Sometimes there is nothing so depressing as reassurance. Seth Rogen is currently making a Larry Sanders-style comedy for Apple TV+ entitled The Studio, in which a bunch of Hollywood executives collectively freak out about the imminent death of cinema as we know it. The good news is that Seth Rogen has used a new episode of Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast to announce how bullish he is about the future of cinema in real life. The bad news is that he had to invoke museums.
“I think if movies were going to go away, they would have a long time ago,” he said. “Paintings are still around. People still go to museums! There’s things flashier or more ‘interesting’ than then oil on canvas, but people still flock from all over the world, enough to keep museums open.”
In one sense, he has a point. People do still go and look at paintings. Around 7.5 million of them went to see the Mona Lisa last year. They went to see it in such vast quantities that it caused overcrowding problems. That’s a bad thing when it comes to the Louvre getting acceptable Tripadvisor reviews, but a great thing when it comes to proving the ongoing appeal of paintings.
