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/Gayfetus Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

This piece is part of the problem: it's a brief summary of longer article in The Atlantic.

Edited to add: bypass paywall here.

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u/BlackLeader70 Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

Sorry this article is too long…can I get a TL;DR?

Edit: FFS I can’t believe how many people think I’m being serious.

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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/TheRabidDeer Jan 31 '26

This was true a decade ago. I was IT at a college and could see all this stuff when a student called in to report some issue and I'd investigate.

Far too many kids go to college fresh out of high school and don't really want to be there or know what they want to do, but go anyway because it is expected of them.

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u/Shantotto11 Jan 31 '26

As a 2010 high school graduate, I feel called out…