The Movies Issue: The Big Picture Strikes Back

Janusz Kaminski for The New York Times

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the stars featured in the magazine's Movies Issue.

Like a character who develops a discreet but noticeable cough at the end of the first act, the movies have been dying for a long time. The latest chapter in their decline — which began, depending on who is telling the story, with the introduction of sound, the rise of television, the fall of the old studios, the spread of home video or the arrival of the Internet — was written earlier this year.

At the end of April (which counts, according to the Hollywood calendar, as the beginning of summer), Steven Soderbergh gave a State of Cinema talk at the San Francisco International Film Festival that was something of a eulogy both for his own career as a director of theatrically released feature films and for the industry that sustained it. According to Soderbergh, there is less and less room in the business for artistic integrity and "specificity of vision"; in the age-old struggle between art and commerce, art is being routed. "You've got people who don't know movies and don't watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you're going to be allowed to make," he said. "That's one reason studio movies aren't better than they are, and that's one reason that cinema as I'm defining it" — the art that sometimes lives within the commercial husk of movies — "is shrinking." Soderbergh had earlier announced that the psychological thriller "Side Effects" would be his last feature distributed to movie theaters. His Liberace biopic "Behind the Candelabra," though entered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, was made for and shown on American cable television (HBO in this case), where his future cinematic projects are likely to unfold. The kind of work that he has been identified with ever since "Sex, Lies and Videotape" — films that balance mainstream appeal with ambition, intelligence and a recognizable creative signature — is increasingly marginal in a system focused on global markets and blockbuster franchises.

Soderbergh's grim diagnosis was quickly seconded by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, once easy scapegoats for the antiblockbuster, quality-cinema movement and now passionate, if somewhat improbable, defenders of artisanal, personal filmmaking. At a widely reported talk at the University of Southern California, they foretold a "big meltdown" of the American film industry. Spielberg declared the current Hollywood business model, which lavishes huge budgets and marketing muscle on superhero tent-poles while forcing movies like "Lincoln" to beg for crumbs, to be unsustainable. A similar lament was offered by the producer Lynda Obst in her book "Sleepless in Hollywood," which anatomized a "new abnormal" of financial anxiety and creative paralysis, brought about by the collapse of the DVD market and other economic and technological changes. Panic over revenue has left the studios "frozen," she wrote, and the consequences have to do with more than money: "The gut is frozen, the heart is frozen and even the bottom-line spreadsheet is frozen."

Did the box-office chill that settled in through July and August over some pricey flops bear out this pessimism? Or did it offer a measure of hope? As one big-budget action movie after another fell short of expectations (at least domestically), you could hear whispers of magical thinking among film journalists and other concerned parties. Maybe the failure of so many overblown, mediocre movies would inspire the flowering of smaller, better ones. Maybe the audience, fed a steady summer diet of sequels, merchandising tie-ins and animated family fun, was finally saying "enough." Maybe a lesson could be drawn from the success of the previous year's crop of Oscar movies, and the future would belong to the Argos and Djangos and Lincolns rather than the Avengers and Transformers.

But maybe you tuned out all this chatter because you were otherwise occupied: with the last five episodes of "Breaking Bad," the first season of "Orange Is the New Black" or the rollout of "Grand Theft Auto V," all of which seemed to loom much larger in the cultural discourse of the late summer than "The Wolverine," "G.I. Joe," "We're the Millers" or "Planes." It is no longer news that video games are, measured in dollars and hours spent by the young, bigger than movies. And the notion that television is better, a provocative claim just a few years ago, when the memory of "The Sopranos" was still fresh and "The Wire" was winding down, is now conventional wisdom in the era of "Mad Men," "Game of Thrones," "The Walking Dead" and "Girls."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a character in the film "Man of Steel." It is Zod not Zog.

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