Tessa Love is a Berlin-based independent cultural researcher, writer, and editor who specializes in decoding the zeitgeist. Over the past decade, she’s worked with brands such as Spotify, Netflix, Nike, Tumblr, and Google, and in partnership with agencies like Canvas8. She’s also the co-founder of the indie print magazine 

The Believer, Longreads, BBC, Outside Magazine, Gossamer

Today, audiences are shaping the cultural agenda. Empowered to speak up for the causes they believe in, people are actively calling out brands they see as inauthentic. What are the main drivers of this behavioural shift? And how can brands win the trust of these outspoken advocates?

Assertive Audiences

People are craving comfort. Amid what can feel like a state of constant crisis – a layering of traumatic societal events – it can sometimes seem like we’ve lost a sense of scale and cohesion. In the face of this, the desire to retreat into nostalgia is more seductive than ever. 

Nostalgia Reimagined 

Navigating reality has become an almost constant shock to the system, and people are growing more invested in constructing a permanent refuge through world-building and community connections.

Essential Escapism

For years, it was easy to spot an ‘Oscar movie.’ There was often a real-life figure at its center, preferably someone important and long dead; a war, crisis or historical backdrop; a prestige actor transformed by prosthetics; and at least one speech destined to reappear in an awards-show montage. 

The Independent

 “Historically, when we think of Oscar-bait cinema, we’re thinking of adult drama that tends to showcase performance and emphasize teaching us something – whether moral or historical – rather than stimulating us with sensation,” says Caetlin Benson-Allott, a film and media studies professor at Georgetown University. 

Interview with Caetlin Benson-Allott conducted by the author

 The formula became so recognizable that ‘Oscar bait’ emerged as shorthand for films seemingly engineered for Academy approval. While they’re capital-S serious, they’re also often as predictable as the franchise blockbusters they’re positioned against. 

 Biopics, historical dramas, and war films became familiar Best Picture winners, reflecting not just ideas about artistic merit but assumptions about what Academy voters considered culturally important.

But that formula is starting to crack. Recent awards seasons have seen genre films, international cinema, and harder-to-categorize projects move from the margins into serious contention. “Especially since the pandemic, genre films have increasingly taken on some of the aesthetic markers of prestige films, and award shows have responded by paying more attention to genre films with those aspirations,” Benson-Allott says. 

Interview with Caetlin Benson-Allot conducted by the author

 Amy Madigan broke through in the Best Supporting Actress category. By the end of the night, 

 had won Best Picture and five other Oscars, while 

Reuters

Now, the once-familiar idea of The Oscar Movie is no longer very reliable. 

InSession Film

This shift is unfolding against a wider tension in cinema. At a moment when audiences are surrounded by sequels, remakes, existing IP, and algorithmically optimized content, there are signs that familiarity itself is becoming a liability; three in ten (30%) US viewers cite lack of interest in the available roster as their main reason for skipping theaters, outranking ticket prices (27%) and even the convenience of home-viewing (20%). 

CivicScience

 The films cutting through, then, aren’t just breaking awards conventions but are answering a broader appetite for something that feels genuinely different.

The gatekeepers of prestige have shifted, too. Following the #OscarsSoWhite backlash, the Academy expanded and diversified its membership, making the idea of a single, fixed ‘Oscar taste’ harder to sustain. 

 The result isn’t the disappearance of prestige but a rewriting of its recipe; a film no longer needs to look like an Oscar winner from ten years ago to be treated as culturally important today. But if the old Oscar-bait formula is losing its monopoly on prestige, the question remains: What replaces it? What makes a film feel culturally significant now – and what does the changing shape of the awards movie reveal about who gets to decide?

Hollywood’s love affair with intellectual property has always made commercial sense. Sequels, adaptations, and cinematic universes arrive with something original films don’t: an audience that already knows why they might buy a ticket. In 2025, the likes of 

 led the US box office, while 2026 boasted 

Deadline

But familiarity is beginning to come with its own risk: boredom. In 2024, almost half (47%) of US viewers wanted fewer movie reboots, and two-fifths (40%) wanted fewer superhero and franchise films, compared with just a respective 21% and 29% who wanted more. 

YouGov

By August 2025, 72% wanted more original films, up from 62% in early 2023. 

TheWrap

The contradiction is hard to miss. “Almost everyone will tell you that Hollywood has run out of good ideas, that they hate the IP-generated stuff and wish Hollywood would start creating more new ideas,” says Jonathan Gray, a media scholar and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “And yet, if you look at the movies they actually go to see, that’s not necessarily true.” 

Interview with Jonathan Gray conducted by the author

 That makes the originals that do break through worth paying attention to. 

