The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.

[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.

Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch you're not going to the theatre to watch a movie. The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up), but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.

This doesn't account for the decline starting in 2002. I'd like to see piracy numbers though- particularly the "official" mppa and riaa numbers

Back in the year 2002...

Internet access was widely available.

Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.

Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.

DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.

Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.

HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.

So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.