The red carpet is a lie. We see the tuxedoes, the seven-minute standing ovations in Cannes, and the hazy, golden-hour photos of actors looking like they’ve finally made it. But for Rahul Bhat and Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy, the flashbulbs didn’t lead to a victory lap in theaters. Instead, they led to the same place everything else goes: the digital void.

Bhat is tired of pretending this is fine. In a recent outburst that felt more like a eulogy than a press junket, he laid it out. "Don’t complain about cinema if you don’t support it," he said. It’s a harsh sentiment, but he’s not wrong. He’s just saying the quiet part loud while the rest of the industry tries to pivot into "content creation" without crying.

The friction here isn't about talent. It’s about the math. Kennedy is a noir thriller about an insomniac ex-cop. It’s dark, it’s moody, and it’s the kind of thing critics drool over. It played at a Midnight Screening in the Grand Théâtre Lumière. People cheered. Then it came home to India and hit a wall of cold, hard reality. The theatrical market has become a binary system: you are either a ₹500-crore "event" movie featuring a superstar punching a helicopter, or you are a notification on a smartphone.

We’ve trained ourselves to be cheap. We’ll drop $15 on a mediocre cocktail or $80 on a video game we’ll never finish, but the idea of spending ₹400 on a ticket and another ₹600 on overpriced, stale popcorn to see a "prestige" film feels like a personal insult. So we wait. We tell ourselves we’ll catch it on the app. We wait for the OTT release so we can watch it at 1.5x speed while folding laundry or scrolling through Reddit threads about why movies aren't "good" anymore.

Bhat’s frustration stems from this exact hypocrisy. We claim we want "brave" filmmaking. We claim we’re bored of the assembly-line sequels and the CGI sludge. Yet, when a film like Kennedy exists—a film that actually tries to do something with the medium—the seats stay empty. The trade-off is simple: if you don’t pay for the art, you don't get to keep the gallery. You get a warehouse full of "assets" owned by a tech giant that views cinema as a way to reduce churn on a monthly subscription.

Let’s talk about that subscription. For the price of a single movie ticket, you get a library of ten thousand titles. It sounds like a win. It isn't. When a film moves straight to a streaming platform, it loses its soul. It becomes data. It’s an entry in an algorithm designed to keep you from clicking the "cancel" button. The specific friction here is the death of the "middle-class" film. There’s no room for the ₹30-crore drama that makes a modest profit and builds a legacy. You’re either a titan or a ghost.

Bhat isn't just defending his own work; he’s pointing at a burning house. He’s watching the cultural currency of the theater get devalued in real-time. When a movie like Kennedy skips the big screen, we lose the communal experience of being uncomfortable together. We lose the silence of a dark room. Instead, we get the convenience of the pause button.

The industry is complicit, too. Distributors are terrified. They see the numbers. They see that the "intellectual" audience—the ones who post 4-star reviews on Letterboxd—are the ones most likely to stay home. Why risk a wide release when you can take a guaranteed check from a streamer? It’s the safe bet. It’s also a suicide pact. By taking the easy money from the tech giants, studios are teaching the audience that "real" movies don't happen in theaters anymore.

The result is a feedback loop of mediocrity. Theaters become museums for the loud and the bright. The thoughtful, the gritty, and the weird get banished to the cloud. We complain that cinema is losing its edge, that everything feels the same, that there are no "real" stars left. Then, when a real star in a real movie asks for two hours of our undivided attention and twenty bucks, we look at our phones and ask when it’s coming to Netflix.

It’s a grim cycle. Bhat’s "exclusive" reality check isn't going to change the box office numbers, but it does strip away the polite veneer of the streaming era. We aren't "democratizing" film; we’re just making it disposable.

If we keep treating cinema like something that should be delivered to us for free between Uber Eats orders, what happens when the people like Kashyap and Bhat finally stop making it?