, a Jim Crow-era vampire film rooted in Black Southern culture and folklore, finished 2025 as the eighth-highest-grossing film at the US box office, taking almost $280 million domestically without recognizable IP behind it. 

 similarly turned an unfamiliar premise into one of August 2025’s biggest theatrical draws. Their appeal wasn’t simply that they were 'new’. For audiences, originality can mean several things; 37% of US moviegoers associate it with characters and worlds they haven’t seen before, and 35% with a fresh take on a familiar genre. 

 As Benson-Allott points out, prestige has often emerged when filmmakers take familiar genres and push them somewhere new. “Hollywood did this in the 1970s, too. You have Scorsese and Coppola rising to the status of auteurs by making gangster and war movies,” she says. “They were taking forms people were already really familiar with and just doing them better.” 

 The same dynamic helps explain why films such as 

 can feel original even while drawing on recognizable genre conventions.

That may make originality easier for audiences to embrace, but it doesn’t make it commercially predictable. Pixar’s 

 was an original story with positive reviews yet grossed just $154 million globally. 

Los Angeles Times

 The emerging appetite, then, isn’t simply for films with no existing IP attached – it’s for films that feel like they have a reason to exist and that make the trip to the cinema worthwhile. “The very reason [films such as 

 work is they aren’t what people have come to expect,” Gray says. “That doesn’t mean everything that’s different will be successful – that’s not how art works. What’s fun about art is that things people didn’t expect break through because there’s a resonance that couldn’t be predicted.” 

For decades, prestige cinema asked audiences to sit quietly, pay attention, and appreciate the craft. But that model of spectatorship is starting to feel out of step with a culture increasingly built around participation. TV shows, for instance, are now as much about creating community and discourse as entertainment; 

 viewers turned lines into memes, swapped theories, organized watch parties, and carried stories into their social lives. Nearly half of US audiences use social media during or immediately after watching TV, making these 

Horowitz

 That appetite makes sense in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. “There were a few decades in which everyone could be expected to watch the same TV or film, and then we moved away from that,” Gray says. “But there’s still a real desire to have that thing that we can all talk about.” 

 takes that impulse offline, turning established fandoms into immersive worlds of character encounters, cosplay, and live experiences.

The desire for participation is now spilling back into cinema, too. When 

 arrived in 2025, Gen Z audiences turned screenings into something closer to 

 than a conventional theater experience, shouting “Chicken Jockey” and “I am Steve” at the screen and uploading the chaos to TikTok. 

Warner Bros. and Legendary responded by launching official Block Party Edition screenings where talking and singing along were actively encouraged. 

Hollywood Reporter

 generated a quieter but equally communal response, with emotional reactions and word of mouth helping it become a must-see event; its second weekend dropped just 6% domestically. 

 As Gray puts it, these are examples of how media offers an easy point of connection: “You can share a random comment with someone coming out of the movie theatre; it can be an icebreaker. There’s a real urge for people to have at least some of those shared things.” 

The same behavior is visible beyond entertainment; a staggering 95% of US Gens Y and Z want in-person events connected to their online interests, while 72% of Gen Z lean more toward events and cultural touchpoints rather than traditional retail. 

Eventbrite

International Journal of Global Research Innovations & Technology

 Brands are responding by giving people more to participate in. Guinness has become a Gen Z fixation through pub pilgrimages and social rituals, while 

 used entertainment to generate participation rather than simply push product. 

 When almost anything can be streamed alone at home, cultural relevance increasingly comes from creating something worth 

Letting the audience, not institutions, lead prestige

Audiences no longer wait for critics, festivals, or awards bodies to tell them what matters. Part of the shift is simply that those institutions no longer control discovery in the way they once did. “One of the important roles of award ceremonies in earlier days was just letting us know that something existed,” Gray says. “Now, first, we don’t need the Oscars for that, and secondly, we’ve all got trust metrics that matter more to us.” 

 Those trust metrics increasingly come from peers, fan communities, algorithms, and online platforms, giving audiences more power to shape a film’s reputation before awards season begins. Cinephile platform 

 has become an important engine for this behavior; millions of moviegoers publicly rate and react to films, some right after the credits roll – building cultural relevance from the bottom up. Membership on the platform grew from 1.8 million in 2020 to more than 17 million by early 2025, and users cast almost 700 million ratings that year alone. 

Fast Company

Letterboxd

 became its most popular film of the year last year, with producer Sev Ohanian crediting the platform’s community of analysis, jokes, and reactions for giving the film a cultural life that extended well beyond the screening itself. 

 In addition, audiences had already named it the best film of 2025, ahead of 

 “You come to learn who the people are that you trust. You see that they agree with you on so much, so when one of them says, ‘This is the thing to watch,’ it matters so much more than what the 

 film critic says or the fact that something is Oscar-nominated,” says Gray. 

