Epilogue: The End of Cinema (As We Knew It)

Layla West

American Film History

Professor Conte

October 17, 2026

Epilogue: The End of Cinema (As We Knew It)

In hindsight, the most significant thing I take from this course is that American film has always been both art and business, and the tides always ebb and flow. The most extreme example of that change is detailed in Chapter 9 of Jon Lewis’s American Film: A History. By comparison, the monopoly of the early Motion Picture Patents Company trust may seem quaint, because by the twenty-first century studios such as Disney, Time Warner, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal were global media conglomerates, effectively reversing the 1948 Paramount decision (Lewis, 2019, pp. 411–413). The blockbuster phenomenon also has roots in the silent era, since audiences go to the movies less for a story than for a new experience (Lewis, 2019, p. 412). Peer-reviewed research reveals just how far the business has come from theaters. According to Hadida et al. (2021), home entertainment spending rose from 15.8 billion USD in 2014 to 42.6 billion USD in 2018, surpassing theatrical spending of 41.1 billion USD that year.

We can see this change on the screen. Lewis reasons that studios no longer value playability; rather, they value marketability. Pearl Harbor and Planet of the Apes each earned about 40 percent of their domestic gross in their first weekend (Lewis, 2019, pp. 416–418). As of 2017, only Avatar was an original idea among the forty most expensive films (Lewis, 2019, p. 421), and Hadida et al. (2021) claim that competition from streaming pushes studios to invest even more in tentpole films. Stars remain a basic component of this system. The two most important factors in deciding whether to greenlight a film are stars and genre, which teaser trailers emphasize (Lewis, 2019, p. 415). Twilight turned Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson into international superstars (Lewis, 2019, pp. 424–425). Yet filmmakers still shape the industry. Director Barry Jenkins took Moonlight home for Best Picture without a major studio behind it (Lewis, 2019, p. 421), while Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win Best Director, earned it for The Hurt Locker, a warning tale on the futility of the U.S. mission in Iraq (Lewis, 2019, pp. 436–437). These films also reflect and shape American society. The Dark Knight symbolically expresses a post-9/11 fear of security and democracy (Lewis, 2019, pp. 426–427). My Final Essay on Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) reveals another facet of that influence: a micro-scale story of Sacramento’s working-class mom and her daughter finding female independence in quotidian life, and not necessarily love. Lewis also notes that, as of 2017, only three American women had ever been nominated for Best Director (Lewis, 2019, p. 440). This award is also a highlight of Gerwig’s nomination in my essay. How few women get to direct shows how uneven access to the director’s chair remains. Film not only portrays the nation but can also shape how people see who can be a hero, a director, or a star. Lewis revisits Godard’s call to await “the end of cinema” optimistically and applies it to technology rather than politics (Lewis, 2019, p. 447). I agree with that reading. Cinema is not finished, but the form we have analyzed in previous modules, centered on theaters and studio control, is transforming. I hope that artists continue to find space to speak truthfully.

References

Hadida, A. L., Lampel, J., Walls, W. D., & Joshi, A. (2021). Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: A tale of two institutional logics. Journal of Cultural Economics, 45(3), 213–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-020-09379-z

Lewis, J. (2019). American film: A history (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.