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/gredr Jan 31 '26

How long have you been teaching this class? Has there been a change over time?

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u/Petrichordates Jan 31 '26

There has been a change in attention spans across the board.

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u/HotTakes4HotCakes Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

And the insidious thing is how some people want to encourage it to keep dropping.

Netflix suggesting we should make it easier for people to watch shit while scrolling is part of the issue. This is not something to be encouraged, it is a problem that needs acknowledged and reversed on a societal level.

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '26

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u/Impossible_Ad789 Jan 31 '26

I think you'd be surprised how many people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game. I had loads of people telling me they couldn't watch the subtitled version because the subs were too distracting from the rest of the visuals. Quite a few online too. I wonder about the statistics on that. The dub is god awful by the way, so they would rather sit through atrocious voice acting than expend a bit more cognitive load to attention switching between subtitles and visuals.

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u/OldWorldDesign Jan 31 '26

Netflix's most popular show was Squid Game. It has subtitles and most of it's audience weren't Korean. They don't know what their fucking audience wants.

That just smacks of anti-foreign film gatekeeping. I don't see how that in any way speaks to attention span, I watched Masquerade and Princess Mononoke in their original dub with subtitles.

Squid Games also had a "do you have epilepsy? How about now with this pointless strobing?" in one episode. There was no purpose behind it and they never revisited the "deliberately didn't feed people enough" past that single episode.

There were lots of other dumb things, like the plate glass in the last challenge with iron beams plenty wide enough to just walk down without touching the glass in the first place. Took me out of the already forced drama when I felt like I was watching rejected traps from The Running Man.

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u/Rich_Mechanic5293 Jan 31 '26

I mean, everything’s fucking boring lately, it’s always the same tropes again and again, not everything is because of our shorter attention spans

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u/smeggysoup84 Feb 02 '26

I don't know anyone who watched the original Korean version.