It’s easy to look at new developments on the social media frontier and decry them. By now, it’s quite clear that for whatever gains we’ve received by giving ourselves over to The Apps, society has not fared well. Yesterday, though, I was scrolling through TikTok, as I sometimes do—TikTok is not one of my addictions, but it remains easy to get lost in it for a half hour at a time every few days—and I came across a video of critic and broadcaster Kevin McCarthy talking to Nick Offerman on the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning red carpet. The five-minute chat is a good one, with Offerman offering his feelings about the theatrical experience, old-school special effects, learning to be patient for opportunities as an actor, his Oscars bit with Conan O’Brien, and more. At the end of it, Offerman shakes McCarthy’s hand and remarks, “Thank you for the intelligent questions, they’re very refreshing in this setting.” IN THIS SETTING.
Red carpet interviews are bullshit. The lowest of the low in terms of star-fuckery and and vapid questions. There’s not enough time, the situation is too hectic, and the only reason anyone’s really there is for the publicity photos. In that setting, as talent, to be asked genuinely thoughtful questions must be such a treat. The clip has 200,000 likes on TikTok, and plenty more on Instagram Reels. The appeal of the clip is odd, because it’s not a fast-paced, entertaining interview. Offerman isn’t asked to do goofy nonsense or mug for the camera. It’s got none of the usual appeals to social media virality that constitute common marketing wisdom in the year 2025. Yet it works, and it penetrates, and it’s for the same reason Offerman himself was surprised and impressed. Here’s a journalist/content creator on a red carpet, clearly a real movie fan, bursting with love for Hollywood and cinema, asking real questions in an earnest way, without any condescension. McCarthy, a local news guy, has that plucky, dweeby, local news charm that above all else is inviting. Watch enough of his videos talking to actors and filmmakers and it’s hard not to feel like the characters onstage at CinemaCon in The Studio finale, chanting, “Movies! Movies! Movies!” Who’d have thought? Movies!
Memorial Day 2025 was a true blockbuster weekend. Record-breaking revenue across a slate of offerings, both studio and independently produced, titles big and small. It was a victory for the movie business and theatrical exhibition, but also variety. There were movies for everyone. A huge Tom Cruise stunt show, a nostalgia-baiting Disney kids remake, a sensational original vampire movie, a weird comedy for sickos, a wild horror movie for sickos, a conservative-coded sports comeback drama, even a Marvel movie. I won’t pretend all of these—or any of them, perhaps—are the height of what cinema can offer, but they cover a wide range of what it does offer the mainstream moviegoing public. The question for years now, particularly post-pandemic, has been: does the mainstream moviegoing public still exist?
This, I believe, is the wrong question. The wrong premise, in fact. It assumes that moviegoing, as a habit and an activity, is some binary aspect of identity. But movies didn’t always exist. They were invented, and then an audience was formed. And that audience changed over time. Their expectations changed. When the movie theatre was your only place to get filmed entertainment, along with filmed news, human interest stories, and travel documentaries, of course they brought in absurd percentages of the population. TV ate into that, but so have other forms of media over time, and at this point the competition is obviously extreme. So where do movies, and specifically moviegoing, fit into this? To answer that, we first need to come to terms with what movies do offer people, and what they can offer. If it’s just a matter of good, filmed entertainment, well, that’s not nearly enough. There’s plenty of that out there, in much more easily consumable packages than a two hour film. The way I see it, the two hour-ish package of a movie has its own artistic merits, but as an experience, cinema thrives on the mass part of mass entertainment. When movies have been important in culture, it’s when they’ve been at their most central to the social aspects of society. In 2025, movies do not generally occupy that space, but look to the success of Sinners, and Final Destination Bloodlines, and any number of other surprising hits over the last couple of years, and an answer begins to form.
People are hungry for movies, for cinema, for movie theatres. They’re demonstrating that hunger. It’s a hunger most people probably don’t even know they have, but it’s there, that longing for a specific kind of social connection the movies are best at. It can be reduced down to the water cooler, but it’s more than just having something to shoot the shit about. Movies are something to be a part of, but in order to get back to that reality, the hunger for them needs to be stoked and fed.
