How Great Stories Still Land

What attention, streaming, and scale mean for storytelling now

Lately, I’ve noticed people keep asking some version of the same question: Are movies dying?

And I get why. Theatrical has changed. Attention is fragmented. People don’t watch the same things at the same time anymore. The business model that once supported certain kinds of films has shifted. The culture feels splintered.

But I think the word “death” is doing too much.

What’s dying isn’t storytelling. What’s dying is the assumption that stories will be encountered the way they used to be: together, at the same time, in the same place, with a captive level of attention. The form and the pipeline have changed. The human need underneath it hasn’t.

If anything, it’s intensified.

For a long time, mid-budget films survived not because they opened huge, but because they traveled. They found audiences over time, through theaters, then home entertainment, then cable, then the slow build of word-of-mouth. That familiar pipeline has largely shifted, even if “second life” still exists in new forms.

But the instinct behind it hasn’t disappeared.

Recently, Matt Damon talked about how audience behavior has begun to shape how movies are made in much more explicit ways. He shared that filmmakers are now encouraged to capture attention almost immediately, sometimes within the first five minutes, because so many viewers are watching at home, often with phones in hand. He also noted that studios are asking for plot points to be reiterated more than once, simply to make sure people stay oriented and engaged.

On the surface, that can sound bleak. Like a concession. Like a lowering of standards.

But I don’t hear it that way.

What I hear is storytelling responding, once again, to how people actually live. People are still choosing to watch. They’re just doing it inside fuller, noisier lives. Stories can’t assume reverence anymore; they have to earn presence. Not by flattening themselves, but by being clearer about what they’re offering and why it’s worth the emotional investment.

That’s the shift.

Audiences haven’t become less thoughtful; they’ve become more selective. They’re constantly deciding: Is this worth my time? Is this for me? Do I trust this? And they’re making that decision faster than ever, often before the story has had a chance to speak for itself.

Which means the responsibility on storytellers, studios, and creative leaders has changed.

It’s no longer enough to make something good. You have to make it legible, to help people understand what experience they’re being invited into, and why it matters.

The practical question I keep coming back to is simple: how do you help a great story land clearly, quickly, and intact, without losing what made it worth telling in the first place?

That’s where I believe commercial storytelling still holds enormous power.

I was once at a film premiere talking with an executive from a studio, and he said something that stayed with me. His favorite part of working on the tech side of animation, he told me, wasn’t the technology itself, it was the legacy. He wasn’t just building tools. He was helping make stories that would last.

People forget tech.But stories stay with us.

Most people don’t remember the year The Lion King came out, or what it made at the box office. But they remember how it made them feel, the music, the loss, the responsibility of stepping into who you’re meant to be. Those emotional beats became shared language, passed down across generations.

That shared language matters more than people admit.

One reason the “death of movies” narrative feels so intense right now is that communal life itself has become harder to sustain. Fewer shared spaces. Fewer shared rituals. Fewer consistent moments of collective experience.

Stories can’t replace community. But they do something adjacent and powerful: they coordinate feeling. They give strangers shared reference points. They create common knowledge, moments when millions of people can say, “I saw that too,” and mean it emotionally, not just informationally.

That’s why I don’t believe culture is shaped only by the loudest or most extreme stories. I think it’s shaped by the ones that endure—the ones people return to, reference, pass along, and carry with them.

The form will change.The paths will evolve.The attention economy will keep pressuring narrative structure.

But the need doesn’t go away.

It simply asks more of the people carrying it forward: more clarity, more judgment, and more responsibility to respect the audience’s real life, without surrendering the emotional truth that makes a story worth telling.