The Death of Cinema: How We Stopped Watching Together

The psychological rupture behind cinema’s audience crisis

Jun 25, 2025

Cinema attendance is in crisis, but not merely because of rising ticket prices, streaming convenience, or post-COVID caution. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the cinema industry has undergone a profound structural contraction. Over 5,000 screens have closed in the United States alone: the steepest drop in over 30 years. Major chains have faltered: Cineworld filed for bankruptcy and shut numerous UK locations, while Empire and ArcLight Cinemas ceased operations entirely. These closures are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a deeper collapse, accelerated by streaming, shifting habits, and a public increasingly uneasy with shared space.

These explanations, while valid, overlook the deeper story, one rooted in the psychology of spectatorship, public ritual, and collective disintegration. The decline of cinema-going reflects not only changing habits, but a transformation in the emotional and cognitive structures that once sustained them.

The shift is not just economic or technological; it is psychological. To understand why fewer people go to the movies, one must interrogate how the act of watching together, in the dark, in silence has become culturally uncomfortable and psychologically fraught.

The Timeline of Withdrawal

Cinema attendance has always fluctuated in response to broader historical and technological changes. But the past two decades mark a pronounced rupture; a shift not only in how people watch films, but in what watching itself means.

1946

Peak of US ticket sales at 4.3 billion

Collective postwar catharsis; cinema as mass emotional ritual

1960s–70s

Rise of television, suburban migration

Disintegration of habitual cinema-going; decline of ritual

1980s–90s

Home video, cable, but also theatrical blockbusters

Dual identities: home as private screen, cinema as event

2000s

DVD boom, piracy, early streaming

Fragmented access; ownership replaced by passive consumption

2010s

Smartphones, binge culture, algorithmic curation

Collapse of attention span; death of anticipation

2020–2022

Pandemic closures, digital-first premieres

Psychological break with the idea of public presence

2023–present

Occasional “event” films amid mass disinterest

Shared watching becomes anomalous, not normative

Cinema did not simply become inconvenient; it became incompatible with prevailing modes of engagement. The decline reflects a deeper shift in audience psychology; from communal participation to isolated, curated, and emotionally avoidant interaction with screen media.

Attention: The First Casualty

Cinema demands attention; a sustained, immersive, and often slow-burn attentional contract. In an era of micro-scrolls, simultaneous screen use, and algorithmic content delivery, that contract has been irrevocably strained. Films that unfold over two or more hours, that require patience or emotional ambiguity, now struggle to compete with platforms engineered for instant feedback and endless options.

Sherry Turkle’s work on digital culture identifies a growing discomfort with unstructured time and non-curated silence. The contemporary viewer, accustomed to algorithmic control, often finds long-form cinema not merely boring, but anxiety-inducing. Jonathan Crary, in 24/7, describes late capitalism’s hostility to sleep and sustained attention as a symptom of hypermodern life. The cinema, by contrast, becomes a space of resistance; one that demands temporal and emotional endurance no longer culturally reinforced.

This shift is not about entertainment preferences, but about the erosion of psychological habits necessary for narrative absorption. The contemporary viewer is not simply distracted. They are neurologically and behaviourally reconditioned.

Cinema as a Site of Public Vulnerability

Beyond distraction, cinema’s decline is rooted in a growing discomfort with being seen. Lacan’s concept of the gaze suggests that watching is never neutral; it implicates the viewer in a network of desire and exposure. In a darkened cinema, one is never fully private. Judith Butler’s theories on performativity further illuminate this: public spaces generate scripts, roles, and expectations. Cinema once offered a suspension of these performances. Today, it intensifies them.

Social media encourages spectatorship as performance: reactions must be filmed, rated, shared. In contrast, cinema invites a type of presence without productivity. This has become psychologically untenable. The theatre does not reward watching with a like or a view count. It offers no feedback loop. The result is unease, not relief.

Zizek has argued that the true horror is not watching something terrifying, but the awareness of being watched while watching. The modern viewer, hyper-attuned to how they might appear, increasingly avoids spaces that do not permit curation of the self.

The Death of the Crowd

Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego offers a key framework for understanding the cinema audience as a temporary suspension of ego boundaries; a collective superego in which individual restraint is softened by group immersion. Laughter, gasps, and tears become shared gestures, regulated not by personal inhibition, but by the rhythm of the collective.

