Your Taste in Movies Is Now Your Personality
What Oscar culture fandom and genre collapse reveal about identity driven engagement
Today’s post comes from Maxine Gurevich, SVP of Future of Consumer & Culture, a dedicated movie buff who decodes the cultural forces shaping people’s lives.
Something fundamental has shifted in movies—and not just on screen. The way films are made, discovered, talked about, and used culturally is changing all at once. The old order—top-down blockbusters, rigid genre lanes, critics as gatekeepers—has started to give way to something messier, more participatory, and more revealing.
This year’s Oscar nominees make that shift unusually visible.
Not because they represent a single aesthetic or worldview, but because they operate as identity signals. Films like Sinners, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Frankenstein, and Hamnet aren’t just being evaluated on craft or performance. They’re being aligned with. Debated. Claimed. Used as shorthand for taste, values, and cultural fluency. Liking—or rejecting—these films has become a way of saying something about who you are.
That’s the throughline running beneath today’s film culture: movies are no longer just entertainment choices; they’re tools of self-definition.
I love A24 and Neon but realistically my style is more Searchlight lol
–u/Parmesan_Pirate119
We’re living in a moment where the vibe of a film matters as much as its plot, where who made it communicates as much as who stars in it, and where your watchlist quietly doubles as a personality test. This is cinema in the age of Identity as Curation—where taste isn’t passive consumption, it’s active signaling.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
That shift is being driven by a set of interlocking cultural forces. Here’s how they show up across the macro trends we track at Horizon Futures.
The Critic is Dead, Long Live the Fan
Trend: Expert-it-is
Not that long ago, discovering a “good” film followed a familiar script. A trusted critic wrote about it. You went to the right theater. Taste flowed downward.
That system has collapsed.
From the rise of influencer critiques to the blending of audience feedback in filmmaking, social media is amplifying the voices of those who now hold “expert” opinions on films. Everyone’s a critic now.
Today, discovery is horizontal and chaotic. In fact, Horizon Media’s research found that 47% of moviegoers now discover films through social media, far outpacing traditional reviews. Cultural relevance is built in public—on Letterboxd, TikTok/filmtok, r/moviesuggestion—through commentary, remixing, and argument. A film’s success isn’t determined by a small group of authoritative voices, but by the collective energy of people engaging with it in real time.
Audiences don’t just watch movies; they activate them. They turn scenes into memes, lines into inside jokes, and themes into discourse. A film’s afterlife—how it’s discussed, defended, or dragged—now matters as much as its opening weekend. Fandom isn’t a side effect anymore; it’s the infrastructure.
The Studio Has Become a Lifestyle Brand
Trend: Brand as Entertainment
Pay attention to how people talk about movies now. It’s rarely just the title—it’s the context.
Studio affiliation has become a form of cultural shorthand. Certain studios signal emotional tone, creative risk, and worldview before a trailer even plays. For many audiences, the studio name itself is a filter—sometimes a stronger draw than the cast.
This is where Brand as Entertainment comes into focus. Studios aren’t just behind the scenes; they’ve become part of the entertainment itself. Their identities show up in trailers, visual language, social presence, meme culture, merch, and even the way films are talked about online. The brand experience begins well before release and continues long after the credits roll.
Horizon’s research found that 52% of audiences say a studio’s involvement is a key reason they’ll see a film, making the studio itself a more powerful driver than many stars.
In an oversaturated content landscape, people rely on brands to do the curatorial work for them. Studio loyalty becomes a way of signaling taste, trust, and cultural alignment. These companies aren’t just distributing films; they’re shaping identity ecosystems.
Genre Is Melting (and Awards Culture Is Catching Up)
Trend: Genre Big Bang
What genre even applies to most of the films breaking through right now?
Horror bleeds into drama. Period pieces feel like psychological thrillers. Musicals behave like crime films. The tidy genre labels that once helped audiences navigate culture now feel constraining, even obsolete.
This is genre collapse, or as we call it, Genre Big Bang.
A cultural shift toward hybridity, remixing, and tonal complexity. People don’t experience culture in neat lanes anymore, and they don’t experience themselves that way either. The films resonating most today embrace contradiction and emotional whiplash because that’s how audiences live.
Genre, once a promise, has become a limitation. Vibe has taken its place.
The Future Is Niche (and That’s a Good Thing)
Trend: United States of Affinity
For decades, success in film meant appealing to everyone. Now it means finding your people.
We’re living in a United States of Affinity, where culture organizes itself around shared obsession rather than mass consensus. Films succeed by speaking directly to specific communities—cinephiles, horror loyalists, literary audiences, internet-native tastemakers—rather than sanding down edges for broad appeal.
This isn’t about getting smaller. It’s about going deeper.
When a film truly understands its audience, that audience becomes its most powerful distribution engine. They don’t just recommend it—they contextualize it, defend it, and carry it forward with an authenticity no media plan can manufacture.
Where This Is Headed
The balance of power has shifted. Audiences aren’t just consuming culture anymore; they’re shaping it in real time. What we share, debate, remix, and obsess over determines what sticks.
Film is simply ahead of the curve (regardless of the ongoing friction between streaming and theaters).
Non-movie brands should be paying attention. The same forces reshaping cinema are reshaping commerce:
Consumers don’t just buy products; they align with signals.
They don’t just engage; they participate.
They don’t just follow brands; they use them as proxies for identity.
The future belongs to brands that know exactly who they are for and build cultural coherence around that audience.
Because increasingly, everything works like film now.
Which means being chosen matters more than being noticed.