- Movie talk has devolved into echo chambers and clickbait, with little real discussion about the art itself.
- Box office numbers are treated like sports scores, even though they’re built on guesswork and projections.
- Media outlets crank out AI-written content with sensationalist headlines for engagement, not insight.
- “Bad faith” movie discourse thrives because the loudest, most controversial voices get rewarded.
- True media literacy is dying, replaced by performative outrage and toxic positivity.
Movie talk used to be fun. Now it’s a mix between sports radio and a Facebook comments section, with just enough fake statistics thrown in to make people feel smart. Somewhere along the way, the idea of actually discussing films—what they made you feel, what they were trying to say—got replaced with fantasy football for cinephiles. The only difference is that in fantasy football you can at least pretend your picks matter. Here, it’s just arguing over box office projections like they’re divinely ordained prophecies instead of glorified dart throws.
Media literacy? Dead. Absolutely stone cold. People don’t want to think about movies anymore. They want to have their take reinforced. If you liked something, you want an echo chamber of “me too” replies. If you hated it, you want an army to help you burn it to the ground. And the people in the middle—the ones who might say, “Well, I didn’t love it, but here’s what worked”—get ignored because the algorithm doesn’t reward nuance. The algorithm rewards noise.
And speaking of noise, you’ve got the Collider headline machine: “Superman sinks Disney’s controversial $240 million live-action remake.” Sounds juicy until you realize the “remake” in question is The Little Mermaid, which came out over two years ago. How is that a story? It’s not. It’s content—probably AI-assisted content—designed to get clicks from people who want to see Disney “lose” and Superman “win,” even though the two films have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But that’s the game now: pit one thing against another so you can turn a spreadsheet into a war.
Valnet-owned sites like Screen Rant and CBR are the kings of this grift. They crank out hundreds of articles a day—hundreds—and they don’t care if you read them all. They care if one gets shared, argued over, or used as ammo in some dumb Twitter fight. The writers get paid peanuts, the owners cash the checks, and the cycle keeps spinning. And when they run out of human labor? AI fills the gap. You think those “ending explained” posts are the result of passionate cinephiles burning the midnight oil? No. They’re SEO chum designed to catch the search traffic of people who don’t have the time—or patience—to engage with a story themselves.
Then there’s the box office discourse. The obsession with whether Movie X beat Movie Y domestically, internationally, or in “adjusted for inflation” ticket sales. It’s all posturing. Ticket prices have gone up, audiences have shrunk, and yet we keep pretending these numbers are the ultimate verdict on a film’s worth. It’s all just another way to keep score in a culture war no one’s actually winning. “Your movie lost at the box office” has replaced “Your team lost the game” as the go-to dunk.
And bad faith actors thrive in this environment because the market rewards them. If you can speak with conviction—whether you know what you’re talking about or not—you can build an audience. Lead emotionally, not intellectually. Stoke outrage or weaponize blind positivity, and you’ll rake in the clicks. It’s the same playbook in politics, sports, and now, depressingly, in film discussion.
The result? People disengage. They stop talking about movies they love because it’s exhausting to fight through the noise. They retreat to smaller circles, or worse, they stop participating at all. And that’s the saddest part—because loving movies used to be about shared excitement, not picking a side and holding the line.
We can do better. We should do better. But the internet doesn’t make “better” easy when the loudest voice gets the biggest payday. The culture war side of this is poison, and it’s not just a right-wing thing. The grift is bipartisan. And while the rest of us are busy arguing over projections, headlines, and SEO bait, the actual conversation about cinema—the thing we all supposedly care about—is fading into the background.
If that’s not the definition of media illiteracy, I don’t know what is.
Hollywood After Dark 