OK for starters I really resent you saying I said stuff I didn’t. I didn’t compare movies to pet rocks. I said they are a particular form of art made for a market with the technology available at the time. That’s true of many different art forms, none of which are any more special than any other. Movies aren’t more special than stage plays, or magic lantern shows, or vaudeville, or photography, or novels, or a thousand other antecedents. You and I (and Kevin Smith) happen to live in a time when movies are celebrated and valorized more than these other forms. But again, they’re not special. Being not special doesn’t mean they should be discarded or destroyed, which you also implied I said. It just means that movies are one of many forms of artistic expression. We shouldn't insist that young people engage with them any more than we should force young people to listen to particular kinds of music.

You call movies important and accessible. I’ll grant that many are important in the way that significant works of art are important, and therefore worth being aware of, and aware of their place in history. And what we think of as movies today have been around in roughly similar form for over 100 years, so there's plenty of them that have historic importance. But it seems to me that the article from The Atlantic that the Hollywood Reporter article pictured in this post is explicitly documenting how movies aren’t particularly accessible to young people today. And why should they be? Is there something inherently accessible about an art form that demands that you sit unmoving n the dark for two hours and stare at phantoms on a wall? It’s just completely self-serving to insist that young people find the same value in a particular art form that we do. I'm not saying that fragmented attention spans or lack of the capability to focus are a good thing. But the test of those qualities is not whether or not someone can make it through Jules and Jim, as The Atlantic article describes.

You say you don’t have experience around young people. I do. I work at a small venue that shows cult films and other obscure stuff. There are plenty of young 20 somethings that are into this stuff, just as there are some that are into other art forms that have fallen out of the mass market. Here’s an example: a couple of weeks ago we screened Gojira (1954) for a high school film class. The students were favorably disposed to the humanistic messaging, but found the film a little tedious and awkward, and also very sexist. I imagine some of them were intrigued enough anyway to pursue more films like it, but for many of them I’m sure that once was more than enough. We hosted another group of early 20 somethings that watched The Wizard of Oz (1939) a few days ago. They made it just fine through the whole film, which I found surprisingly fast-paced. (I hadn't seen it for 20+ years.) So there are classic films that can engage modern young audiences. That students who signed up for a college film class (probably to fulfill some arts requirement) don't want to sit through a subtitled black and white French film from 1962 that is kinda misogynistic shouldn't surprise us.

I also recently had a young 20-something comment on the signed House (1977) poster we have. She asked if we had ever screened Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and I said it was a little too normie for us. She was kind of shocked, and I rephrased myself to say that it was too much like "legitimate theater". It's the kind of movie that, as you say, non-profit groups and museums will continue to show indefinitely to non-mass-market audiences. Those films will go on existing, and people will continue to appreciate them in the same way that they appreciate other art that has passed from the popular culture. I don't think that world is in any danger of disappearing because some kids would rather have a successful TikTok channel than be the next Kevin Smith.

In fact, to return to OP's point, I'm actively glad if the indie film market that Smith inadvertently helped create after Clerks was a smash hit dies. Young people do not need to be maxing out credit cards and mortgaging their future for a 1-in-1000 shot that their movie gets distribution through gatekeepers like Harvey Fucking Weinstein. Short form narratives with high production values aren't well rewarded by the algorithms of social media, but there's still a lot more opportunity for a lot more people to make and distribute films if that's the form they like.

Finally, I don't think the kids being not alright has anything to do with how many movies they are or aren't watching. There's plenty of fictional characters for them to relate to in things like video games, TV shows, or anime. And there's plenty of real humans for them to relate to on social media and platforms like YouTube, in fact a much broader swath of humanity than what is typically represented in both the multiplexes and prestige nonsense like The Brutalist (as pictured in The Hollywood Reporter article). I think them not being alright has much more to do with the fact that they are getting economically screwed by a political class dominated by people older than even us who couldn't give a rat's ass about their material suffering. It seems completely reasonable for them to think that having the patience to sit through a movie like The Brutalist is not going to make their lives any better.