There was a time when cinema smelled like cigarettes and consequence. You could look at Jack Lemmon’s cramped desk in The Apartment and feel the paper cuts. You could watch Connery’s Bond run out of options and feel your own pulse argue with the soundtrack. The Godfather didn’t need a cosmic beam punching a hole in the sky; it had a door closing on Kay. The heroes of those worlds were mortals with sharp wits, bad knees, and problems you could almost inherit by accident. You could imagine being them. The films had pores.
Somewhere along the road, the center of gravity slid toward the frictionless and the godlike. The industry’s economics shoved us in that direction: fewer movies, bigger bets, more pressure to make “events” that blast through the noise. By the end of 2024, U.S./Canada ticket sales landed around 29 000 HUF–2 900 HUF billion—still roughly a quarter below 2019—so studios doubled down on brands that promise pre-sold weekends and global merchandising ecosystems. The mid-budget, human-scale drama (the ecosystem that once nurtured The Apartment-type films) has been squeezed to the edges or siphoned to streaming. And audiences, increasingly conditioned by short theatrical windows and the convenience of the couch, now discover most “new releases” at home. The machine isn’t evil; it’s just optimized—for IP, for velocity, for safety. But optimization can sand off the fingerprints.
Superheroes became the lingua franca of that optimization; invulnerability sells across borders. But even that engine is coughing. Marvel’s The Marvels didn’t just underperform—it became the MCU’s lowest-grossing entry, a flashing dashboard light that spectacle alone cannot guarantee ignition. The diagnosis isn’t “death of capes,” it’s malpractice: consequence-free physics and interchangeable apocalypse. We’re very good at simulating everything except weight. Audiences know the difference—consciously or in their bones.
Here’s the paradox: some of the most “modern” hits worked by reintroducing gravity. Top Gun: Maverick strapped IMAX-capable cameras into real jets and let actors eat genuine Gs; Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning opened with a man riding a motorcycle off a mountain and negotiating with the air on the way down. You can clean up seams with VFX later, but you cannot fake the way mass moves, the way eyes change when acceleration writes on the face. Even the year’s most ostentatiously analog flex—Nolan’s “no CGI shots” rhetoric on Oppenheimer—was really a philosophical position: make reality the special effect and let digital work be the glue, not the cathedral. The result isn’t nostalgia; it’s legibility. We can parse cause and effect again.
And yet, the culture keeps widening the gap between us and the people on screen. Part of that is consumption. When three-quarters of viewers sample new films via streaming, heroes can feel like content rather than company; the communal gasp turns into private multitasking. Part of it is windowing: when a film’s life sprint from cinema to living room is sometimes measured in a few weeks, the theatrical ritual—our old, secular mass—loses its sense of pilgrimage. Exhibitors are literally lobbying to lengthen the window again, because short-term convenience may be long-term amnesia.
Then there’s the physics of identification. The brain bonds most deeply when it senses stakes it can model: weight transferring to a knee, a hand shaking before a phone call, a car that might understeer if you breathe wrong. When images drift into the omnipotent—bodies shrugging off concrete like confetti, cars surviving orbital mechanics—the mirror systems that let us “be there” disengage. It’s not that CGI is the enemy; it’s that friction is the narrator, and too much antihistamine kills the story. (The Fast & Furious saga is the perfect parable: what began as asphalt-level, human-scale larceny mutated—sometimes delightfully—into physics that laughs at itself. The space-car gag in F9 was a meme with a NOS bottle; by Fast X, even sympathetic critics talk about “overcranked nonsense.” When the universe itself becomes a cartoon, it’s hard to imagine you belong in the frame.)
Still, let’s not write an obituary for “soul” and mail it to Hollywood. The market is a weather system, not a god. You can feel tectonic plates shifting: horror quietly booming because it’s cheap, personal, and communal; a few studios rediscovering that audiences show up for craft, not just canon; analyst charts revealing that the mid-tier has thinned too far to be healthy. None of this guarantees a renaissance, but it maps a path: fewer immaculate gods, more scruffy mortals who bleed on carpets and argue with gravity.
The controversial take (which shouldn’t be controversial): movies didn’t “lose” their soul; we starved one of its food groups—friction. We outsourced risk to pixels and consequences to quips. We replaced the smell of hot film and brake pads with immaculate renderings of destruction that leave nobody limping. But the antidote doesn’t require burning the render farms or chaining ourselves to a Steenbeck. It just asks for a hierarchy: put reality in the foreground and let the computers be your silent collaborators. Give us frames where a human body bargains with a physical law, where a room’s silence can beat a planet exploding. That’s why Maverick sings; why Mission still feels like a handshake with danger; why analog postures around Oppenheimer mattered even as digital artists did crucial work.
Will we ever feel as close to characters as we did with Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter, Connery’s Bond, or Michael Corleone? Of course—if we finance and film like proximity matters. That means more mid-budget risks, longer theatrical breathing room, and a craft culture that prizes readable cause-and-effect over maximal noise. It means remembering that a camera two handspans above the tarmac at 60 km/h can be more intoxicating than a digital tumble through a thousand-story void.
We are fragile creatures of carbon and hope, hurling stories at the dark to see ourselves. Stop bubble-wrapping the gods and let the mortals drive. Movies get their soul back the second we let weight, consequence, and human cunning onto the screen—again and again—until we recognize ourselves not as spectators of invincibility, but as co-conspirators with physics.
