The world and their wife have chimed in on the “superhero fatigue” debate. Some notably saying that it’s not superhero fatigue, but bad movie fatigue that is suppressing audience numbers. Here at Last Movie Outpost, as usual, some of our Outposters have been far ahead of the curve.
In the Disqus, they have talked cinema-fatigue. How being time-poor people at a certain stage in life means it is a real effort to get out to movie theaters these days.
Others of us have pointed to the generational change that seems to be going on. Our kids seem happy enough to spend hours viewing five-minute videos on YouTube of over-excitable teenagers playing video games and shouting at each other, but you can’t even get them to join you on the couch and sit happily through a movie.
Gen-X was largely a movie theater experience generation who were lucky enough to be there for the birth of the home entertainment revolution and had the best of both worlds. Millennials were there for the explosion of streaming. Gen-Z, and Gen-Alpha behind them, are looking like they are something else entirely. Something that sees dark storm clouds gathering for Hollywood in its current form.
Hollywood will catch on, eventually. Two people who get it are Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo. In a recent interview with Total FIlm they gave voice to exactly what you guys have been saying here for months:
“I think it’s a reflection of the current state of everything. It’s difficult right now, it’s an interesting time. I think we’re in a transitional period and people don’t know quite yet how they’re going to receive stories moving forward, or what kinds of stories they’re going to want.
There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media. There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s ageing out.
Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time.
You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”
The cinema audience is ageing out, replaced by people who want to absorb bite-sized content via their devices.
Look, all I am saying is that Quibi could well have been ahead of its time here!
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