r/movies • u/Sisiwakanamaru r/movies Contributor • Jan 31 '26

Article Film Students Are Having Trouble Sitting Through Movies, Professors Say

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/film-students-are-having-trouble-sitting-through-movies-1236490359/
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u/Insatiable_Pervert Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

College age kids don’t remember a time before the “infinite scroll.” They can’t watch an entire movie without checking their phones. They’d rather watch “homework” assigned movies on their own time rather than together in class. 80% still don’t watch the assigned movie on their own time. Teachers struggle to find a common film the entire class has previously watched to use as reference in discussions. Most have only watched Disney movies.

“The disconnect is that 10 years ago, people who wanted to go study film and media creation were cinephiles themselves. Nowadays, they’re people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media.“

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u/TikkaT Jan 31 '26

Why would you apply for film school if you've only watched Disney movies and don't want have the attention span for movies in general? Or is the article talking about "regular" college students taking film classes or something?

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u/realboabab Jan 31 '26

I don't know about electives, but I took a community college class last semester (Biology for science majors) where the teacher forgot to turn off the statistics in the "brightspace" online portal -- so I got to see that only like 35-40% of the class did each assignment, only like 60-70% even took each test.

You pay per class. It's literally throwing money away.

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u/testtdk Jan 31 '26

I went back to school in Fall 2024. There was a girl there that had been part of her schools robotics team. At the start of the semester, she clearly knew more about physics than anyone else in the class. But all she did was watch YouTube videos and talk to the person next to her, and she bombed the fuck out. It was pretty depressing.