The Missing Middle: Why Nobody's Making Michael Clayton Anymore.

I love the big screen at the Leicester Square Odeon in London. The renovation was perfect. The seats are welcoming. The screen and the sound I like probably more than the IMAX in Waterloo. It is more like being at a cinema and less like being in an immersive ride. I just bought four tickets for a movie next weekend - £120. Is there a live band playing and free drinks? No. We can only imagine how much the popcorn will cost.

Cinemas have been quietly raising ticket prices for years and nobody seemed to really notice, because the audience that cared about how much it cost had already left.

When this comes up, we immediately start talking about streaming. Netflix killed the multiplex. Disney+ ate everything. But that’s not it. That’s confusing distribution with repositioning a product.

Imagine if Withnail & I came out now?
It would disappear without trace.

When the studios reduced the time in cinemas window from seventy-five days to seventeen during Covid, they trained a new consumer behaviour. We learned that ‘in cinemas now’ meant ‘on my sofa in three weeks.’ I know I reflexively think that way. If I turn on Apple TV, it says it: ‘available to rent on (a date not very far away)’, and that’s before I have even looked at the times it is on at the Ritzy near where I live. That’s not a distribution tweak. That’s a retraining of a cultural habit, and the old habit has not returned.

The real shift is in the shape of the audience. UK admissions peaked at 1.6 billion in 1946, bottomed out around 50 million in the mid-80s1, and now sit at 123.5 million for 2025. That’s 30% below pre-pandemic 2019, with another 2% drop year on year. Box office takings actually rose slightly to £996.8 million2, which tells you something more interesting than the headline: cinemas are getting more revenue out of fewer visits. Fewer people, paying more, on bigger formats. Going to the cinema has stopped being a default and become a choice, a significantly more expensive one.

The lazy version of this argument is that cinema is becoming niche, like opera or ballet. That’s nonsense. People don’t realise how small that end of the arts is. Opera in the UK runs on a few hundred thousand attendances a year, propped up by Arts Council subsidy that gets cut every year. Ballet is smaller. Cinema is still two orders of magnitude bigger, and entirely commercial. The comparison flatters the diagnosis.

The far more honest comparison is gigs. Live music. The artform closest to my heart, that I don’t recognise any more. A sector that has polarised into stadium tours which with a straight face charge £300+ for a ticket, venture-capital-run mega festivals that lift and shift AI-curated lineups across the European continent, and smaller, Guildford Boileroom type venues, fighting every day to keep the doors open. That end of the market is defined by a scrappy battle by artists, some amazing, all guaranteed to lose more money the more venues they play. How many articles have you read by musicians saying that touring is only for rich kids now? Cinema, especially now with generative video, is heading down the same path, a bit more slowly, with much worse music.

What is happening in cinema is that the middle has fallen out. Tentpoles still work: Wicked: For Good, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Jurassic World: Rebirth all cleared their numbers in 2025. Of the UK’s top 20 grossing films last year, seventeen were sequels, franchise instalments, remakes, or video-game adaptations3. (The three exceptions were The Housemaid, Sinners, and F1.) Arthouse and prestige still find an audience at the other end: Bugonia, One Battle After Another, The Brutalist, and Anora were all amazing and kind of got their moment. What’s in freefall is the mid-budget, adult, slightly demanding film. The £20–50m drama or comedy that used to be the discovery engine, where you worked out what it was about films that you liked. The kind of film Little Miss Sunshine was, or Jerry Maguire, or Erin Brockovich, or Michael Clayton. Those don’t get made for cinemas any more.

It’s worth being concrete about how recently this was normal. The 2007 Best Picture nominees included No Country for Old Men ($25m), There Will Be Blood ($25m), Atonement ($30m), and Michael Clayton ($21m)4. All four were, in current money, mid-budget adult dramas a studio funded at non-tentpole prices and put in multiplexes. In 2025, the studios funded almost nothing in that band. The few films that vaguely fit the shape like After the Hunt, or The Smashing Machine, or Black Bag (love) underperformed and lost millions5, and their failures will be cited internally for years to justify not making any more. The mid-budget adult film hasn’t just lost its audience; it’s lost the people inside the studios who wanted to make them. The people coming through who would once have championed those scripts and those directors now all work in franchise development.

The middle has migrated to streaming, where Marriage Story, The Power of the Dog, Roma, and May December got nominally distributed and then atomised. They are algorithmically tiled next to true-crime documentaries and 90 minute reality formats, served up briefly, and then replaced. Some break through. The huge majority do not. It’s not about whether they exist or not, it’s whether they have any afterlife when they do. Imagine if Withnail & I came out now? It would disappear without trace. A run at local cinemas gave a film three or four weeks of being something we all had to reckon with. A Netflix release gives it a fortnight on a tile and then zip, gone. They’re not the same product, even when the film is.

That’s a more uncomfortable story than ‘the art is becoming free,’ because the middle is where most of the interesting work historically lived. The studio drama. The mid-budget comedy. The director’s second or third film, before they’re a franchise hire or a Palme d’Or winner. We all look at the listings and roll our eyes. We pray for the next Christopher Nolan or Paul Thomas Anderson, but we won’t get them, because the films that produced them aren’t being made any more. That emotion comes from all of these missing movies that we don’t get offered, mostly because Transformers 9 is on.

But supply-side framing is naive. It isn’t only studios pulling back. Audiences walked away too. The movie studio CFOs’ strategy now is overwhelmingly risk aversion and IP economics, true. The more honest answer is that adults stopped going first, and the studios responded. UK admissions for the over-35s have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels and look like they never will. Date night is not cinema night. The movie-curious relocated to their sofas and there’s no obvious plausible model in which they relocate back. Hollywood didn’t quite kill the mid-budget drama. The audience killed it, by quietly leaving, and Hollywood drew the obvious conclusion.

Behind that is a larger shift in how culture is consumed in 2026. Average household streaming subscriptions in the US plateaued at four and started contracting in Q2 2025, the first time since the metric has been tracked6. TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and a billion hours of AI-generated short-form video have trained a generation to treat cultural artefacts as 30-second units, replayable, remixable, free, and infinite. A two-hour theatrical drama isn’t competing with another two-hour theatrical drama. It’s competing with an evening of 400 vertical clips, a Twitch livestream, and a YouTube podcast. The seat, not the screen, has become the scarce resource. Two hours of fixed attention is the rarest thing the industry now asks for, and it’s now priced like a luxury.

There is a counter-trend worth taking seriously though, because it cuts against the gloom. Gen Z theatrical attendance ticked up in 20257: the share visiting six or more times a year rose from 31% to 41%. Letterboxd is now north of 25 million users. Repertory cinemas like the Prince Charles are running their strongest numbers ever, and new ones like The Garden Cinema have been full every time I’ve been. Park Circus reported a 139% increase in the classic-film market between 2019 and 20238. A24, Neon, Mubi, and Searchlight have built credible specialty distribution models. Sinners grossed nearly $360m worldwide on a $90m budget9. So something is alive at the cinephile end, and it’s younger than the people writing obituaries for it.

But, and this is the hardest bit, that’s all great but cannot possibly scale to fill the gap. Letterboxd is a community of maybe 2% of the population that cares deeply10. The repertory revival is mostly people watching films that were already paid for forty years ago. A24 puts out around twenty films a year and relies on prestige economy maths: festival pickup; awards push; ancillary licensing, that doesn’t fund a £40m original adult drama. The cinephile revival is real but it’s the equivalent of a small room at the Marquee, not the missing mid-tier tour. It’s saying jazz is fine because there’s a queue outside Ronnie Scott’s (it’s not).

The optimistic version, that cinema, like theatre and ballet, will get smaller, weirder, and more interesting once it stops trying to please everyone, is a hope, not a forecast. Theatre and ballet didn’t get freer on their own. They’re sustained by an eighty-year-old subsidy ecosystem, a Royal Charter, and a small but durable audience willing to pay £80 a ticket. Cinema will probably never have that scaffold. It has, instead, a handful of specialty distributors operating on margins that don’t tolerate a single bad year, an ageing arthouse audience, a UK tax-relief regime aimed at production rather than exhibition, and a streaming sector that funds prestige films sporadically as awards bait and then buries them.

We confuse the death of an industry’s commercial model with the death of an art form. They are not the same thing. But the art form still needs the industry to pay for it, and what nobody has worked out is who funds the films that aren’t tentpoles and aren’t micro-budget, i.e., the mid-budget drama with adult ambition and theatrical scale. The honest answer today is, I believe, nobody. Studios won’t. Streamers will, occasionally, and then bury what they fund. Specialty distributors can’t get to scale. Public subsidy, the model that saved theatre, has no political consensus behind it for cinema, partly because for most of its history cinema was both popular and profitable, and we never built the moral argument for treating it as a public good. We didn’t need to. Now we do, and the muscle isn’t there.

That’s what I’ll be looking for during my next twenty years of going to the movies. Not whether the middle comes back. I don’t think it does. More, will anything replace where the middle was? That work of taking adult experience seriously, on a screen big enough to make it feel important, in a room full of strangers, at something like £15 a head. Or even, as it is 2026, £30 a head, which is what those four tickets I bought for next weekend at the Odeon worked out at. I’ll still go. But if the answer to who pays for the rest is ‘nobody,’ then we shouldn’t tell ourselves the story that the art is getting freer. We should be honest that something specific has been lost, and that the loss is being felt by all of us.