Darling, after years of pretending convenience was sexy enough to carry culture by itself, Hollywood appears to be sneaking back to ritual.

You can see it in the week’s entertainment coverage if you squint past the sequins. Reuters reports Denis Villeneuve nearly stepped away before deciding to finish Dune: Part Three, persuaded in part by the audience response to the first two films. That matters because it says something deliciously unfashionable: people will still leave the house, sit still, and submit to scale when the work feels worth the trouble.

For a while the industry tried to convince us friction was the enemy. Everything should stream. Everything should auto-play. Everything should be optimized for the exhausted thumb. But audiences, inconvenient little creatures that they are, still crave event. They still like the feeling that something is happening there, not just passively appearing here. Spectacle with craft retains an erotic charge that content slurry never quite manages.

Netflix, bless its algorithmic heart, seems to know this too. Reuters notes the company is rolling out limited theatrical screenings to support its upcoming animated Stranger Things spinoff. Imagine that. The same ecosystem that spent a decade flattening all media into subscription wallpaper now keeps slipping into theaters in dark glasses like an ex texting after midnight. It turns out ritual has resale value.

Then there is music, where fandom remains one of the few institutions left that people join with shameless sincerity. Reuters says BTS’ comeback album Arirang moved nearly 4 million copies on day one. That is not just commercial success. That is organized attention at a scale most political parties would sell a kidney to command. Pop fandom looks unserious only if you mistake joy for weakness. In practice, it is one of the most disciplined forms of modern collective behavior.

The Oscars, meanwhile, drew 17.9 million U.S. viewers, down again. Prestige still knows how to pose, but the audience for the pose has thinned. And yet — here is the interesting part — the ceremony still matters. Everyone loves announcing that the old gatekeepers are dead. Then they spend a week talking about what those gatekeepers approved. The telecast may be shrinking, but the symbolic function remains stubbornly alive. A smaller church is still a church.

This is why entertainment coverage has gotten more moral lately. Whether it is faith-inflected criticism of films, self-aware comedy about purity culture, or lifestyle pieces that are really anthropology in eyeliner, culture writing keeps returning to the same seduction: tell me what people desire, and I will tell you what they worship. We no longer consume leisure as mere escape. We interrogate it for values, tribe markers, anxieties, and secret aspirations.

Which brings us back to ritual. Shared viewing, premieres, fandom campaigns, awards nights, theatrical rollouts — these are not just business tactics. They are attempts to restore heat to cultural life after years of convenience cooled everything to room temperature. Streaming gave us abundance and stole occasion. Now the business is trying to put the occasion back on, one smoky-eyed “limited engagement” at a time.

And honestly? Good. Not because every franchise deserves another candlelit resurrection, but because culture needs hierarchy of attention. It needs moments when people gather around the same object and argue, swoon, mock, quote, and repost in public. Otherwise everything melts into private consumption, and private consumption is a lousy substitute for shared meaning.

So here is the little after-hours truth: the winners in media over the next few years may not be the platforms with the largest libraries. They may be the ones that know how to make people feel that missing out would be unbearable. Attention is the commodity. Ritual is the wrapper. Desire does the rest.

Careful, though. Event can become empty pageantry just as easily as streaming became background mush. The trick is not merely to stage a moment, but to earn one. Audiences will forgive a lot. They rarely forgive boredom.

Sources: Reuters lifestyle roundup; Sojourners culture coverage.