Stop Blaming Netflix. The Movie Industry Has Nobody to Blame but Itself.

You’ve heard the excuses a hundred times. The movie market is dying because of streaming. Because of TikTok. Because of video games. Because of short-form content stealing everyone’s attention. Luo Yonghao, the Chinese entrepreneur turned commentator, recently echoed this line: “There’s no need to be sarcastic toward filmmakers. The market is down because streaming, short videos, and games have split the audience.”

It sounds reasonable. It’s also a convenient lie.

The movie industry isn’t losing to video games or Netflix. It’s losing to its own contempt for the people who buy tickets.

Let me tell you what actually happened. I’ve been watching this space for years. Every time a blockbuster flops, the same narrative pops up: “People just don’t go to theaters anymore.” But that’s not true. People still go to theaters — for the right experience. They went to see Barbie in droves. They went to Oppenheimer. They packed houses for Spider-Verse and Top Gun: Maverick. What they stopped doing is giving a damn about lazy, formulaic, audience-insulting garbage.

One comment on the Zhihu thread put it bluntly: “Anyone making excuses for the Chinese film industry at this point is either a dinosaur or a waste. There’s zero self-reflection, zero respect for the audience. The whole industry needs a cleanout.” That’s from a user named MaxWang. He got nearly 300 upvotes. Because he’s right.

Real voices beat abstract research every time. Another user, Sun Yi, pointed out the irony: “Luo Yonghao says it’s all about competition. But Lu Shiheng says the industry is making movies that earn money from men while insulting men — destroying the couple audience base.” The reality isn’t a single cause. It’s a feedback loop of complacency and disrespect.

Here’s the twist most analysts miss: the movie industry’s real competitor is not other movies, not streaming, not games. It’s the entire attention economy. And the only way to win in a zero-sum attention game is to offer something uniquely experiential — the social ritual of a shared cinematic moment, the immersion of a dark room and a giant screen. But you can’t sell that if your product is a soulless franchise extension or a sequel nobody asked for.

So when Luo Yonghao says “don’t blame the filmmakers,” I say: blame them. Blame the executives who greenlight safe mediocrity. Blame the directors who think audiences are too stupid to notice a lazy plot. Blame an entire industry that has spent a decade training audiences to wait for streaming — because the theatrical experience was no longer worth the price of admission.

Neutrality is death. I’m taking a side: the audience is right, and the industry is wrong.

This isn’t about Chinese cinema alone. It’s global. Hollywood is doing the same dance — blaming cord-cutters while pumping out reboots and sequels that nobody asked for. The difference is that in China, the drop is sharper because the industry was built on a speculative bubble of screens and subsidies. Now the bubble is popping, and instead of apologizing, they’re pointing fingers.

What should happen instead? Stop making excuses. Start making movies that respect the audience’s time, intelligence, and money. No half-baked CGI. No bait-and-switch marketing. No treating ticket buyers as cash cows to be milked. The moment you treat your audience as partners rather than marks, they’ll come back.

One sentence to screenshot and send to your film-buff friend: “The movie industry’s real enemy isn’t streaming. It’s contempt for its own audience.”

I saw this firsthand at a screening last year. A packed theater for an indie film that had no stars, no explosions, just a story that made people laugh and cry. Afterwards, nobody checked their phones. They were talking to each other. That’s the magic that movies can still create — if they bother to try.

Don’t give me the ‘streaming killed cinema’ speech. Give me a movie that makes me forget my phone exists. That’s the only competition that matters.