At the same time, the stamp of the Academy carries less weight than it once did. Ahead of the 2026 Oscars, only a tenth (10%) of US viewers could recall that 

 had won Best Picture the previous year; in 2024, barely a quarter (24%) correctly identified 

That fading recall matters because awards only carry cultural authority if their judgments stick. Instead, viewers are increasingly applying their own criteria; 87% say quality comes down to their personal connection with a film or show. 

Netflix

 Prestige, in other words, is being negotiated long before an envelope is opened.

Commission for cultural distinctiveness, not awards potential

Originality alone isn’t a strategy. Audiences still turn out for familiar franchises, but breakout successes are often films that give them something recognizable in a form they haven’t seen before. Crucially, that kind of distinctiveness depends on what the industry is willing to back. “In terms of horror, part of it is who’s making these movies and who’s distributing them,” says Benson-Allott. “A24 and Blumhouse started making films that looked like indie movies, with prestige character actors, better writing, and more of a slow burn. The change in the industry and the players in the industry has played a big role.” 

 That makes creative distinctiveness a potential commercial asset. Even amid the rise of short-form and user-generated media, the majority of Gen Z (54%) and millennials (63%) still prefer studio-quality shows and films to UGC. 

Octane Seating

 Warner Bros. took that kind of swing with 

, backing Ryan Coogler’s $90 million historical vampire film and agreeing to return its copyright to him after 25 years. 

Variety

 For commissioners, the opportunity isn’t to reject IP altogether but to protect the creative risk that makes a project feel authored rather than reverse-engineered.

Turn prestige into a ritual, not a rarity

As streaming makes polished entertainment available everywhere, cinemas need to offer something the sofa cannot: shared ritual. But there’s a trap in treating every theatrical outing as a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. “A lot of defenders of movies have shot themselves in the foot by creating this discourse of magic around the cinema,” Gray says. “The problem is that it makes going to the movies seem like such a treat that it becomes a rare thing.” 

Interview with Jonathan conducted by the author

 The opportunity is to make collective viewing feel special 

 repeatable. After all, the experience economy is growing by 9% annually, outpacing the goods economy at 6%, while 41% of Gen Zers now go to the cinema at least six times a year – up by 10% from 2024. 

Forbes

 into exactly that kind of ritual; its limited sing-along theatrical run generated more than 1,000 sold-out screenings before returning for further fan events. 

 Cinemas and studios could build more participation into releases through formats that similarly give audiences a reason to return together.

If audiences increasingly decide what matters before awards bodies weigh in, film marketing has to create momentum people want to join. Gray notes that people often trust “friends and fan groups who share the exact same quirky interests” more than “an assortment of Hollywood glitterati.” 

 Social platforms increasingly shape that discovery; 56% of younger viewers in the US stream films or TV after hearing about them from creators online, while 53% say social media gives them better viewing recommendations. 

Deloitte

TikTok can also translate buzz into action, with exposure on the app driving a median 172% increase in movie ticket purchases. 

TikTok

 campaign shows what this can look like. Rather than relying on conventional prestige cues, it built buzz through surprise premieres, celebrity seeding, limited-edition merchandise, and self-aware promotional content, generating 61 million engagements. 

Meltwater

 The opportunity is to treat cultural conversation not as the outcome of a campaign but as part of the campaign itself.

 of US moviegoers want more original films, up from 

 US Gens Z and Y are interested in in-person events connected to their online interests

 of audiences, quality comes down to their personal connection with a film or show

As franchise fatigue grows, prestige is shifting toward films that offer distinctive worlds, fresh genre twists, and creative risks audiences haven’t seen before

With streaming making polished entertainment ubiquitous, culturally important films are increasingly those that create communal, participatory experiences audiences feel compelled to share

Critics and awards bodies are losing their monopoly on cultural authority, giving audiences the power to shape prestige from the bottom up

Jonathan Gray is a media scholar and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose work focuses on audiences, fandom, taste and media culture. He is the author or co-author of six books, most recently 

Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste

Caetlin Benson-Allott is professor of English and director of Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University, specialising in US film history, spectatorship, horror and media technologies. She is the author of three books, including 

The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television

, and previously served as editor of the 

United States

TV, film, and social media video

, the old Oscar-bait formula is cracking. As US audiences crave originality, shared experiences, and a greater say in what matters, prestige is becoming less about familiar signals of seriousness. So what makes a film feel prestigious and culturally important now?

Analysis

Tessa Love

Jonathan Gray

Caetlin Benson-Allott

Related Macro Behaviours

Assertive Audiences

Nostalgia Reimagined

Essential Escapism