Steven B. Zwickel
July 6, 2026
I used to be a real movie lover. Not any more.
A few weeks ago, I found a bunch of my old yearly planners and started browsing through them. Among the dental appointments (not enough, I now realize) and the job interviews (far too many), were the names of movies I’d gone to see. Year after year,, I’d gone to a movie theater 2 or 3 times or more almost every month.
Sad to say, as I write this, it has now been almost 3 years since I last went out to see a movie, and I really hated the picture.
What happened? I got older, of course, and I am no longer part of the target audience movie producers crave. But I think it goes beyond that; the movies have changed from artistic adventures to marketable consumer goods.
I’m a Baby Boomer and grew up at a time when movies were only available on the big screen at a theater. We had a black and white set, but the studios prevented movies from being shown on television until the middle of the 1950s. One of the very first times movies were shown on TV was “Million Dollar Movie” on WOR-TV (Channel 9 in New York), which showed the same movie twice every evening. While it was sometimes a struggle to get permission to watch TV on a school night {OF COURSE I’ll do all my homework first, momma!}, whenever we could, my sister and I would devour these films. We watched, sometimes twice in one night.
So I grew up to become a lover of movies and I think I must have seen hundreds. In Brooklyn we lived near a theater where you could watch two movies for a dollar and when I moved to Wisconsin I was lucky enough to live in a town with a one dollar theater.
Some time in the early 1980s we started renting movies on VHS tapes and watching them at home. These do not show up in any of my planners, but I know we did this, especially at holiday time, when we rented “family” movies. The VHS cassettes eventually gave way to DVDs, which we would play on my home computer before we got a DVD player.
We survived the Covid pandemic by borrowing free DVDs from the public library. I will always be grateful to the library for helping us stay sane in a crazy time.
But then something changed. After the pandemic, even though it was safe to go to the movie theaters, I couldn’t find a reason to go. I studied the names, actors, and plot summaries of the new movies, but nothing appealed to me.
Prequels or sequels, which seem to dominate the new releases, don’t interest me. You can learn more about the worst sequels (Jaws. The Karate Kid. Speed. Paul Blart: Mall Cop, etc.) at <https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/worst-sequels-of-all-time/> Somebody ought to put up a big sign in Hollywood, “If you don’t have a new idea, don’t make a movie.”
As if I needed another reason not to go see a movie in the theater, a few months ago [Apr 27, 2026] the Wall Street Journal ran this headline, “The $50 Movie Ticket Has Arrived.”
I put together a list of the types of movies I am not interested in watching and realized that it pretty much eliminated everything playing in the theaters.
I am not interested in:
🎥 Rom-coms: I’ve found my true love and have no interest in watching mis-matched couples battle for 2 hours on screen. If you ask me, none can compete with “Bringing Up Baby.”
🎥 Coming-of-age: They can’t pay me enough to watch awkward teens dealing with adolescence. Immaturity is not entertaining.
🎥 Coming out: People who are not happy with the way they are can and should try something else to see if that is any better. I feel for them, really I do, but not enough to sit through hours watching other people’s internal struggles over sexual orientation.
🎥 Comic book movies: I was discouraged from reading comics when I was a kid and never developed a taste for them. If there really are super-heros, where the hell have they been all these years? If I had super powers, I’d send all the re-makes, sequels, and spin-offs of these movies to a distant galaxy.
🎥 One-man army: It was fun, at first, to watch Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Liam Neeson, and Steven Seagal take on the bad guys. But, like the action figures people used to buy for boys {“They are NOT dolls!!!”} they are one-trick ponies. James (Sean Connery) Bond was different, because he had a sense of humor, but even he got stale and repetitive. The Bond movies became circus acrobat performances with fancy guns—the improvised weapons used to be amusing, but even those became clichés.
🎥 Pseudo-history: take any episode in history and jazz it up with modern-day sensibility (preferably by adding sex—straight, bi-, whatever), add loud, dramatic orchestral music (preferably loud enough to drown out the mundane dialog) and you have an “important” movie. Wake me when it’s over. The old “swords and sandals” epics are still fun to watch and you can laugh at the stilted acting and oodles of ketchup that pour out of every wound.
🎥 Sci-Fi and Horror movies: Oh no! Don’t open that door/hatch! If you hear spooky music, well…..
🎥 Disney princesses, etc.: I am not, and have never been, the target audience for these films. I miss the days when Disney was subversive, with TV shows and movies about rebels and anti-heroes who weren’t afraid to take on the system. I remember Davy Crockett (Fess Parker), Zorro / Don Diego de la Vega (Guy Williams), Daniel Boone (Dewey Martin), and The Swamp Fox/Francis Marion (Leslie Nielsen). Disney also made shows about “The Magnificent Rebel” Ludwig van Beethoven, Scottish cattle thief Rob Roy, and English outlaw Robin Hood. Is it any wonder that the Baby Boomers became anti-establishment rebels?
🎥 Bio-pics: These re-work a pop culture icon into a great hero, who overcame (or failed to overcome) one or more of the following: poverty, child abuse, sexual abuse, drug abuse, alcoholism, a physical disability, harsh criticism, losing everything to a con man, wartime trauma, racial/ethnic/religious stigma and discrimination and make a movie about a modern-day hero. Maybe some people like knowing others had it worse off than they do. I’m not cold-hearted, but these kinds of stories don't interest me.
🎥 Redemption/Quest: An ex-con/ex-sheriff/ex-cop is trying to atone for some evil deed he did in the past and agrees to help a tough woman/disabled man/lost child find out what happened to her/his family, meeting a band of truly terrifying killers and killing a lot of people along the way. The ex-whatever is hoping that, by helping with the quest, he will be redeemed. There may be sexual tension between the ex-whatever and the person he’s trying to help, but who cares?
If you add a bit of obsession, this category includes the “Sane-guy-going Crazy” plot where the audience is treated to watching someone go bonkers for two hours. What fun!
🎥 Smart kids/stupid grownups: Long before their idiot parents realize it, their brilliant children know that their folks were meant for each other. Sometimes the kids plot against the adults, sometimes they plot to bring them together. So cute! I could gag.
We have a streaming service, and can find Pizzaflix on YouTube, so we have loads of really good old movies we can watch that we haven’t seen before. (By old I mean from before 1930.)
They’re mostly in black and white and they rock (most of them; some are stinkers, I admit.) But they are entertaining and there is no one sitting behind me commenting—in a loud, annoying voice—offering uninformed opinions about every scene, actor, costume, and song.
All of which leaves me with exactly no reason to go out to the movies.
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