Letterboxd launched over a decade ago, and in that time it has steadily grown in stature as a great social media platform, and an amazing hub for the proliferation of cinephilia. The app, on which users can log, rate, review, and list movies they watch, brings a happy democracy to cinema appreciation, and the proof is felt in sold out rep screenings, physical media successes, and notable shifts in the accepted canon. Still, Letterboxd is a purpose-built app for a specific set of interests reaching a mostly insular group. Having Charli XCX on there is a great boon, but that’s not enough. It might preserve cinema and foster deeper relationships to it. It might make movies cooler, which is no small feat, but it’s not saving cinema. Not on its own.
Enter: TikTok.
I have no empirical data on this, but I’m convinced that TikTok (in concert with Letterboxd) is saving cinema. When I first started perusing TikTok, I was dismayed by the film content (FilmTok!) I was seeing. Banal observations about movies by unsophisticated creators as likely to be mad at Martin Scorsese for insulting Marvel movies as they were to actually recommend something good. That hit an inflection point, though, as the popularity of Letterboxd’s own Four Favourites series really started taking off. Not even made expressly for TikTok, the videos, often done on red carpets, asking stars and filmmakers for their four favourite movies, collided in a beautiful way with FilmTok. Not merely good content, the videos inspired a real sea change in how TikTokers approached movies. Some had tried to make a whole thing out of artists’ supposedly fancy or pretentious tastes, picking movies the adverage person might not have seen or heard of. The backlash to those videos was swift and harsh. Users and other creators drew a line in the sand: cinema appreciation is good. Full stop.
The result has been a lot more videos that, if not attempting to ape the viral qualities of Letterboxd’s format, match it by placing the focus on movies. Not goofy Jimmy Fallon-esque games, but movies. The whole reason anyone is there in the first place. For too long now, in the age of YouTube virality and late-night shenanigans, movie marketing has been practically embarassed of movies. Talk about anything but the movies. Make the stars seem approachable, because that'll sell a movie apparently. Have them be silly or funny on TV. Surely that’ll get people to shell out the cost of a movie ticket at their local multiplex. There was no real logic to this, and worse than that, by disconnecting these actors from the movies they’re in, relying on “IP” as much as possible for that, Hollywood has been practically incapable of producing new movie stars. Real movie stars. Stars that have an aura onscreen that carries offscreen as well. Instead, they’re just actors who are funny in viral clips.
Videos like the ones Kevin McCarthy put out, though, operate on a different logic entirely. They are about movies and moviemaking. They aim to both demystify filmmaking while preserving the mystique of The Movies. Before Sinners came out, Ryan Coogler teamed up with Kodak to produce a 10-minute explainer video for the various formats his movie was shot on and would be projected on. It’s pure nerd shit, but it went viral, and not just with nerds. Watch the video, and it’s easy to see why.
For ten minutes, Coogler takes viewers on a tour through film formats in really basic, easily understandable terms. “Sinners was shot on the big boy format, entirely,” he explains at one point. “This is what we call ‘large format’ in motion picture photography. This is 65mm. Crazy enough, it’s the same material as this Super8 right here, just wider.” His spirit is infectious, and that infectiousness invites people to really think about film, about how movies are made, and what they’re actually getting when they go out to the movie theatre to experience something like Sinners.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, where Coogler’s video also went viral, creators run the gamut. Some are big enough to nab interview with the likes of Christopher Nolan, asking cool, thoughtful, in-the-weeds questions about the moviemaking process that delight the artists they’re talking to and the viewer in turn. Others stick to a more simple influencer approach, recommending and reviewing movies. But not just big, mainstream blockbusters. These kids are out here discussing and recommending Come and See, and Stalker, and bananas Czech versions of Beauty and the Beast from the ‘70s that I’d never even heard of. They’re not playing around. It’s film lovers discovering movies and sharing them, putting the focus back where it should have been all along, in a far more accessible place than the pits of Film Twitter.
The results speak for themselves. Not every movie will be Sinners, or Oppenheimer, or Barbie, or even Friendship, which has been its own kind of success on a much smaller scale. Still, there’s something bubbling up. What TikTok and other social media platforms are now doing, in concert with Letterboxd, is stoking the moviegoing appetite. Movies are becoming a part of the conversation again, and moviegoing is becoming exciting again. I can’t remember the last time I had so many non-cinephiles in my life hitting me up to say, “Hey, do I have to go see Sinners in theatres?” or, “I hear I have to check out the new Final Destination,” or, “When can we go see Materialists?” This is how it happens. How it begins, at the very least. Salvation.