Netflix’s CEO Wants You Lonely and Miserable

‘T he Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” President Trump declared on Sunday, announcing his plan to impose a 100 percent tariff on films produced abroad. The proposal shook Hollywood, but it reflects something millions of Americans already feel: cinema has lost its cultural power. It no longer shapes the public imagination the way it once did. This isn’t just an industry in decline — it’s a ritual being hollowed out.

Whether or not Trump ever had a Citizen Kane poster hanging in his apartment — as last year’s glib The Apprentice biopic suggests — one thing’s clear: The man genuinely loves movies. A friend of the president once told me he’s a real cinephile, and you can hear that passion in his instincts. Whatever one makes of his tariff proposal, Trump seems to grasp something many in power have forgotten: films matter. They’re not just products; they’re shared experiences, moral touchstones, vessels of collective memory. He’s right to sound the alarm. But their collapse isn’t just economic — it’s cultural and spiritual, beginning the moment a society stops telling stories that move the soul and starts mistaking art for content.

At last month’s TIME100 Summit, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos gave voice to the mentality driving this unraveling when he called moviegoing “outdated” because Americans can’t walk to a theater — so why bother going? It’s the outlook of a man who saw the 2020 lockdowns not as a crisis, but as a prototype — a future where stories are streamed, not shared.

What Sarandos is promoting is much worse than self-serving corporate spin — it’s cultural euthanasia masquerading as innovation. It is a profoundly antisocial, antihuman ideology that deems obsolete anything that can’t be summoned like an Uber Eats order. Backyard BBQs? Too inefficient. Visiting granny? Not scalable. Sitting through a movie with strangers? Practically medieval. If you can’t do it alone in sweatpants while checking your phone, it’s probably not worth doing.

Box office returns are hardly a reliable measure of artistic value, but they do speak to our drift. In 2024, domestic ticket sales sank to $8.7 billion, a 23.5 percent drop from 2019, the last pre-pandemic benchmark. Annual admissions plummeted from 1.3 billion to just 800 million. Even the momentum of smash hits like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine faded fast. Theaters are open — but, more and more, they echo.

Ironically, Netflix helped build the very void it now treats as inevitable — a cultural ecosystem built not to nourish but to numb. This is the same company that lobbied to sideline The Count of Monte Cristo — a film that could have galvanized audiences beyond Europe — to prop up its gaudy narco-musical Emilia Pérez. Meanwhile, it relegates pre-1970 films — the golden age of cinema — to a digital shredder. In their place, with some exceptions, the platform is dominated by anti-art: focus-grouped “content” engineered for short attention spans.

It may be a profitable model in Silicon Valley (for now), but it’s a cultural dead end. By reducing film to just another digital distraction, Netflix also hastens its own irrelevance — because when movies are stripped down to mindless escapism, people will always choose whatever demands the least of them.

The erosion of cinema’s communal power is just one symptom of a broader spiritual void. Robert Nisbet captured this deeper longing when he observed that “the quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature — needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.” Without those things, he warned, material comfort alone cannot prevent disconnection. And in our hyper-connected age, alienation may be the only thing keeping pace with bandwidth.

What’s most demoralizing is that none of this was inevitable. We weren’t doomed to live in a world of dwindling meaning; this was a choice — one that traded wonder for convenience and robbed us of something sacred. For over a century, American cinema didn’t just entertain — it told the world who we were. As Christian Blauvelt chronicles in Hollywood Victory, film has long served as a vehicle for projecting American ideals, shaping national identity, and offering moral and emotional clarity in times of uncertainty.

As the late Pope Francis recalled in his autobiography, it was the same day that he watched Federico Fellini’s La Strada that he decided to become a priest — a reminder that film once functioned as a kind of secular liturgy: a shared moral and emotional experience capable of molding the moral imagination. And it didn’t require the asceticism of Bresson or the metaphysical weight of Bergman to do it. A film as gentle as David Lynch’s The Straight Story — just a man on a tractor traveling cross-country to reconcile with his brother — carries more moral gravity than any Twitter tantrum. TikTok can’t do that, and influencer grifters don’t want you feeling anything other than rage, to keep your thumb twitching and money flowing to their pockets.

“Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows,” once wrote Roger Scruton. This was the promise of American cinema — not just to entertain but to elevate. To help us make sense of heartbreak, duty, and grace. To transform the everyday into something meaningful — and memorable.

The president is right about one thing: Something is dying. The deeper impulse — to reclaim cinema not just as an industry but as a cultural inheritance — is worth taking seriously. We don’t need more binge-watching à la Covid, whereby stories blur together and time dissolves. We need movies that ask us to pause, to reflect, to gather. That’s how a culture remembers who it is — not by scrolling in solitude but by sitting shoulder to shoulder with family, friends, and strangers, letting a story move through the room like a shared breath.

As the newly elected chairman of the Kennedy Center, President Trump now holds a rare platform to help revitalize one of our greatest cultural treasures. I do not know if tariffs will save Tinseltown, but I do know that cinema is worth saving — not just because it entertains but because, when a nation stops gathering to hear stories, it doesn’t merely lose its theaters. It loses its memory. Its imagination. Its soul.

And no algorithm — no matter how intricate — can bring that back to life.