That sounds about right to me. And except for the small issue that I don't really have a full perspective on the industry and therefore can't really trust my judgement, it seems like both of the below statements (first from your optimists and second from your pessimists) invite actual evidence:

>So then,
>these Marvel actors/directors will have more clout when they
>want to try to get more artistic endeavors funded, similar to
>what Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have by and large
>done since the Twilight movies. If Marvel movies make big
>money, the rising tide lifts all boats."

>Instead of making
>good movies, they're just trying to make the next Marvel,
>which isn't going to go well and will force everything other
>than 5 mil budget horror movies and the odd Oscar bait flick
>out of cinemas and into streaming services.

So which one is happening? It really feels like the latter, but I'm willing to be convinced. And I'll also add that the former view isn't all upside either, as "clout" indicates a proven commodity. So the movies that will be permitted to step outside the new Marvel paradigm are given that privilege. They haven't taken it by the force of their talent. So we'll never know the thing we're missing - aggressive, reckless movies that perceive risk differently than "losing money."

Part of my frustration here is that getting old means losing valued methods of finding new things to watch or hear faster than I'm gaining them. I watched "The Living End" a couple months ago on Criterion because I was bored and it wasn't very good but it was certainly aggressive and reckless. I guess it's not like movies like that aren't being made, but they're so severely siloed that a 43 year old dullard like me is never going to find them. But in 1992, Greg Araki was just like "here's a movie."

>I don't really
>watch any of it, because I'm a movie guy through and through,
>but it's there.)

There's a smarter, younger version of me that would want to talk and talk and talk about this until we arrive at some way of understanding that watching movies is a fundamentally different activity (not better or worse, except by individual taste) than watching a TV show. That smarter and younger version would maybe lean on Eliade's sacred/profane distinction, where movies are epiphanic disruptions to our life. Our consumption of them, particularly in theaters, is liturgical. We file into seats, wait for the lights to go down, observe carefully ritualized actions to gesture at respect for others' experience. TV is quotidian in the sense that is ongoing, built according to schedules that gesture at preserving our convenience.

Or not. Maybe that's silly. But since in the next paragraph you head straight to in-theater watching, maybe it's not totally off-base:

>So old people die and are replaced with people who don't give a
>shit about the theatrical experience. So movie theaters march
>their slow death into being a novelty, streaming becomes king,
>and pop culture increasingly just doesn't include movies at
>all. As a lover of film, all of this is, of course, insanely
>depressing.

Huh. Nothing ever dies at the rate or in the fashion that we expect. So maybe there's an altweibersommer for theaters out there. Like a couple decades where the experience of going to a theater is more comparable to seeing live music than to the experience of going to a Sunday matinee with a sticky floor in 1990 to see "Almost an Angel" because of how much you loved Paul Hogan in the Crocodile Dundee films.

>Then again, as someone currently working in the TV movie
>space, it's not like I'm exactly on the front lines fighting
>the good fight, lol.

Nice. If you'd have gotten a job on The Good Fight, then you could say that's what you were doing and nobody would know the difference. Luckily, as I assume you know, nobody who needs a job to live in the world is individually responsible for any broad systematic trends.