“It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve,” Susan Sontag wrote 30 years ago, in an essay to mark 100 years of film entitled The Decay of Cinema. For Sontag, the onset of the “ignominious, irreversible decline” of the 20th century’s greatest art form was the arrival of television. Today it is the advent of streaming.
Cinema is in a state of existential crisis. Netflix is bidding to take over Warner Bros, as the industry is still recovering from lockdown and the 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose One Battle After Another received 13 Oscar nominations last week, having failed to break even at the box office, asked if people still have “the appetite” for movies, and if cinemas are in danger of becoming “silos – like jazz bars”. Matt Damon has suggested that films are being dumbed-down to cater for changing watching habits. And the director Mary Sweeney said that her ex-husband David Lynch, who died in January last year, would struggle in Hollywood now because of “the dissipation of our concentration and the way the digital world has permeated people’s lives”.
Amid these anxieties over audiences’ dwindling attention spans, Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, and the recipient of this year’s Bafta award for outstanding British contribution to cinema, has called time on a growing trend for ever longer films. At three hours and 35 minutes, The Brutalist (2024) required a 15-minute interval. Avatar: Fire and Ash, now in UK cinemas, is three hours and 17 minutes. Protracted running times are not just painful for audiences but for profits, as cinemas can only have one showing each night. Many independent cinemas across the UK are already struggling, with almost a third facing closure within the next three to five years without investment. As Ms Binns said, it would be a “tragedy” if local cinemas disappeared.
But it is not all bad news. According to a British Council survey, gen Z finds film and television nearly twice as influential as digital creators in shaping UK culture. An American trade report revealed a 25% increase in cinemagoing among US young people last year, while the UK and Irish box-office revenue in 2025, at £1.07bn, was the highest since 2019. Ironically, social media is encouraging younger audiences back to the cinema, with viral hits such as Saltburn and the emergence of the thriving film buffs’ platform Letterboxd.
As the outrage when the cult Prince Charles cinema in London was threatened with closure showed, cinemas are much more than places to watch movies. Whether it is an art-house theatre or sprawling multiplex, once the lights go off, cinemas are magical places. Netflix and chill will never have the same romance as a night at the movies.
“Give cinema some respect,” Martin Scorsese said in defence of his Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), which has a runtime of three hours and 26 minutes. If we sit at home bingeing on algorithm‑driven content while scrolling our phones, we risk being rewarded with a diet of ultra-processed films, full of sugary rushes, empty scenes and endless exposition. We must all get off our sofas.
“If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love,” Sontag wrote at the end of her essay. On this she was right. A new generation of cinephiles might save cinema from the streaming giants.
