As a free market guy and an observer and celebrator of creative destruction - I'm glad that the taxi industry is dying for example - I'm aware that it's a bit odd for me to agree with an 84-year-old filmmaker that there is a horrifying thing happening that puts movies in jeopardy.
Ridley Scott has taken flack for saying that The Last Duel flopped at the box office in part due to millennials not being able to get off our fucking phones. The issue is, he's right. It's worse with iGen. I can't get younger people to sit through ninety minute movies because they're regarded as being too long.
YouTube and especially TikTok are scrambling kids' brains and this is a problem.
It's not just a problem for the art form that I love the most. If attention spans are so short that kids can't pay attention to a ninety minute movie, how can they sit through reading a damn Charles Dickens novel? Forget being able to read Bentham or Kant.
Being able to digest content for large chunks of time isn't a paltry thing.