic medium into one experience: visual composition, music, performance, writing, and editing all working together to create something more immersive than any single art form alone. That combination triggers real emotional and physiological responses, the score can raise your heart rate, a well-timed cut can make you laugh or gasp, and a strong performance can make you feel empathy for someone whose life is nothing like your own. There’s also the structural pull of the story itself. Humans are wired to find patterns and resolutions satisfying, and a two-hour film delivers a complete emotional arc, tension, release, transformation, in a tightly compressed package. That compression is part of the appeal: unlike a novel or a TV series, a movie asks for one sitting and rewards you with a finished experience. Finally, movies are a low-cost way to live other lives. They let you experience love, danger, grief, or triumph vicariously and safely, which is part of why genres like horror or romance can feel so visceral, your brain is responding as if it’s somewhat real. And watching with others adds a shared, social layer (laughing or jumping together in a theater…and Kim sure does her share of jumping) that other media don’t replicate quite as easily.
A recent Pew study found just 53% of U.S. adults said they’d been to a theater in the past year, and ticket revenue is still running about 20% below pre-pandemic levels even after the post-COVID recovery. Theater numbers tell a similar story, with domestic attendance down 7.5% and international attendance down nearly 15% in its most recent quarter. A few things are driving it. Streaming is the obvious one, when a new release often hits a service within weeks of theatrical release, the urgency to see it on a big screen evaporates for a lot of people. Cost matters too: tickets plus snacks and a Buddy sitter can run us well over $100, while a streaming subscription covers a whole month of unlimited viewing. You miss the really big screen immersive experience (depending on how seriously you take your home theater set-up) and certainly much of the social collective layer, but the divide between theater and home is clearly narrowing. And the divide is also generational and economic, about two-thirds of adults 18-29 went to a theater in the past year versus only 39% of those 65 and older, and high earners attend at much higher rates than lower-income adults, suggesting price and habit both play a role.
There’s also a content effect: theaters increasingly depend on big action releases (Marvel, blockbuster franchises, must-see event films, etc.) to drive attendance, while mid-budget dramas and comedies that used to fill multiplexes now often go straight to streaming. So moviegoing is shifting from a routine weekly habit into more of an occasional “event,” reserved for films people feel they need to see immediately or on the largest screen possible. Kim and I are movie people, but even we feel some of the pull of those changes to our modern way of life. But why then is the movie format, whether watched in a theater or at home, coming into play?
There’s a real shift happening, and it cuts both ways. On the one hand, a large meta-analysis covering nearly 100,000 participants across 71 studies found that heavier short-form video consumption correlates with worse attention and inhibitory control, the so-called “TikTok Brain” effect that I didn’t want to lean on too heavily. That’s reshaping expectations: audiences raised on endless scrollable feeds are less patient with slow setups, and even traditional platforms are adapting. YouTube extended Shorts have gone from 60 seconds up to three minutes as of late 2024, chasing that same bite-sized attention economy. Filmmaking itself has been trending shorter and faster for decades, independent of TikTok. Average shot length in feature films has dropped from 8-11 seconds in the 1930s to under 5 seconds today and that acceleration started with action movies in the 80s and 90s, long before smartphones and social media existed. So in some ways, Hollywood was already training audiences toward quicker cuts and faster pacing; short-form video just pushed that further and into a new format entirely. The interesting wrinkle is that overall sustained attention capacity hasn’t necessarily shrunk, research suggests healthy adults can sustain focused attention for hours by repeatedly re-engaging with something they find intrinsically interesting, which is exactly how a 2.5 hour movie works when it’s good. What’s changed is the threshold for hooking someone in the first place. People are pickier and faster to bail if a film doesn’t grab them in the first few minutes, which puts pressure on pacing and opening scenes even within long-form content.
There’s also a new middle ground emerging: microdramas, vertically-shot serialized stories with one-to-three-minute episodes and constant cliffhangers, exploded out of China and turned into a multi-billion-dollar industry. That’s essentially long-form storytelling restructured into short-form delivery, suggesting people still want narrative arcs and character development, just chunked differently. So rather than killing the appetite for long-running stories, short-form platforms may be training audiences toward serialized, episodic consumption instead, which is part of why limited series have thrived even as single 2-hour theatrical films have struggled.
As for AI, it’s reshaping this from both the production and consumption side, and the effects pull in different directions. On production, generative AI has moved from novelty to standard tooling fairly fast. A January 2026 McKinsey report found AI video generation now factors into over 70% of pre- and post-production workflows in Hollywood. AI tools can generate photorealistic backgrounds and audio-synced sequences without expensive location shoots, and does that really matter if it’s done well since suspending reality is the name of the game in the movie business anyway? But it’s all lowering the cost floor for filmmaking, which cuts both ways: it could mean more diverse, lower-budget films getting made (as some advocates argue for emerging markets like Dreams of Violets now at the Tribeca Film Festival), but critics worry it’ll mainly producing more formulaic content and squeezing out the human craftspeople. It’s unclear that AI is driving the crap level in movies since that’s been going on for years (think Spaghetti Westerns). One industry critic argued generative AI can only amplify Hollywood’s existing reliance on predictable formulas rather than generate genuinely new ideas, but can it free creativity from the economic constraints as well?
On the consumption side, AI is intensifying the attention competition we talked about earlier rather than easing it. Algorithmic feeds are now partly populated by AI-generated content itself, about 48% of young adults reportedly following at least one AI-generated virtual celebrity, which adds an entirely new category of bite-sized, infinitely generatable content competing for the same eyeballs that might otherwise watch a two-hour film. The net effect is that AI is making long-form content cheaper and faster to produce while also flooding the short-form ecosystem with infinite, algorithmically-optimized competition. That likely deepens the bifurcation we discussed, big, expensive, “must-see” theatrical events on one end, and an ever-expanding ocean of cheap short-form (increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated) content on the other, with the mid-budget theatrical film continuing to get squeezed from both directions.
I just watched the first half of Lawrence of Arabia last night…one of my favorites. I stopped at Intermission…imagine that. But I loved every minute of the cinematography and the story development. I was immersed and I love that. That’s why I watch movies….