WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2026) film review

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A very lose adaptation.

Is it a bold, thoughtful reinterpretation of a literary classic—or a grotesquely self-indulgent fever dream? Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights positions itself squarely at the intersection of gothic romance and modern sensibility, daring to reimagine Emily Brontë’s tempestuous novel for contemporary audiences. The question is not whether Fennell has vision—she undeniably does—but whether that vision honors Brontë’s architecture or merely rearranges it to suit her own aesthetic impulses.

Tragedy strikes when Heathcliff falls in love with Catherine Earnshaw, a woman from a wealthy family in 18th-century England. What follows, in Brontë’s telling, is a slow-burning study of pride, cruelty, class, and decay.

Let us begin where praise is due. Emerald Fennell is undeniably a visionary director. Her eye for composition, color, texture, and environmental immersion is extraordinary. Every frame feels curated—shadow and candlelight carefully balanced, fabrics heavy with implication, the moors rendered both seductive and foreboding. The costuming and production design are exquisite, nearly flawless in execution. If one were evaluating this film purely as visual art, it would stand among the most striking adaptations of Brontë ever mounted. There is a neo-gothic confidence in its aesthetic—modern, tactile, and immersive.

Unfortunately, that same discipline is absent from the screenplay.

Fennell the director and Fennell the writer feel like two different artists. Subtlety is sacrificed in favor of blunt-force reinterpretation. When Fennell adheres closely to Brontë’s plotting, the film works. When she strays—and she strays often—the adaptation buckles under the weight of unnecessary revisionism.

The most egregious example is the character assassination of Catherine’s father. In both the novel and the 1939 William Wyler adaptation, he is a kindly, stabilizing force—the glue that holds the family together. It is only upon his death that his biological son, Hindley, descends into cruelty and degradation, transforming Heathcliff from adopted son to servant in a perverse Cinderella inversion. Fennell eliminates Hindley altogether, redistributing his vices—gambling, drunkenness, cruelty—onto the father himself, rendering him a monstrous, bigoted drunk from the outset. This is not reinterpretation; it is structural sabotage.

By corrupting the father from the beginning, the narrative loses its axis of decay. And decay is central to Wuthering Heights. The estate should mirror the relationships within it—beautiful at first, falling gradually into ruin as love curdles into vengeance. Yet Fennell presents Wuthering Heights as decrepit from the outset. If everything is already broken, there is no meaningful deterioration to witness. The symbolism collapses before it can resonate.

Isabella Linton suffers a similar flattening. In Brontë’s novel and prior adaptations, she possesses dimension, agency, and tragic complexity. Here, she is comparatively inert, stripped of the inner life that once made her more than a narrative device. Again, when Fennell stays close to Brontë, the film steadies itself. When she diverges, the narrative weakens.

Pacing further undermines the film’s impact. What could have been told effectively in an hour and forty-five minutes stretches to two hours and fifteen, with a protracted second act that tests even patient viewers. Entire opening sequences could be excised without loss, and substantial portions of the middle tightened considerably. One feels the absence of editorial restraint—the checks and balances that a separate, more disciplined screenwriter might have imposed.

And yet, there are cinematic pleasures here.

While the narrative falters, the film’s visual architecture is nothing short of extraordinary. Production design, cinematography, and costuming operate in near-perfect harmony, creating a world deeply rooted in Gothic romance yet unmistakably filtered through contemporary sensibilities. The estate’s textures—weathered wood, cold stone, candlelit interiors—create a tactile atmosphere that is immersive and deliberate. The color palette oscillates between muted earth tones and saturated bursts of crimson and shadow, suggesting emotional volatility beneath composure.

The costuming deserves particular recognition. Fennell understands silhouette and line as psychological tools. Structured bodices, layered fabrics, and stark contrasts in texture mirror emotional rigidity and suppressed desire. There is a modern sharpness in the tailoring—a recalibration that prevents the film from feeling museum-bound. This is Gothic romance rendered through a contemporary lens without collapsing into gimmickry.

The cinematography further elevates the material. Light and shadow are deployed not merely for aesthetic pleasure but for emotional suggestion. Faces emerge from darkness as though haunted by memory; candlelight flickers against stone walls like unstable devotion. Fennell’s compositional instincts are impeccable—symmetry fractured at key moments, framing that isolates characters even when they occupy the same space. Visually, this Wuthering Heights breathes.