That dynamic has broken down. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, public space and particularly crowded space has become associated with risk, discomfort, and behavioural unpredictability. The cinema crowd is no longer a zone of sublimated safety, but of exposure: to illness, to social disruption, to the unpredictable behaviour of others.

The psychological contract of the audience, sit still, stay quiet, surrender together, is now routinely violated. Phones light up mid-scene. Viewers speak, scroll, or even film themselves reacting. The social grammar of cinema-going has degraded, and along with it, the willingness of others to participate.

What was once an unspoken ritual has become a risk few are willing to take.

Infantilisation and the Death of Ambiguity

Contemporary film discourse often attributes cinema’s decline to the dominance of franchises and intellectual property. While this is economically relevant, the deeper issue is psychological infantilisation. Audiences are increasingly conditioned to desire familiarity, repetition, and reward, traits more aligned with algorithmic platforms than with cinematic language.

Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism traces how digital systems flatten individuality into predictable behavioural patterns. This same dynamic flattens taste, producing viewers who seek not challenge, but reassurance. Rewatching, recapping, and reducing complex narratives to shareable memes all reflect a cultural fear of ambiguity.

Compare, for instance, Everything Everywhere All at Once with Marvel’s multiverse entries. Both explore multiplicity, but the former invites chaos and contradiction, while the latter imposes coherence and continuity. One unsettles, the other reassures. Audience hostility to ambiguous or unresolved endings, The Green Knight, TÁR, further underscores this trend. Complexity is no longer a draw, but a deterrent.

Cinema, particularly the kind not built around IP or fan service, is at odds with this. Films that demand discomfort, emotional contradiction, or interpretive labour struggle to find traction. In psychological terms, audiences are regressing to media that serves developmental reassurance, not psychic expansion.

Control, Surveillance, and the Retreat Into Private Screens

The home offers something cinema cannot: control. Rewind, pause, turn off. The domestic viewer curates not only the content but the conditions of viewing. No risk of embarrassment, of crying in public, of laughing too loudly. No vulnerability.

The cinematic space is not private. It implicates the viewer in a communal field. Even in darkness, one is seen. This has become increasingly intolerable in a culture of hyper-visibility and self-surveillance. To attend a film alone, or even with others, is now perceived less as autonomy and more as exposure.

Home viewing removes this psychic risk. But it also removes the possibility of shared emotional experience. The psychological cost is invisibilised: empathy atrophies when it is not exercised in public.

Exceptions That Prove the Decline

Films such as Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Top Gun: Maverick produced momentary reversals of these trends. But their success was as much meme driven as it was cinematic. The so-called “Barbenheimer” phenomenon functioned as a brief reactivation of event-based viewing, not a return to ritual, but a viral anomaly.

Audiences did not simply watch these films. They dressed up, documented the experience, and posted it. The theatre was no longer a sacred space, but a backdrop. Top Gun: Maverick and Dune Part II offered ritualistic spectacle but did so within male-coded performance logics. These were not collective emotional experiences; they were demonstrations of cinematic scale.

Such exceptions do not signify revival. They underscore how rare the collective experience has become. Most films, especially mid-budget dramas, adult thrillers, or non-franchise cinema, vanish without audience traction. The infrastructure for habitual, collective, emotionally intelligent viewership is no longer intact.

Reclaiming the Collective

Cinema’s decline is not inevitable. It reflects choices; structural, technological, psychological; that can be re-evaluated. What must be reclaimed is not merely attendance, but the value of presence.

Models already exist. Microcinemas and independent screening spaces increasingly foster intimacy over scale. Post-film discussions and curated screenings reframe the act of watching as a communal process, not a passive one. Some educational and therapeutic models even use cinema as exposure therapy; a safe way to reintroduce emotional regulation, empathy, and co-presence.

Berlant’s cruel optimism returns here: the dream of cinema remains alive, but its pursuit must adapt. The goal is not to restore cinema to its former dominance, but to reconceive it as a site of slow time, shared vulnerability, and emotional apprenticeship. To watch together is to learn how to feel together again.

References

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2013.
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 1977.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. MIT Press, 1991.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.
“While Movie Theaters Close Nationwide, Maryland’s Independent Theaters Survive.” CNS Maryland, March 2025. https://cnsmaryland.org
“Cineworld.” Wikipedia, last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cineworld
“ArcLight Cinemas.” Wikipedia, last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcLight_Cinemas
“Empire Cinemas.” Wikipedia, last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Cinemas

When was the last time you truly sat through a film — in full, in silence, among strangers?