Media has changed a lot in the last decade, and it has a lot to do with the fact that companies are switching to digital forms of entertainment.
Ten years ago when a movie would come out, you would either watch it in theaters or you would have to purchase it six months down the road. In today’s world when a movie comes out, you can either buy an expensive movie ticket to watch one movie or you can spend $11 a month to watch hundreds of movies plus the movie that just came out. This all started in 2019 when Disney decided that they needed to rival the biggest streaming service at the time, Netflix. This service also came out right before the worldwide pandemic, so people were stuck in their homes. This led to 2019 being one of the biggest years for Disney, but these profits did not stay like this forever. The pandemic has ended, and the movie industry has been going downhill because of it. The pandemic made it so that people had to stay in their homes, and this made making movies a big problem because no one could see them. The solution to this problem was to put the movies onto streaming services and hopefully make back a little bit of money from the movie that they spent millions of dollars making. The problem for the film industry after the pandemic ended was how to get people to go back to the theater instead of just staying at home and waiting for it to be released on streaming. They have not come up with a solution to this problem, and it is having major effects on box office performance. 2023 was one of the worst years in history in terms of box office performance, with movies such as The Flash losing 200 million dollars. This is because people are perfectly content with just staying in their homes and watching the movies they have on their streaming services.
Streaming services are tearing society apart. When people can watch anything they want it separates pop culture into smaller groups. For instance, if I want to watch only Marvel then I can do that, but I never have to try anything new because I have the choice to not do that. If streaming services did not exist then I would not have to only watch Marvel movies unless I wanted to wait a year for a new one to come to theaters. No one would wait that long to watch a new movie, so this forces them to try something new. Streaming services remove the need to watch something new. This stops people from coming out of their comfort zone which can stop people from having common interests. These problems are huge and need to be solved, or the film industry might be in trouble.
