In its time, it was the dominant popular entertainment. Communal, expensive, aspirational. You dressed up, you went out, you shared the experience with strangers in the dark. Stars became cultural icons. The stories it told shaped how generations understood romance and ambition, death and grief.
Then, technology changed. A new screen emerged. It was more convenient, accessible. Democratic. Audiences migrated and attendance fell. Some remained passionate about the old form, forced to make an increasingly familiar argument: that it still mattered, that the experience couldn't be replicated at home, that something irreplaceable would be lost if it disappeared.
The experience became fancier. Ticket prices crept up, and to keep from dying, the art form got smaller.
Timothée Chalamet might think I'm describing opera. I'm actually describing his industry: cinema.
Last week, Chalamet boldly proclaimed the relevance of cinema by contrasting it, recklessly, to ballet and opera. The performing arts world erupted. So did the Internet. The Met shaded the comments on Instagram. Seattle Opera dropped a coupon code and winking discount. Jeopardy got in on the fun. The dancer Misty Copeland pointedly reminded him that he'd borrowed her ballet career to promote his movie. (Copeland will perform at the Oscars Sunday night; Chalamet is nominated for Actor in a Leading Role.)
The pile-on is well deserved, but misses the actual story. Chalamet used opera and ballet as a foil to make movies look modern. The problem is that compared to what's actually capturing attention today, cinema isn't modern, and is quickly starting to look a lot like opera. Timmy's defensiveness is the sound of ego, and of an industry grappling with the same structural change that the performing arts have been navigating for decades.
I work in arts marketing. I've spent a decade and a half building audiences for classical performance, making the case to audiences, sponsors, boards, and journalists that these art forms still matter. Here's what I've learned: the problem is never whether people love stories, music, or spectacle. That's timeless. The problem is where they're watching it.
The desire to watch performance has never waned. When the motion picture arrived, opera didn't die. The town opera house just became the movie palace. Something very similar is happening again, with the audience increasingly picking a seat at home and a screen from their pocket.
Accessible, algorithmically-driven platforms are putting compelling and personalized content in front of Americans, and it's dominating entertainment consumption. Just as the motion picture killed the exclusivity of the live stage, the smartphone and social video are killing the exclusivity of the silver screen. Young viewers under 35 now spend more time watching short-form social video than TV shows and movies combined. This is real competition for the multiplex: infinite, largely free, personalized feeds that never ask you to leave your couch.
In the 1930s, Americans bought more than 30 movie tickets per year. Today, it's barely two. Since 2019, roughly 3,000 U.S. theater screens have gone dark. Actual admissions — not revenue — are down roughly 37%. The pandemic accelerated this decline by an estimated 15 years, but make no mistake: this is a structural shift of the same kind that reshaped opera, ballet, and every dominant entertainment form before them.
The industry's response, amid quiet panic, has been identical to what opera and ballet did a generation ago: premium pricing, fancier venues, smaller and wealthier audiences. In 2025, a movie date night — two tickets and a popcorn — costs an average of $42 nationally and nearly $60 in New York City, rivaling symphony or ballet tickets. Theaters are pivoting to IMAX and other premium formats, dynamic pricing, reserved recliners, craft cocktails, and exclusive events — destination experiences sustained by the loyalty of a smaller, more devoted, and necessarily wealthier audience.1 This is the playbook to which every performing arts organization Chalamet was dismissing has turned, by structural necessity.2
The movies will follow in opera's footsteps: niche, beloved, vital, and smaller. Someone's, not everyone's. That's how it goes for the performing arts. And the organizations Timmy was dismissing have been figuring out how to sustain exactly that kind of audience for generations, 14 cents at a time.