Fennell’s restraint also deserves applause. After the provocative spectacle of Saltburn—and the social media speculation that followed—many anticipated a sexually explicit interpretation of Brontë. Instead, this adaptation is comparatively restrained. Passion is implied more often than shown. Edginess exists, yes—but it is measured, not gratuitous. Ironically, this restraint underscores her discipline as a director even while her writing falters.

Performatively, the film is strong. Robbie and Elordi deliver committed, emotionally grounded performances, leaning into the operatic intensity of the material without tipping into parody. Hong Chau, as Nelly, provides a compelling presence—observant, restrained, and quietly anchoring the emotional chaos around her. The cast frequently elevates what the script undermines.

There are even moments—brief, surprising—that are genuinely funny. Fennell understands tonal modulation, allowing dry humor to flicker through the gloom like shafts of unexpected light.

Ultimately, 2026’s Wuthering Heights is immersive and visually arresting but narratively anemic. It demonstrates how essential the collaborative checks and balances of cinema truly are. A more disciplined screenwriter paired with Fennell’s formidable directorial skill could produce something extraordinary. Instead, we are left with an adaptation that is imaginative, occasionally exhilarating—and unlikely to command a rewatch.

It is not without merit. But it mistakes alteration for insight, excess for depth, and provocation for revelation. And for a story as enduring as Brontë’s, that is a costly miscalculation.

Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry

Love-themed Film Scores

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Valentine’s Special 2026

With Valentine’s Day approaching, it felt like the right moment to step away from jump scares, body counts, and box office noise—and spend an hour with something far more enduring: love, as expressed through film music.

Cinema has always struggled to say what love feels like. Dialogue often collapses under the weight of it—becoming either too poetic or painfully banal. Film scores, on the other hand, have an uncanny ability to articulate what words cannot: longing, ecstasy, restraint, obsession, memory, and heartbreak. Sometimes all at once.

This episode’s juried selections are not simply “romantic” scores in the conventional sense. These are works that understand love as complicated and often uncomfortable—love that consumes, love that lingers, love that is sacrificed or denied. From classic Hollywood to modern cinema, these scores don’t just underscore romance; they interrogate it.

Some of these films are sweeping and operatic. Others are quiet, restrained, almost painfully intimate. But what they share is an emotional honesty—music that trusts the listener to feel deeply without being told how.

So settle in. Let the music guide the conversation. This is ReelTalk—and today, we’re listening to what love sounds like.

Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry

SEND HELP (2026) horror movie review

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Send Help is the rare survival thriller that understands the most dangerous thing on a deserted island isn’t nature—it’s the workplace baggage you bring with you.

Send Help plays like a postmodern riff on Misery—less interested in replicating its mechanics than in reconfiguring its psychological cruelty for a contemporary workplace horror. One can also detect traces of Survivor, the underseen Office Killer (1997), and even a one-way echo of Fatal Attraction, though Raimi’s film resists the lurid sensationalism of those predecessors in favor of something more controlled, more ideologically curious. I went into Send Help expecting one kind of movie and walked out having experienced something far more interesting—and far more satisfying. What initially presents itself as a straightforward survival thriller gradually reveals a different set of priorities: character over carnage, tension over spectacle, and psychology over shock. The turn is not a bait-and-switch so much as a recalibration, one that rewards patience and attention.

A woman (Rachel McAdams) and her overbearing boss (Dylan O’Brien) become stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash. They must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it’s a battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.

Despite containing remarkably little gore, Send Help is punctuated by moments of excruciating intensity—scenes engineered to linger in the mind the way Misery’s hobbling scene does, not because of what is shown, but because of what is anticipated. Raimi understands that true discomfort is often born from restraint. Violence, when it arrives, is not gratuitous; it is precise, purposeful, and deeply unpleasant.

