Can feature films still claim to be the pinnacle of cultural expression?

Perhaps, but not as once enjoyed in movie palaces. Today, the point of consumption is a much smaller, private, screen, in the living room or the pocket.

No one doubts that movies are big business. The Ringer notes:

“According to Box Office Mojo, 704 movies — the most ever — were released last year that grossed at least some money in theaters. (The lowest, Confession of a Child of the Century, drew $74 in limited release.) The American theatrical movie industry raked in an extraordinary $11 billion at the box office, more than any other year. But that data point is misleading because it did so with the third-fewest tickets sold in the past 20 years, against the highest average ticket price in history ($8.43) and the highest number of releases. This includes the accounting for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which, with a lifetime gross of $937 million, is the biggest domestic release in movie history by more than $175 million.”

Entertainment conglomerates are in business of filmed entertainment, not cinema art.

Therefore, as quoted in the same article, Bret Easton Ellis predicts:

“There will not be another Coppola. There will not be another Spielberg. There will not be another Scorsese. There will not be another Altman. Because the melding of that kind of artistic mind with a cultural experience, which was going to the movies and watching a large-scale film on a giant screen that’s not IMAX that isn’t a Marvel movie, is over. It’s shifted to television, and that basically now what we’re going to get on television, is someone trying to recapture the glory of 20th-century cinema on TV.”

My take: If Ellis is right, we find ourselves in a lamentable situation. When I was growing up, there was no question, cinema far exceeded television as a medium for artistic expression. TV was where movies went to the panned, scanned and injected with commercials. It’s almost as if they’ve traded places.