First of all, I hate, hate, hate the popular use of the word “content” to describe audiovisual media like film and television. This is the terminology of corporate executives who have a pipeline to fill and who do not themselves have the taste or creative acumen to distinguish quality from trash. As long as there are movies in the cinemas and on the streaming services, as long as there are series being produced to fill the virtual airwaves, they are satisfied. It’s all “content.” And this has a tendency to infect our own perception of the media; as long as we can flip on the big-screen display and having moving pictures accompanied by sound, we can allow ourselves to feel satisfied that our demand for “content” is being filled, whether we’re consuming quality material or, again, utter trash.
That being said.
On the one hand, new creations and new voices are emerging all the time. It would feel tragic to me not to be able to take advantage of these. I would be “impoverished,” to borrow the word above.
On the other hand, the mainstream media landscape is dying. Today’s creators are experimenting with AI, which is going to absolutely kill originality. It’s still on the fringe — notorious weirdo Harmony Korine, for example, is using the toolkit, but it’s also being used by people like Natasha Lyonne who really should know better, and Mel Gibson’s latest movie starts with an opening shot that’s almost certainly AI generated — but its forces are certainly massing at the gates.
Not to mention the fact that a huge proportion of modern media is just recycling and regurgitating pre-existing material, whether or not AI is involved. We’ve got two different Tomb Raider TV shows coming (one live-action, one animated). We’ve got that idiotic Harry Potter series in the pipeline which just remakes the stories we already got in movie form (“the same, but more!”). Amazon has recently confirmed they’re moving ahead with a series based on the Mass Effect games. If you look at the movies currently in cinemas and scheduled for the next few months, we’ve got a John Wick spinoff and a movie based on Formula One racing, a fantastically wrong-headed live-action Lilo & Stitch, lots of sequels (Zootopia, Avatar, Tron, Jurassic World) and reboots (Naked Gun, The Running Man, new takes on Superman and Frankenstein), more paint-by-numbers bullshit biopics (Complete Unknown, Deliver Me from Nowhere), and on and on. Even the iconoclastic Robert Eggers has been roped into the game, having just been signed to make yet another version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Absolutely none of this is of interest to me.
This is not to say there isn’t quality work being done anywhere. The latest Star Wars series, Andor, is much, much better than it has any right to be, and especially stands out because it’s floating in the sea of garbage that is the rest of that now-terrible franchise. Also, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s Long Walk looks much better than expected. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was goddamn amazing. Flow, which just won the animated Oscar, was terrific. We’ve got a new original horror movie from Steven Soderbergh coming up. Wong Kar-Wai’s series Blossoms Shanghai, previously aired on Chinese television, is finally getting a Western release. Wes Anderson is continuing to do his thing. There’s good stuff out there, if you ignore the blaring foghorn of mainstream media promotion and seek out quality material.
But the pickings, unfortunately, are increasingly slim.
Which means the question, for me, is more interesting than it might seem at first glance. I don’t want to close the door on future media, because, again, there are still a few good movies and shows that manage to escape from the slop factory largely unmolested. They’re vastly in the minority, but they do exist, and I wouldn’t want to miss out. Nevertheless, I would say that north of 99% of future releases will be worthless, so if you forced me to make that choice, I wouldn’t miss much.
The question becomes really interesting if you make it a real tradeoff. You can watch only what exists now, with no possibility of watching anything released from tomorrow forward … or you can watch only new stuff, say movies and series released from the beginning of 2025 onward, but never anything older.
That, for me, is an easy no-brainer choice. But it might be an interesting dilemma for someone else.
