2016 May Bring Good Things

I literally don't remember the last time I went to the movies (getting a little forgetful) but there's a good movie house within a few miles with a really big screen, really big sound, and you can order a meal at little tables.  It's dinner theater.  The problem is that I can't find a movie that I want to see with actors that I want to watch.  This may be the reason:

With a box-office take rapidly approaching $30 million, 2016 is already the second highest-grossing feature-length documentary ever. In mainstream Hollywood, its success was totally unexpected—a word that carries the same irony Glenn Reynolds has imbued it with since Obama took office because it comes at the same time that Hollywood’s overall numbers are tanking.

It’s not just that, as the BBC reports, the overall box-office take this past weekend was the lowest for more than a decade. It’s that, in general, fewer people are paying to see movies.

The most obvious—and cited—reason for Hollywood’s decline is that it rarely produces films for adult audiences uninterested in comic-book characters, animation, fairy tales, talking bears, or dystopian fantasies—categories that fit 20 of the top 25 highest-grossing films so far this year.

But I’m absolutely certain there’s a more important factor—actually, two factors, inseparably intertwined. The first is that mainstream Americans—the kind who used to go with some regularity to the movies, whether they lived on the coasts or in “flyover country”—no longer see mainstream America represented on screen.

Now, 2016 I would go out to see.