Where Send Help distinguishes itself most clearly is in its thematic ambition. Raimi trades his trademark splatter for commentary on workplace dynamics—particularly the lived experience of women navigating environments shaped by misogynistic men, institutional indifference, and power imbalance. The film proposes that monsters are created—that violent behavior can be traced back to environment, circumstance, and provocation. While the film makes this argument with conviction, I remain unconvinced by its absolutism. Environment can shape behavior, yes—but it does not absolve agency. Some monsters are forged by their surroundings; others choose monstrosity despite them. Under most circumstances, we remain responsible for our actions.

That tension—between explanation and excuse—is where Send Help becomes most interesting. The film is less persuasive as a moral thesis than it is as a provocation, forcing the audience to wrestle with where empathy ends and accountability begins. In that sense, the island setting becomes more than a survivalist conceit; it is a crucible. A demented Gilligan’s Island, stripped of whimsy and comfort, where rescue is uncertain and survival demands agency. The film is clear-eyed about one thing: help does not always arrive. Sometimes survival requires seizing control rather than waiting to be saved.

Visually, the setting is striking—lush, isolating, and quietly menacing. The CGI animals, however, are nearly laughable, though thankfully used sparingly enough not to derail the experience. When Raimi relies on atmosphere rather than digital intrusion, the film is at its strongest.

Excellent casting anchors the film, thoughtful writing gives the conflict weight, and the thrills feel refreshingly old-school—earned through escalation and dread rather than excess. All of it is quietly underscored by moments of dark comedy that arrive not as winks to the audience, but as pressure valves, reminding us that sometimes the most unsettling laughs are the ones that catch us off guard. McAdams’ and O’Brien’s chemistry is exceptional. They play off one another with a rhythmic precision that feels almost musical—each reaction, pause, and escalation perfectly calibrated. Their dynamic does much of the film’s heavy lifting, grounding the psychological tension in something human and volatile. One hopes this pairing is not a one-off; there is genuine electricity here worth revisiting.

There is also an unintended—but revealing—meta-text hovering around O’Brien’s presence. In a recent Entertainment Weekly article, O’Brien noted that he has been repeatedly told by agents, producers, and directors that he needs an Instagram account—that without it, he risks losing roles deemed “appropriate” for him. He has no intention of starting one. As a film scholar, I find this deeply troubling. When talent, suitability, and longevity are increasingly filtered through social media metrics rather than craft, presence, and screen intelligence, the industry risks confusing visibility with value. Send Help, perhaps inadvertently, becomes part of that conversation—raising questions about how we identify monsters, merit, and worth in systems increasingly governed by optics.

Ultimately, Send Help is not a perfect film, nor is it a subtle one. But it is a thoughtful, unsettling, and frequently compelling genre exercise—one that uses survival horror as a vehicle for interrogating power, agency, and responsibility. Raimi may be experimenting here, but the experiment is a worthwhile one. If nothing else, Send Help reminds us that the most terrifying scenarios are not those where monsters appear—but those where we are forced to decide what kind of people we are when no one is coming to save us.

Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry

NETWORK 50th Anniversary Review

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When satire ceases being satire–we’re living inside it.

There are films that feel timely, films that feel dated, and then there is Network—a work so disturbingly elastic that it seems to recalibrate its relevance with each passing decade. What Sidney Lumet’s incendiary masterpiece offered in 1976 as provocation now functions as diagnosis. Network ceased being satire the moment we began living inside it. And at fifty years on, it is no longer prophetic so much as instructional—a grim field manual for the media ecosystem we willingly built.

On its surface, Network is a scathing critique of television news and the corrosive marriage between journalism and entertainment. But that reading now feels almost quaint. Today, the film operates as a far more expansive lens—one through which we can examine social media’s performative outrage, the collapse of editorial integrity, the rise of influencers over actors, and “content” replacing cinema as both commodity and aspiration. The film’s possibilities for interpretation are not merely endless; they are inescapable.

You can listen to the NETWORK episode of ReelTalk, which serves as a great companion piece to this article through your favorite podcast service. For your convenience, I’ve included some links that may work for you.

When I survey the contemporary media landscape—where outrage is currency, truth is malleable, and spectacle supplants substance—I often find myself echoing Howard Beale’s immortal lament: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The tragedy, of course, is that Beale’s righteous fury is swiftly commodified, packaged, and sold back to the public. In Network, that process is the warning. In 2026, it is the business model.

