With the saturation that the streaming era has brought to movies and TV shows, often a lot of companies behind films are trying to make them as marketable as possible. It's difficult to compete with quick fixes like TikTok, which gives you a brand-new story or bit of content with every swipe.
This is something that Paul Mescal is quite sick of. In a new interview with The Times, the Gladiator 2 star said that "acting should never be reduced to numbers of Instagram followers."
"Over the last few years people have been talking about films and TV shows as content. That's a filthy word. It's not 'content', it's fucking work," he continued. Mescal is not alone in this anti-content way of thinking. Willem Dafoe recently spoke about how now people want to watch "something stupid" when they put on a movie. Even if you agree with Mescal, though, it seems like the majority of the entertainment world is shifting to content above all. Big franchises that can be milked for the content game, and TV shows that need viral GIFs for people to stand a chance of watching them.