Everything Everywhere All at Once: Why Theatrical Cinema No Longer Commands Instant Attention

System Studies: Cinema (Pt 3 of 4) — Films used to launch into culture. Now they drop into the feed: flattened, forgotten, and forced to compete with everything else.

Welcome back to System Studies: Cinema, a four-part series expanding on my CineEurope 2025 keynote, “The Enemy Isn’t AI or Streaming — It’s Holding On To Attention.” If you’re new here:

• In Part 1, we dismantled the myth that cinema is dying and instead it’s the conversation that’s collapsing.

• In Part 2, we explored what remains after the moats (content, d…