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Notes -
I mentioned before that my mother once said to me that she finds herself enjoying movies and TV shows that aren't in English more than ones that are. Why? Because if it's not in English, she has to give the show her full attention to read the subtitles. If it's in English, she can spend half the movie looking at her phone. Netflix are acutely aware of the "second screen" phenomenon and have urged screenwriters not to bank on the audience's undivided attention, and to stuff their scripts with lazy expository dialogue so that audiences can still follow the plot even if they're watching "Family Guy funny moments" or similar on their phone at the same time.
I wonder if this is a big part of why (per the OP) modern movie writing is so bad - if the screenwriters are thinking to themselves "well, this is a boring talky scene, where people will be staring at their phones. Even if I do my best to make the expository dialogue realistic, lively and entertaining in its own right, no one's going to look up at the screen until something explodes, so why bother putting in the effort?"
Some touring musicians are insisting on audiences putting their smartphones into little black bags which they can collect at the end of the gig because they hate performing in front of a sea of people on their smartphones. I would happily pay an extra euro for a phone-free cinema screening, and I reckon that, while people would initially grumble about it, they'd most likely end up enjoying the movie a lot more.
The smartphone is truly the worst invention in human history.
Future generations will dig up Steve Jobs's corpse and mount his head on a pike.
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That's always been the case for TV - script writers were encouraged to write plots that a woman preparing dinner could follow along with. It's actually decreased somewhat - now we have "prestige TV" and podcasts have taken over the niche of "Give Mom's brain something to think about while doing mindless repetitive task."
True. I get the impression that this tendency is bleeding over from soap operas into ostensibly prestige television and standalone films, two media in which the audience's undivided assumption was traditionally assumed.
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That's absolutely a problem with audiences today, and part of the reason our attention spans and focus are so frayed. And yeah, the writers have to compensate for "if we don't keep the action moving, we won't keep eyeballs on the screen".
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