Paul Schrader has never been interested in comforting anyone, least of all himself. The screenwriter who gave us Travis Bickle's mirror monologue and the director who sent Ethan Hawke spiraling into eco-theological despair in First Reformed has now delivered a verdict on his own medium: cinema, as a cultural force, is finished.

In recent remarks, Schrader — who at 78 remains one of the few working American auteurs with an unbroken line to the New Hollywood era — argued that film no longer occupies the central position it held in American life from roughly the 1960s through the early 2000s. It has become, in his telling, one entertainment option among many, competing with streaming algorithms, video games, TikTok, and whatever else captures the fragmenting attention of a post-monoculture audience.

The last honest man in the room

What distinguishes Schrader's pessimism from the usual festival-circuit lamentations is its lack of special pleading. He is not arguing that his kind of cinema deserves rescue while superhero franchises burn. He is saying the entire enterprise — from Taxi Driver to Top Gun: Maverick — has slipped from the center of gravity. The theatrical experience that once functioned as a shared American ritual now exists as a niche enthusiasm, like opera or literary fiction.

This is, of course, heresy in an industry that still measures success by opening-weekend grosses and awards-season campaigns. But Schrader has spent a half-century writing about men who cannot lie to themselves about their own obsolescence. It would be strange if he exempted his profession.

The numbers behind the mood

Schrader's intuition tracks with observable trends. Theatrical attendance in North America has never recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and the films that do break through tend to be either franchise tentpoles or cultural phenomena that function more as events than as movies. Meanwhile, the streaming wars have produced a glut of content that trains audiences to treat film as background noise — something to half-watch while scrolling.

The prestige sector that once sustained directors like Schrader has contracted. Mid-budget adult dramas, the bread and butter of 1990s cinema, now struggle to secure theatrical releases. When they do get made, they often debut on streaming platforms where they vanish into algorithmic obscurity within weeks.

Our take

Schrader is not wrong, and that is precisely why his remarks sting. Cinema's cultural centrality was always historically contingent — a product of 20th-century technology, urban geography, and the absence of competing screens. What Schrader mourns is not the death of an art form but the end of its monopoly on the collective imagination. Films will continue to be made, some of them brilliant. But the era in which a single movie could define a generation's self-understanding is probably over. The honest response is not to rage against streaming or nostalgia-bait audiences back into theaters. It is to make work that justifies its own existence, even if fewer people are watching. Schrader, characteristically, seems to have made his peace with that.