What Network ultimately offers is not just a critique of television news, but an elegy for every so-called Golden Age of legacy media—journalism, cinema, and serialized television alike. Watching it now, I am reminded of Norma Desmond’s aching declaration in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Substitute “pictures” for platforms, algorithms, and engagement metrics, and the lament lands with devastating clarity. In my view, social media and streaming have not merely disrupted cinema and television; they have delivered a mortal wound—one from which craft, patience, and collective cultural experience may never fully recover.

Network endures first and foremost because it is built on one of the most ferocious screenplays ever put to film. Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning script is not merely well-written; it is weaponized language—monologues that cut like scalpels, dialogue that oscillates between blistering satire and operatic tragedy, and ideas so densely packed they continue to unfold decades later. This is writing that trusts intelligence, that dares to be verbose, ideological, and confrontational in a way modern studio cinema rarely permits. Chayefsky understood that words—spoken with conviction—could be more explosive than spectacle, and he built Network accordingly.

What makes the screenplay extraordinary is its refusal to choose a single target. It indicts television news, corporate capitalism, religious fervor, political apathy, and audience complicity with equal venom. The famous “mad as hell” speech is not a populist rallying cry so much as a trap—an emotional release engineered to be monetized, emptied of meaning, and repackaged as programming. Chayefsky was not predicting outrage culture; he was anatomizing it. In an era where dialogue is often sanded down to algorithm-friendly soundbites, Network feels almost alien in its literary ambition—proof that cinema once trusted language to carry weight, risk, and consequence.

Sidney Lumet’s direction is the perfect counterbalance: disciplined, precise, and deliberately unflashy. Lumet stages the film like a moral courtroom drama, allowing performances and ideas to occupy the foreground while the camera observes with quiet authority. His restraint is crucial. Rather than amplifying the satire through stylistic excess, Lumet grounds the absurdity in realism—office spaces feel oppressive, boardrooms feel sterile, and television studios feel eerily sacred. The effect is chilling: the madness is not heightened by cinematic flourish; it emerges organically from systems that feel frighteningly familiar.

Together, Chayefsky and Lumet create a film that feels less like a movie and more like a controlled detonation. There is no indulgence, no wasted motion, no attempt to soften the blow. In contrast to today’s cinema—often drowned in visual noise, diluted themes, and studio-mandated ambiguity—Network stands as a reminder of what happens when writing and direction operate with absolute clarity of purpose. It is fearless, articulate, and devastatingly focused. And perhaps most damning of all: it proves that cinema once had the courage to tell audiences the truth, even when that truth was deeply uncomfortable.

Yet if Network endures as forcefully as it does, it is not solely because of its prescience. It endures because it is performed with astonishing precision and gravitas by one of the greatest ensembles ever assembled. Peter Finch’s Howard Beale remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable figures—a man whose breakdown is mistaken for authenticity, whose humanity is exploited until nothing remains. Finch’s posthumous Academy Award win feels less like recognition than inevitability.

William Holden, meanwhile, brings a weary, world-worn melancholy to Max Schumacher that resonates deeply with his earlier turn as Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. Both characters are men who recognize the rot of the system even as they remain complicit within it—observers with just enough moral clarity to feel shame, but not enough power to stop the machine. Holden’s quiet resignation here serves as the film’s conscience, a reminder of what professionalism and restraint once meant.

And then there is Faye Dunaway, delivering a tour de force for the ages—one of those rare performances that does not merely dominate a film, but defines an era of acting. Her Diana Christensen is ambition incarnate: ice-cold, ferociously intelligent, and utterly unencumbered by empathy. Dunaway doesn’t soften the character or seek audience approval; she weaponizes Diana’s ruthlessness, allowing her to move through the film with the predatory calm of someone who understands power not as responsibility, but as leverage. The performance is so precise and so unflinching that it almost feels inhuman, as though Diana has already evolved into the algorithmic logic the film warns us about—ratings as morality, attention as currency, and human cost as an acceptable casualty.

