Thinking about the post on media and film distribution I added to yesterday, what I forgot to add is simply that a lot of you now spend the hours that you would have once spent on cinema and television on Tiktok and Reels and (to a degree) YouTube. If you know you spend 1-3 hours on Tiktok each day, well, in the 90s, nothing like that existed. You only had books, cinema, television, radio. So people weren't hyping memes and random dances and Good Emu Person and Shitty Emu Person etc. and everything folks talked about - even on early internet - when it came to mass media, centred on those specific forms of mass media.
Cinema will never ever be the same again so long as people give 12+ hours of their week to Tiktok / Instagram and similar sites, instead of cinema and television. You can't cry out for a golden age that's gone when it's gone because the audiences moved on. The fact is, one of the most common media watching memes on places like Tumblr is a version of 'everyone is recommending shows or movies to me and I don't have the time / energy / inclination to watch them.'
I'm part of this, I spend a lot more time on Tiktok than I do watching television or cinema, and this obviously only applies to the folks who do spend huge chunks of time scrolling through short pieces on the internet. And there's also nothing wrong with that until you go 'omg why aren't we getting shows like we used to / why is fandom so different now / why aren't we having these experiences anymore.'
You took the time and investment away, and that's why. It's way easier to get rabidly hyped in a fandom if you don't have Tiktok, or YouTube, or Instagram**, because what's left over (film, television, etc.) is all you have. And that's a pretty huge and significant reason why a) the budgets for film and TV are smaller (overall, it's similarly extreme on the other end, re: Sandman and Marvel etc. But I'm including everything here) and b) fandoms aren't as huge or long-lasting as they used to be.
I'm still noodling on this, and obviously there are a lot of factors going on here (many of which I went into yesterday, it's so fucking opaque to say 'we don't have films like we used to' because like, we do, people just don't know where to find them anymore, what we don't have is indie films hitting the zeitgeist like they used to, which is a different issue and it's multifactorial, and some of it is that people are now screaming about Emmanuel the Emu instead of the latest indie movie that came out). But I do think where Tiktok is making billions off of people, those billions are not going to more 'classic' forms of mass media.
If you want it, you have to give it your time. It's that simple.
** (Obviously these things can also be used as tools for fandom, it's just so much of fandom has also now ported over to transformative works around real people (i.e. dueting / stitching / replying / remixing / meme-ing etc. are all a form of transformative work that take time and labour, they're just different to what we classically think of as transformative works) and/or Tiktok fandom moves really fast by the nature of the format).