Several months ago, during an Oscar campaign far more memorable than the movie it was promoting, the actor Timothée Chalamet offered up an observation: “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this any more.” Recognizing that he might have just offended some ballet or opera lovers, he added, “I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”
Chalamet went on to reference billion-dollar-grossing blockbusters, such as Oppenheimer and Barbie. Beloved as opera and ballet may be, they have a niche audience. I have never, for instance, witnessed gaggles of girlfriends dress like birds to catch a Swan Lake performance the way millions of women swathed themselves in pink to see Barbie.
But what people who were annoyed by the ham-fisted comment may have missed—what Chalamet himself missed—is that he is already working in a field of narrowing cultural relevance. Theatrical movie releases have been on the decline since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, dropping from 910 releases in 2019 to 670 in 2025. Box-office sales are shrinking. People are still streaming movies at home, but studios are worried. Feature films are getting longer overall, but scriptwriters are under pressure to keep acts short, with faster cuts designed to keep viewers focused. Chalamet’s comment came in response to the actor Matthew McConaughey, who was lamenting that studios have been trimming first acts to “get to the point,” at the expense of story building. Chalamet was saying that he sympathized with the impulse to adapt in order to keep drawing audiences to the movies.
[Read: The attention-span panic]
But it may be too late. The movies were once a working- and middle-class pleasure—cheap Nickelodeon theaters sprung up in the early 1900s in cities dense with immigrants. By the Jazz Age, “movie palaces” brought in wealthy patrons too, and for decades, the cinema was an all-American activity. But today, affluent people are the most likely to say they’ve gone to a movie recently, whereas low-income people are the least likely. In one survey, 78 percent of respondents said that they considered going to the movies a luxury. Meanwhile, millions of people have started watching micro-dramas on TikTok.
This may be less a matter of changing tastes than a matter of time and money. I don’t just mean the money it costs to pay for movie tickets and streaming services, at a time when Americans are stretching for gas and eggs. (Last year, the cost of streaming increased almost 20 percent, well above the 2.7 percent inflation rate.) I don’t just mean studios’ money-saving turn to generative AI, which will inevitably lead to a decline in the quality of films. I’m talking about what not having money does to your time, and your ability to spend it.
Who can and cannot sit down to watch a movie may seem like a low-stakes issue, but it’s not. Everyone is struggling to get off their phones and pay attention, but some are struggling more than others. The ability to focus is a class issue, and the attention span is undergoing a class divide.
The average American reports checking their phone nearly 200 times a day. Everyone—blue-collar moms, college students, CEOs—suffers from the distractions of carrying around the pinging, blinking pocket-size casinos that our phones have become. While our attention spans have shrunk, however, our brains have not fundamentally changed. Focus, it appears, is a recoverable asset that can be retrieved by shutting out the noise and leaving the casino. And that is much easier for high rollers to do.
Money offers the ability to buy expensive gadgets such as second, basic phones and “bricks” that can make smartphones temporarily dumb. But it also means access to resources that don’t look like resources at all: stable work, consistent schedules, chunks of leisure time, agency over how to structure your day. The ability to block out time to focus on emails, make to-do lists, or do in-depth work. To meditate, exercise, or go outside. To commit three hours to seeing a movie in a theater (or a ballet or an opera). These are things that economically stable individuals take for granted, but that evade many struggling Americans.
The unemployment rate is hovering around 4.2 percent. But if you add the “functionally unemployed”—which includes anyone making less than a living wage ($26,000 a year) and anyone who wants but can’t get 35 hours or more of guaranteed work a week—then that figure rises to about 25 percent. Nearly 30 percent of Americans are employed in gig work, which promises flexibility and freedom but is more commonly defined by a lack of steady hours and the need to constantly be on call.
Americans are spending their days hustling and waiting for the opportunity to hustle, their days broken up into unpredictable units of work and languishing. That’s stressful, and stress limits the ability to retain information and focus. In this way, precarity reduces attention spans. And the phone is always right there, whenever and wherever, offering a perfect form of mindless entertainment when your mind is on so many other things.
Enter: the micro-drama.
These soapy shows are made up of minute-long episodes meant to be watched vertically on your phone. They’re fast-moving and designed to hook viewers quickly. Relying heavily on tropes, they are more telenovela than Scorsese. Recently, one show titled Screen Time, from Issa Rae’s production company, garnered 75 million views in a week—on TikTok and on TikTok’s micro-drama app, PineDrama. The series, which has 57 parts, tells the story of two couples on a double date that descends into chaos after a mysterious figure hacks their personal devices and forces them to reveal their secrets to each other.
An estimated 28 million people are watching shows on PineDrama, and it’s one of many micro-drama platforms. Who are these viewers? Many are women, many are Gen Z, and many are people of color. While representation of women and minorities has declined in traditional films, a number of micro-drama platforms focus on diverse creators and casts. Two, Fanbase and Minivela, were specifically designed to showcase Black- and Latino-driven content.
In China, where micro-dramas quickly become a major phenomenon, producers have been explicit about whom they’re targeting: the working class. David Kwok, the CEO of the Singapore-based production company Tiny Island, told the BBC that the Cinderella and Horatio Alger storylines of many micro-dramas “feed people’s needs and fantasies, especially for the blue-collar crowd.”
[From the August 2026 issue: The end of reading is here]
The rise of micro-dramas coincides with the rise of AI, and in China, more than 95 percent of the micro-dramas released early this year were AI-generated. Screen Time is a human-led affair—human actors filmed by camerapeople. But PineDrama offers AI shows too, and they may become the norm here as well.
All of this makes me fear that we’re watching the creation of a cultural divide, a situation in which the art of film is created for the white and affluent, and everyone else is served up micro-drama kitsch—stories of women and Black and Hispanic people, relegated to coffee-break-length narratives cheaply churned out by AI.
I do see one bright spot to the micro-drama trend. It signals the persistence of the human desire to engage with narrative storytelling. Social media isn’t meeting this desire, but many people don’t feel like they have time to sit through a two-hour movie. A micro-drama can provide the satisfaction of a resolved story in an arc that lasts less than half an hour. And yet I doubt that satisfaction can match the pleasure of sticking with an epic novel or a movie to the end, a pleasure that is dependent on the investment of deep attention.
I grew up catching cheap matinees at the Angelika theater in New York, an art-house cinema in the Village. Sometimes we’d go to $3 movies at a second-run theater in Midtown—big blockbuster films that everyone in the country had already seen. Sometimes we’d spend the whole day in the dark cool theater, watching multiple films and escaping from the stress of working-class teenage city life. Across the country, other teenagers were doing much the same—participating in shared moments of monoculture, the exact kind that I suspect Chalamet wants to be a part of.
Few things are more American to me than the Hollywood movie. Ballet and opera were always art forms to entertain the wealthy. But for most of their history, the movies have been a mass-market enterprise. That will change if the attention span becomes a status symbol. The art form once enjoyed by many will be reserved for those who can—and can afford to—sit still.
The post The Attention-Span Class Divide appeared first on The Atlantic.