It is no accident that Dunaway earned the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role. The Oscar was not simply recognition of a great performance; it was an acknowledgment of something rarer—a character so vividly realized that she became a cultural archetype. Diana Christensen is not just a television executive; she is the prototype for the modern media operator, the spiritual ancestor of today’s content strategists, brand architects, and engagement-obsessed executives. Dunaway plays her with surgical control, her clipped delivery and laser-focused gaze conveying a woman who has replaced conscience with metrics long before such thinking became normalized.

In the broader context of film history, Dunaway’s work in Network cements her status as one of the greatest actresses of all time—very much in the lineage of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, yet operating outside the classical Golden Age of Hollywood. Like them, Dunaway possessed an unapologetic intensity, a willingness to embrace unlikable women, and a commanding screen presence that bent films around her gravitational pull. But unlike Davis or Crawford, her era offered fewer guardrails and less mythmaking; Dunaway emerged during a transitional moment in American cinema, when performances could be raw, confrontational, and morally untidy.

That makes her Diana Christensen all the more extraordinary. It is not a performance cushioned by studio glamour or softened by melodrama—it is sharp, modern, and terrifyingly plausible. Decades later, Dunaway’s Oscar-winning turn feels less like a relic of 1970s cinema and more like a warning label we ignored.

The supporting cast—Beatrice Straight, Ned Beatty, Robert Duvall—forms a devastating chorus, each representing a different facet of institutional decay. Straight’s Oscar-winning performance, in particular, remains one of the most remarkable achievements in Academy history. The fact that Straight’s Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was won with comparatively limited screen time only underscores the magnitude of her presence. Every line, every glance carries weight. Gravitas is not measured in minutes.

It is impossible to discuss Network without reckoning with its unprecedented—and now unthinkable—Oscar performance. The film received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and an astonishing four acting nominations across all performance categories. Even more remarkable: Network won three of the four acting awards—Peter Finch (Best Actor), Faye Dunaway (Best Actress), and Beatrice Straight (Best Supporting Actress)—with Finch’s win occurring posthumously. That trifecta remains a singular achievement in Oscar history.

What makes this feat so haunting in retrospect is not merely its rarity, but what it represents: a time when the Academy rewarded performance-driven cinema rooted in language, ideas, and moral urgency. These were not roles engineered for “Oscar moments” clipped for social media circulation. They were fully realized characters inhabiting a screenplay that demanded intelligence, restraint, and theatrical rigor. Even Beatrice Straight’s win—earned with fewer than six minutes of screen time—speaks to an era when gravitas mattered more than exposure, and emotional truth outweighed narrative gymnastics.

Contrast that with the modern awards landscape, where performances are often subsumed by brand visibility, platform allegiance, and campaign machinery. Today’s Oscars frequently feel less like a celebration of cinema than a referendum on cultural relevance as defined by streaming metrics and algorithmic reach. In that context, Network’s acting sweep feels not merely impressive, but elegiac—another artifact from a period when cinema trusted adults to speak, listen, and think.

This is where Network dovetails uncomfortably with my broader reflections on the erosion of cinematic prestige and journalistic integrity. The film arrived at a moment when studios still believed movies could challenge audiences, when networks still pretended journalism was a public service, and when awards bodies still recognized craft over content. That ecosystem no longer exists.

Today, companies like Netflix and Disney—titans of scale and convenience—have played outsized roles in flattening the cultural landscape. Netflix’s content-first philosophy has blurred the line between cinema and disposable product, prioritizing volume over vision and treating storytelling as a data problem to be optimized rather than an art form to be refined. Disney, meanwhile, has transformed legacy filmmaking into brand maintenance, where risk is minimized, mythmaking is franchised, and even news-adjacent programming is filtered through spectacle and marketability.

In that environment, Network feels almost confrontational. It reminds us that journalism once aspired to truth rather than virality, that cinema once valued language over noise, and that performances once carried weight beyond their runtime. The film’s Oscar dominance is not simply a historical footnote—it is a marker of how far the industry has drifted from rewarding seriousness, substance, and moral clarity.

Ultimately, Network foresaw where we were headed with terrifying clarity. But perhaps its greatest sorrow is that it did not imagine how eagerly we would embrace that future. Our media landscape has not merely changed; it has lost its soul. Journalism has become performance. Cinema has become content. And authenticity—once a virtue—has been repurposed as branding. Half a century later, Network stands as both benchmark and indictment. It is proof that cinema once mattered enough to scare the powerful—and a reminder that somewhere along the way, we stopped demanding that it do so.

Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry

Cinema is big. It’s the Oscars that got small.

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From the Big Screen to the Smallest: The Oscars and the Final Lament for Cinema

In 1929, the Academy Awards were born alongside the consolidation of cinema as the defining art form of the twentieth century. The Oscars did not merely honor motion pictures; they sanctified the big screen as a cathedral of light where stories were projected larger than life, and where audiences gathered together in reverent silence to be transformed. Nearly a century later, the announcement that the Oscars will move to YouTube in 2029 feels less like an adaptation and more like a capitulation. It’s a moment of inflection that reads, unmistakably, as a eulogy.

Anyone who has followed my work on Twitter or my blog for any length of time knows that I effectively gave up on the Oscars years ago. Even so, this announcement demands cultural analysis and reflection on its deeper implications. One needn’t be a devoted viewer of the ceremony to recognize the ongoing erosion of cinema itself; disengagement does not preclude clear sight, and distance often sharpens it.

There is a morbid irony in a ceremony created to celebrate cinema’s grand scale choosing to live on the smallest screen possible. The Oscars migrating to YouTube is not simply a platform change; it is a symbolic reversal of values. The institution that once affirmed spectacle, patience, and collective experience now aligns itself with the very medium that played a decisive role in cinema’s metaphoric death—fragmented attention, algorithmic taste-making, and content flattened into disposable scrolls. What was once king has voluntarily donned the motley of the court jester.

For decades, the Oscars functioned as a kind of cultural mass. Even when ratings declined, the ceremony retained its claim to seriousness. It insisted—sometimes stubbornly—that movies mattered, that craft mattered, that the labor of hundreds could still culminate in something worthy of ritual. To move this rite to YouTube is to concede that cinema no longer warrants ceremony at all. It is now content, indistinguishable from reaction videos, vlogs, and monetized outrage. The awards will play not to the gods of light and shadow, but to the lowest common denominator of engagement.

This decision cannot be disentangled from the broader arc traced in the manuscript on which I am presently writing Are You Still Watching? Solving the Case of the Death of Cinema, which is my followup book to Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror releasing in October 2026. The internet did not merely change distribution; it reprogrammed desire. It replaced anticipation with immediacy, reverence with irony, and stars with personalities. The movie star—once a distant, luminous figure whose very remoteness fueled myth—has been rendered obsolete by constant access (except for you Tom Cruise–you are the last remaining movie star in the classical sense). When everyone is visible at all times, no one can remain larger than life. In this sense, the internet did not just kill the movie star; it dismantled the conditions required for stardom to exist.

The Golden Era understood something we have since forgotten: limitation creates meaning. The big screen mattered because it was rare. The theatrical experience mattered because it demanded surrender—of time, of attention, of comfort. The Oscars mattered because they crowned achievements that could not be reduced to metrics. Box office was discussed, but it did not dictate value. Craft, risk, and ambition still held currency. One cannot imagine the architects of Hollywood—those who built studios, nurtured stars, and believed in cinema as a national dream—viewing this moment without despair. The roll call of names etched into Oscar history now echoes like a rebuke.

The move to YouTube completes a long erosion. First came the shrinking theatrical window, then the dominance of streaming, then the rebranding of films as “content.” Each step was defended as pragmatic, inevitable, even democratic. Yet inevitability is often the language of surrender. By placing the Oscars on YouTube, the Academy signals that it no longer believes cinema deserves its own stage—literal or metaphorical. It accepts, finally, that movies are just another tile in the feed.

What makes this moment especially tragic is that it arrives cloaked in the rhetoric of accessibility. YouTube promises reach, youth, relevance. But to what end and at what cost? Cinema was never meant to be optimized for virality. Its power lay in duration, in immersion, in the audacity to ask audiences to sit still and feel deeply. An awards show on YouTube does not elevate cinema to the digital age; it drags cinema down to the logic of the internet, where attention is fleeting and meaning is provisional. That which is required by the desired algorithm will be that which dictates the ceremony and pageantry thereof.

