This Awards Season, Let’s Pray for the Death of Film

It’s a reactionary medium controlled by the uber-wealthy.

Film critics are generally invested in film as a form and a tradition. They want film to thrive, and they dislike encroachments on films central cultural position. Critics tend to mistrust the move to streaming; they want more people to see more movies in theaters. They tout big blockbuster successes as a triumphant sign of film’s continuing relevance; they bemoan the box office failures of much-hyped, films-for-filmgoers fare like The Fall Guy. Critics may dump on particular films, but if you’re a film critic, you’re generally supposed to want film, as a whole, to thrive.

I write about film a fair bit, and there are lots of films I love. (Here are some from this year.) But I think there’s a solid argument that movies are bad for the culture, and that we’d be better off in a lot of ways if the whole industry imploded, leaving some other medium (music? books?) as the big thing that moved discourse, style, and capital.

It’s the last of those that’s the key problem here. Films—especially big studio films—require an enormous amount of capital to create, distribute, and market. As a result, movies are pretty glaringly our most reactionary art form. And it’s not all that close.

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Films are incredibly expensive

I don’t think anyone’s likely to disagree with me that films are very expensive. It’s worth just briefly reiterating just how massively capital intensive they are compared to just about every other art form, though.

Deadpool & Wolverine, one of the big hits of the year, had a $200 million budget. Dune 2’s budget was $190 million. Fall Guy was around $150 million.

Of course, those are big marquee blockbusters with a lot of special effects. But even smaller budget films like The Substance ($17.5 million) or Monkey Man ($10 million) are built on budget numbers that would set you up for retirement if they appeared in your bank account. Even tiny budget films like The Blair Witch Project ($600,000) are too expensive for most people to put together without substantial fundraising and capital.

In contrast, to write a novel you need…maybe a $1000 laptop, which you can then also use for other stuff. Big release albums often budget $200,000 to $350,000—still less than it cost to create The Blair Witch Project. And with DIY tools, it’s possible to record for not much more than that laptop on which you’re writing your novel.

Material conditions affect the product

The material of creating art affect the content of the art. That shouldn’t be an especially controversial argument. And the material condition of film is that film is incredibly fucking expensive. Which means film is much, much less willing to take risks than other less expensive art forms.

What does “taking risks” mean in this context? Well, for starters, it means allowing people who aren’t cishet white guys a chance to tell stories. To make movies, you need to convince people with capital that you have a movie worth making, and the people with capital are disproportionately white and disproportionately male.

The result is predictable. In film in 2024, only 13.4% of movies were directed by women. Only 5.3% were women of color. Only 24.1% were people of color (about 42% of people in the US are people of color.)

The contrast with music is stark. This year’s biggest music act was Taylor Swift; second was Sabrina Carpenter. Others included Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Women at one point this year had four of the top five albums on the Billboard Top 200—which isn’t usual, but isn’t unprecedented either. People of color—Future, Tyler the Creator, 21 Savage, Travis Scott, and of course Beyoncé again—also regularly appear in, and even dominate, the charts.

Queer SF for books, but not for movies

Just as rich cishet white guy movie producers are reluctant to give money to women and people of color, so are those same cishet white guy movie producers nervous about giving money to make a movie about queer people.

Here it’s useful to compare science-fiction and fantasy films to science-fiction and fantasy novels. Since the 60s, at least, SF/F novelists like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, and more have used alternate worlds and alternate societies to explore alternate sexualities.

Today, successful, critically acclaimed writers like Ann Leckie, Vajra Chandrasekera, Jeff Vandermeer, N.K. Jemisin, Catherynne Valente, and on and on, regularly feature narratives in which protagonists are queer, or trans, or in which societies on alternate worlds have wildly different gender norms and pronouns. Martha Wells’ Witch King, for example, is an epic high fantasy in which the main character switches bodies, sometimes inhabiting men and sometimes women, but always keeping his pronouns. This is just part of standard furniture of the genre at this point; Wells tosses it off as an aside.

Compare this to science-fiction and fantasy film. Neither Dune 2 nor Alien: Romulus include LGBT characters; there is no suggestion in either of them that people in the far future, on incredibly distant worlds, might have different ideas about gender expression than we do. Technology advances; squishy aliens appear, but pronoun usage stays stubbornly affixed to norms that would meet the approval of Ron DeSantis.

Capital will crush you

If you turn away from the big budget films, and step outside SF, there is a lot of great queer film, this year and every year—just as there are lots of great films made by people who aren’t white men this year and every year. And of course there’s a lot of sexism, racism, and homophobia in the music and publishing industries too. I’m not arguing that all movies are irredeemably reactionary, nor am I arguing that other art forms are a utopia of progressive justice.

What I am arguing is that (a) film is extremely capital intensive compared to other mediums, and (b) the high cost of making films makes film significantly more reactionary than other comparable art forms.

Which leads to the conclusion—(c)—that we’d be better off if movies were less central to mainstream culture. If film entirely disappeared tomorrow, our cultural productions, just by defaulting to music, books, or even television, would be much less racist, much less sexist, and much less homophobic.

Despite the occasional whining and warnings of film critics, people like movies, and they aren’t likely to stop liking them anytime soon. As long as that’s the case, though, I think it’s important to point out the ways in which the movie industry is failing—even compared to the relatively low standard set by other art forms under capitalism. And critics especially should maybe take time off from bemoaning the death of movies, and take a moment to acknowledge that the death of movies as they are now—run by extremely wealthy cishet white guys for extremely wealthy cishet white guys—would not necessarily be a bad thing.

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