The film industry is telling itself a comfortable story these days. Awards season has become predictable. Streaming services have democratized access. International cinema is finally getting recognition. All true enough. But comfort is the enemy of clarity.
The better question isn't whether cinema is thriving. It's what the collapse of middlebrow entertainment reveals about our cultural moment, and what gets bulldozed in the wreckage.
Consider the recent passing of Marcia Lucas, the Oscar-winning editor whose technical mastery shaped some of cinema's most iconic works. The tributes poured in, as they should have. What struck me, though, was the implicit melancholy: Lucas worked in an era when technical excellence in service of popular storytelling could earn you the industry's highest honors. When you could be both commercially successful and artistically uncompromising without those goals being seen as fundamentally opposed.
That world is largely gone.
What we have now is a bifurcated industry. On one end, there are tentpole franchises designed by algorithm, engineered for global markets, stripped of the cultural specificity that once made American cinema distinctive. On the other, there are prestige projects operating in rarefied air, made for critics and festival circuits, increasingly difficult for ordinary moviegoers to access or even find. The vast middle ground where solid, entertaining, expertly-crafted films could thrive has been collapsing for a decade.
This matters more than the usual hand-wringing about "cinema is dead" suggests.
The middlebrow wasn't perfect. It could be sentimental. It often reflected the biases of studio gatekeepers. But it operated on a democratic principle: that you could reach millions of people while maintaining artistic integrity. That expertise mattered. That audiences deserved better than lowest-common-denominator content, but shouldn't need a film studies degree to enjoy what was offered.
The loss of this middle space is reshaping what kinds of stories get told and who gets to tell them. Without the commercial viability of the middlebrow film, young directors face harsher choices. Make something niche and hope for festival attention, or make something designed by spreadsheet. Risk-taking becomes the province of the already-established or the independently wealthy.
We're seeing it ripple outward in unexpected ways. When entertainment becomes either mass-market formula or elite cultural product, the gatekeeping function doesn't disappear. It just relocates. Instead of studio executives deciding what films get made, algorithm designers do. Instead of newspaper critics shaping public taste, TikTok trends do.
International cinema is experiencing its own version of this squeeze. The same forces that flattened American middlebrow entertainment are globalizing now. Local film industries worldwide are facing pressure to either chase international streaming deals or disappear. Something is gained in visibility. Something real is lost in specificity.
What breaks next is harder to predict. Perhaps theatrical exhibition continues its slow fade, and we're simply watching a medium transform rather than die. Perhaps younger audiences never miss what they didn't experience, and this grief over lost gatekeepers is generational myopia. Perhaps the streaming platforms eventually discover that algorithmic curation alone can't sustain quality, and they begin investing in the middle ground again.
But we shouldn't pretend that comfort with "cinema is evolving" is the same thing as understanding what we're actually losing.
The middlebrow dream wasn't about creating art for everyone. It was something subtler: creating conditions where excellence was possible at scale, where audiences could be trusted with complexity, and where the people making entertainment had some insulation from pure commercial pressure.
That insulation is gone. What grows in its absence will define entertainment for the next generation. Pretending the loss doesn't matter is how we stop noticing what we're building instead.