Not long ago, we used to talk about movies in the same tone we reserved for literature, sculpture, or architecture. They were cultural high watermarks — shared myths that carried meaning across time. The best films felt like modern epics, threading together private emotion and public identity. Just as Homer or Tolstoy captured the spirit of their age, a good movie could pin down an entire generation’s psyche in two hours.
At some point, that current thinned. If you're someone who loves film — and has perhaps built friendships around analyzing scene transitions or debating third acts — you probably felt it before you could name it. Around 2019, something shifted. We still had 1917, Parasite, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But after that, it felt as though movies stopped echoing. Films arrived, had a brief conversation on social media, then disappeared. Precious few left any grooves in the culture.
The reasons are layered. Streaming upended decades of economic precedent. The back-end profits — syndication, DVD sales, international re-releases — that once buffered creative risks simply vanished. Instead, platforms chased volume over vision, safe plots over original voices. A studio could spend hundreds of millions on a film and still have less idea than ever of whether it mattered to anyone.
Then, there was the overcorrection. What some simply call “the message.” Instead of films telling stories that happened to carry values, they offered values — identity, equity, critique — with a thin veil of story laid over the top. Many people, whether they said it aloud or not, began to tune out. Not because they disagreed with the values themselves, but because the art had gone missing. Storytelling, especially on screen, works best when values are discovered, not dictated.
And this is why Edington is getting the kind of underground attention that used to belong to early Tarantino or pre-Matrix Wachowskis. It doesn’t just tell the truth — it tells it from within a narrative that feels human, frail, honest. It acknowledges the shape of life since 2020 without boiling it down into slogans. It's the first film in a while that convincingly shows both the online and offline selves we live with. You might not agree with its conclusions, but you can feel the art beating underneath the ideas.
This kind of film feels important not just because of the story it tells, but because of what it signals. Namely, that we're entering a quieter, more generative phase — a post-message phase. Around our team at Dellecod, we talk a lot about cultural signal vs. noise, whether it’s in software, design, or storytelling. The overstated often burns fast and leaves little. Substance, grounded in observation and care, tends to last. Edington feels like it's part of that recovery.
There’s a second beam of hope on the horizon: AI. Much of the attention in AI today goes to prompting and content generation — the fear that tools like Sora or Runway will flood the world with lazy simulations. But on the other end of that lie voices who never had access to cameras, crews, editors, or funding — now able to produce something moving. The barrier between vision and expression is lower than it’s ever been.
Like any leap in tooling, AI will amplify what’s already there. Empty ideas will get louder. But so will the quiet, odd, and insightful ones that used to stay unpublished. Some of us look forward to seeing what a single person with a great story and an open-source toolkit can now make.
There’s irony here too. The most "undeliverable" film in Hollywood — Atlas Shrugged — might finally have a path forward, not through a billion-dollar studio but through curiosity, code, and care. Whatever you think of Ayn Rand, the fact that her story is unwelcome in film today — despite being among the best-selling novels of the last century — tells us how far from risk Hollywood drifted. That risk, it seems, is finally returning in the best possible way: as curiosity, not as contrarianism.
We’re entering a new era. Not one dictated by genre or studio pipeline, but by permission. Comedies are being greenlit again. Directors like Mel Gibson — previously radioactive — are back on set. Even the decision to reboot Naked Gun, a franchise that unapologetically makes fun of everything, speaks volumes.
There is still a wave of movies coming that were built during the height of the "message" era. Many of them — as insiders will quietly admit — will likely stumble at the box office, and not because audiences are cruel, but because they’ve moved on. That wave may crest, but something else is rising behind it.
People still need myths. We still search for stories that help us make sense of our families, our grief, our beliefs, our failures. Film isn’t dead. It just took an ill-fitting detour.
Now, the good ones are starting to appear again. And if the infrastructure of Hollywood can’t catch up fast enough, the rest of us, with our tools, communities, and curiosity, just might.