Entertainment

Swarms of Termite Moviemakers Have Made Cinema More Personal

Screens have become less passive, more participatory, and more open to all kinds of moving pictures.


Jesse Walker | From the May 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson; Source images: iStock)

The walls that once separated TV shows, feature films, viral videos, and holiday snapshots are collapsing. All those forms are (or can be) movies, in the original sense of the word: They're moving pictures. And now they are more and more likely to be moving on the same screens.

This convergence has been in progress for a while. But it crystallized with the announcement last year that YouTube, long associated with phones and laptops, had surpassed Disney to become the company with the most U.S. viewers on television sets. The biggest player in American TV today is a hub where you can rent Hollywood hits, watch pirated sitcom reruns for free, or enjoy thousands of amateur clips in the vein of "Charlie Bit My Finger"—not to mention all the programming posted by YouTube-native celebrities, some of whom attract larger audiences than anyone on CNN or Fox News.

With all those moving pictures packed into the same place, you might find yourself thinking about them as a whole, not as separate art forms with some superficial similarities. Yes, there are differences in their production structure—particularly with TV, a medium with roots not just in cinema but in radio and vaudeville. But they are all part of the same continuum, each influencing the others. And when you examine them as a continuum, the last two decades look different from some of the standard stories our cultural pundits like to tell.

In the 2010s, for example, critics often complained that mature midbudget movies were dying out, their habitat now dominated by superhero blockbusters. But in retrospect, those dramas didn't dwindle so much as they migrated to other places: Cable TV and then streaming sites made room for artistically serious visual storytelling. In the process, they liberated storytellers from both the more rigid length of a feature film and the more rigid frequency of a network show.

More recently, some critics have bemoaned the end of the so-called Peak TV era. After a long increase, the number of shows started declining, and so did the percentage of those programs that reward close attention rather than serving as dumbed-down background wallpaper (though both numbers are surely far higher now than they were 20 years ago). But the same period saw an explosion of low-budget videos on user-driven platforms, many of them entertaining and some of them bona fide art. The sequel to Peak TV is Peak Content: an age when most of the public routinely carries a device that can shoot a movie and instantly share it with the world, and when new tools have made F/X and editing far easier as well.

It is fashionable to bemoan short-form video today, to damn YouTube and TikTok as trivial, addictive, stupid, and perhaps some sort of Fu Manchu mind-control conspiracy. If you point out that people said the same things about television, one common retort is that those old-school critics were........

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