THR‘s Pamela McLintock has posted an encouraging report about increasing movie theatre attendance among Zoomers and therefore a hopeful trend as far as the future of brick-and-mortar cinemas are concerned.
McLintock: “Zoomers had been written off as anti-moviegoing since they were the first generation to bond 24/7 with an iPhone or other device. [And yet] social media has them craving a collective experience, resulting in a rise in theatergoing among those born between 1997 and 2012.
Comscore’s Paul Degarabedian: “GenZ is ironically drawn to the classic analog experience of going to the movie theater. They are able to blend this traditional activity with their digital lives, using theater outings as fodder for social engagement.”
This is all well and good except for one teeny weeny thing: Zoomers are not only plagued with short attention spans, but are sorely undereducated as far as exposure to rich, transcendent classic cinema is concerned. They regard the ’80s as ancient history and have barely delved into the late ’60s to late ’70s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” era. And you can totally forget even a passing GenZ awareness of films made in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.
If taste is a result of a thousand distastes, as Francois Truffaut once observed, being undereducated or under-exposed to the really good stuff from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s (1986, don’t forget, was one of the greatest years ever!), it follows that Zoomers are incapable of having anything resembling good taste because they don’t know very much about what constitutes great cinema during the Mark Harris “Pictures at a Revolution” heyday. They just don’t know enough. Hell, they don’t want to know any more than what they know now.
I wouldn’t want to say that the vast majority of Zoomers, cinematically-speaking, are mentally smug chuckleheads who adore their own insularity and ignorance, but it sure seems this way.
And so they adore wank-off films like Sinners and Everything Everywhere All At Once and Deadpool & Wolverine and all the other cancer-causing shite out there. On top of which they’re wokeys, and so they believe in bullshit presentism (POCs costarring in historical European films set in the 1800s, 1700s and before).
Sidenote: The chart just below this paragraph is hilarious as boomers aren’t even tracking — their theatrical attendance is so minimal that they don’t even count any more. Dead to the world.