And yet, this lament is not without pride. There was a time when this industry truly was an industry of dreams. When the Oscars crowned films that expanded the language of the medium. When a win could alter a career not through branding, but through trust—trust that audiences would follow artists into challenging territory. That history cannot be erased by an algorithm, even if it can be buried beneath one.

If the Oscars moving to YouTube does not signal the death of cinema, it is difficult to imagine what would. It is the final nail not because it kills something vibrant, but because it seals a coffin long prepared. What remains will continue to exist—films will still be made, awards will still be handed out—but the animating belief that cinema is a singular, communal art form has been surrendered.

The tragedy is not that the Oscars will stream on YouTube. The tragedy is that, in doing so, they admit they no longer know what they are mourning.

This loss of self-knowledge did not arrive overnight. Long before the platform shift, the ceremony began to erode its own authority through an increasing embrace of socio-political posturing by hosts and award recipients alike. What was once a night dedicated, however imperfectly, to the celebration of films, performances, and craft gradually transformed into a sequence of soapboxes. The Oscars mistook moral exhibitionism for relevance, and in doing so alienated a broad public that tuned in not for lectures, but for an affirmation that movies themselves still mattered.

This is not an argument against artists holding convictions, nor a denial that cinema has always intersected with politics. Rather, it is an indictment of a ceremony that lost the discipline to distinguish between art and advocacy. When acceptance speeches routinely overshadowed the work being honored, the implicit message was clear: the films were secondary. Viewers responded accordingly. Ratings declined not merely because of streaming competition, but because the ceremony no longer respected its own premise. Had hosts and winners remained anchored in the films—celebrating storytelling, performance, direction, and the collaborative miracle of production—the Oscars might have retained their standing as a cultural commons rather than a partisan spectacle.

In surrendering the focus on cinema itself, the Academy weakened the very case for its continued relevance.

Progress is often invoked as an unqualified good, but history suggests it is more accurately understood as an exchange—one that invariably involves loss. Sometimes that “loss” isn’t’ felt immediately, but there is inevitably some mild, moderate, or signifiant loss somewhere. Every cultural advance carries a cost, and the measure of true progress lies in whether what is gained outweighs what is surrendered. In the case of the Oscars, the pursuit of modernity, relevance, and moral signaling came at the expense of gravitas, neutrality, and shared cultural meaning. What was gained—momentary applause within narrow circles, fleeting relevance in the news cycle—proved insufficient compensation for what was lost: broad public trust, ceremonial dignity, and the sense that this night belonged to everyone who loved movies, not just those who spoke the loudest.

When institutions confuse change with improvement, they often wake to find that they have survived only in form, not in spirit.

Taken together, the Oscars decline follows a macabre logic—a ceremony founded to exalt scale, craft, and collective experience gradually surrendered its authority by de-centering movies themselves—first through moral grandstanding, then through technological appeasement, and finally through full assimilation into the internet’s attention economy. Each step was justified as necessary, inclusive, or inevitable. Yet the cumulative effect was corrosive. The Oscars did not lose relevance because audiences abandoned cinema; audiences abandoned the ceremony because it no longer stood for cinema as something distinct, demanding, and worthy of reverence.

What remains is a hollowed-out ritual, stripped of its gravitational pull, migrating to YouTube not as a bold reinvention but as an admission of defeat. The move completes the journey from cathedral to feed, from shared cultural moment to algorithmic afterthought. It confirms that the Academy has chosen survival at the cost of meaning—and in doing so, has preserved the shell of the institution while relinquishing its soul.

Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, reflecting on the industry’s changing fortunes, once delivered an epitaph that now feels uncomfortably prophetic: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” A century after the birth of the Oscars, her words resonate with renewed clarity. Cinema did not shrink because audiences demanded less; it shrank because its stewards accepted less.

The Oscars’ migration to the smallest screen is not progress; it’s the final confirmation that something vast, communal, and luminous has been allowed to diminish, and that what replaced it was not worth the cost. A ceremony that no longer centered movies should not be surprised when audiences stopped gathering to watch it. The move to YouTube, then, feels less like a sudden betrayal and more like the logical endpoint of a long retreat: from celebration to commentary, from reverence to rhetoric, from a shared night at the movies to just another argument in the feed.

Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry