Film Students Can't Watch Movies Anymore

If you can't get film students to watch movies, what does that say about the rest of us?

Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, thought he had the dream assignment: homework that consisted of watching movies. But his students won't do it. Even film students—people who chose to study cinema—are struggling to sit through feature-length films.

This isn't an isolated case. Twenty film professors across the country report the same troubling trend: over the past decade, and especially since the pandemic, students have lost the ability to focus on movies for 90 to 180 minutes. At USC's prestigious film program, students fidget like nicotine addicts during screenings, eventually surrendering to their phones. At Tufts, half the class secretly checks their devices despite an electronics ban.

The Numbers Tell a Disturbing Story

When professors can track viewing habits, the data is stark. At the University of Indiana, fewer than 50 percent of film students even started their assigned movies on the campus streaming platform. Only 20 percent made it to the end. These are students who voluntarily enrolled in film classes.

The problem extends beyond mere completion rates. When Jeff Smith at UW Madison asked students basic questions about François Truffaut's classic "Jules and Jim" on a final exam, more than half got it wrong—confusing World War I for World War II, or claiming Ernest Hemingway appeared in the film (he doesn't). Smith had to grade on a curve to keep marks within normal ranges, something unprecedented in his nearly two decades of teaching.

The Attention Economy's Casualties

The root cause isn't mysterious. Today's college students have no memory of life before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours daily on social media, flicking between short-form videos. Screen time for children under two doubled between 1997 and 2014. Computer users now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from every two and a half minutes in 2004.

Akira Mizuta Lippit at USC puts it bluntly: "If your body and psychology aren't trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will feel excruciatingly long." Some of his students can't even name a movie they've watched recently. Others arrive having seen only Disney films.

The industry has noticed. Netflix now encourages filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes to hook viewers. Directors are advised to have characters repeat plot points three or four times because audiences browse social media while watching. Matt Damon recently observed that streaming platforms are essentially training filmmakers to accommodate distracted viewing.

Two Paths Forward

Faced with this crisis, educators are splitting into two camps. Some professors are doubling down on slow cinema. Rick Warner at the University of North Carolina deliberately assigns films like Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman"—a three-hour movie mostly showing a woman doing household chores. His philosophy: "I'm trying to sell them on the idea that a film watched properly can help them retrain their perception."

Kyle Stine at Johns Hopkins is piloting courses on minimalist films with almost no narrative thrust, explicitly designed to rebuild attention spans. These professors view shortened attention as a problem to solve, not a reality to accept.

Others are adapting to their students' media diet. They show shorter films, break movies into multiple sessions, or focus on teaching engagement techniques for social media-length content. Erpelding now assigns three- or four-minute films similar to what students see online—after all, that seems to be the only video format many young people want to consume.

The Broader Cultural Shift

This isn't just about film education. When future filmmakers can't watch films, when students studying visual media prefer scrolling to screening, we're witnessing a fundamental shift in how humans process narrative and meaning.

The irony is profound: we live in the golden age of television and film production, with more high-quality content available than ever before. Yet the audience capable of sustained attention to that content is shrinking. Students arrive at university having consumed thousands of hours of media but struggle to engage with a single two-hour film.

Some professors report that students who do push through the initial discomfort of slow-paced films eventually find them rewarding. The capacity for deep attention isn't permanently lost—but it requires deliberate cultivation, like a muscle that's fallen out of use.