Television

I wasn't looking at my phone when I watched that cop movie they made. I was lifting weights and hemming my sweatpants.

Netflix movies are pretty crap for doing these because we ourselves are to blame. I admit I have done this couple of times while watching movie or TV at home.

I think Netflix manufactured this problem first. Originally they were going for volume so they added a lot of padding to their og shows. To the point I stopped watching (torrenting) any Netflix originals. So people got in the habit of doing other stuff while waiting for the plot to start moving again. Now they claim that their shows are meant for second screens. Motherfucker: we are in the golden age of TV, so there's plenty of engaging content being produced. Marvelous Mrs. Maisle is so fast paced and brilliant I never felt the need to pick up my phone.

Can't believe how prescient this movie was. We're on our way!

Or we are on our phones because the movies repeat their themes over and over and over again

Writer insight : if people start pulling their phone when they should be watching your movie, it means your movie is shit, not that it should be made even sloppier. Watered down shit is still a shit cocktail.

Bad movies need to do this. You know, the average movie Netflix signs off on.

This is what kills any articles on the web. The first three paragraphs repeat the question you're looking to get answered and the last paragraph vaguely answers it.

I feel like an old person now but I've started watching movies from the 90s/2000s and I can't believe how much worse movies have become over the years.

It’s the big tech social media disease.

Everyone, frigging everyone who steps away from fb/insta/twittler/yt/tiktok/… says the same “holy shit my mind is so peaceful all of a sudden.” And somehow it’s not substantially part of the daily discourse. Somehow between that and EVERYTHING else these mfrs are responsible for (protecting pedos, encouraging insurrections, …) just flies.

It’s a disease, an addiction, a plague and we gotta start naming it as such. Talk to your loved ones and carefully try to get them off that shit.

The amount of reciprocal effort art is socially allowed to demand from the audience changes. The art form gets refined and people respect that and are willing to invest more attention, then at some point it's opera and nobody goes because it requires too much attention and respect. Netflix might suck but on the other hand Christopher Nolan is making movies with inaudible dialogue and Game of Thrones has invisible fight scenes because they got out of hand with it and think they can demand you only watch their thing alone in a soundproof HDR screening room.

Good thing we canceled our Netflix subscription last year when Trump threatened to invade our country the first time.

Even greater that now that he is threatening to do it again, and seemingly is more serious about it, we are one year into being back on physical media and we fucking love it. Dvds and blurays are so much better than shitflix.

Make movies that are engaging enough to keep people from checking their feeds while they wait for something to happen.

Make content that makes people put their phones down.

You could absolutely do it in a funny way like Kronk (Emperors New Groove) or Luis (Ant-Man).

I find shows and movies that show something happen clearly and then restate it in the dialogue immediately quite annoying. Very common in anime.