Opinion | Gen Z Is Going to the Movies. This Is Great News for Everyone.

I recently changed careers from philanthropy to entertainment, and my first few months in Hollywood have been an education.

When I arrived, I encountered an industry that was reckoning with epochal upheavals in technology, distribution and consumer expectations. New formats were evolving at astonishing speed. Every conversation I had — whether on podcasts or panels, in one business lunch and welcome dinner after another — turned to the topic of an industry in apparent free fall.

The ostensible question was: Can we continue to make movies and shows that resonate with new audiences? The more fundamental, even existential, question lurking behind it: Have we lost an entire generation of viewers to online platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat — or more confounding still, to livestreaming sites like Twitch and Kick?

For some in the entertainment industry, this is a period of creative destruction, as irreversible as the march of progress itself. I see it differently.

In entertainment — as in nearly every aspect of American life — we are dealing with the progeny of inequality: distrust and loneliness, deteriorating democratic institutions and the rapid decay of a shared identity that once knit us together. This crisis seems to be affecting young people in particular: the generation that came of age in our atomized era, enduring the algorithmic tsunami of social media’s first wave and then navigating the rupture of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Hollywood, this led to a few misbegotten assumptions about America’s rising generation: that members of Generation Z would forever choose small screens over big ones, short-form over feature-length, digital over physical, isolated over communal. There was even something comforting in this cynicism: the sense that young people were simply beyond our reach, let alone our understanding.