By J. Sampson
The result is consumer whiplash. We are no longer "binge-watching." We are churning . We subscribe for Succession , cancel, resubscribe for The Last of Us , cancel, and pirate Bluey for the kids out of sheer subscription fatigue. The average household now spends over $100 a month on streaming—more than the average cable bill of 2015. a27hopsonxxx
In 2023 and 2024, the box office was a tale of two cities. On one hand, you had Barbie and Oppenheimer . "Barbenheimer" was a once-in-a-generation cultural collision—a piece of intellectual property (IP) about a plastic doll directed with arthouse flair, paired with a three-hour biopic about a physicist. Both were original-ish, director-driven, and wildly successful. We subscribe for Succession , cancel, resubscribe for
And crucially, we are no longer loyal. In the 90s, NBC could rely on a Friends audience. Today, your favorite show is cancelled before you finish the season premiere. On one hand, you had Barbie and Oppenheimer
But the industry is adapting. The new buzzword is not "content" but "event." Netflix proved the model with Squid Game ; Disney revived it with The Mandalorian ; and now, everyone is chasing the watercooler moment. Shows are no longer dropped all at once. They are being serialized weekly again, not out of nostalgia, but out of desperation. They want you to talk about the show. They want the memes. They want the discourse. Speaking of discourse: we are living through a revolution in who gets to tell stories.
The living room is dead. Long live the bedroom, the subway, and the treadmill. We watch on phones with subtitles permanently on (a study showed 80% of Gen Z uses subtitles, not because they can’t hear, but because they can’t risk missing a line while looking away). We watch at 1.5x speed. We watch "explained" videos instead of watching the actual show.