Because there's nothing interesting in the present until its the past. No one made a movie about the 2000 election until 2008 and even then it was a TV Movie. No one wanted to go near 9/11 as a film until United 93 and no one went to see that. Writing about the present - or indeed the recent past - is such a raw experience that it can only be talked about easier through the past because then using metaphor is safer.

It was rare even twenty years ago for big budget films to try and discuss present day situations: movies like Traffic that looked at the drug industry realistically were hard to come by when I was growing up. And it's not like films were even discussing the distant past for a very long time: until Steven Spielberg made Schindler's List a film about the Holocaust was inconceivable. The past gets made into movies more to discuss the present because it's always easier to see parallels to our present in the past. No one's going to make a movie about COVID or the events of January 6th for fifteen years because no one wants to face the present when its happening.

You want to know why no one wants to make movies of the moment? Because they date immediately and become anachronistic quicker. It was true in the 1940s and 1950s, it's just as true as now when our minds change eveyr five minutes. Movies about 2024 are called documentaries and its been proven no one goes to those. FIlmmakers want their movies to be seen. Movies are supposed to be escapism. You really think anyone wants to go to a theater to see people talking about the world they just left? I don't. I can get that if I turn on the news.

You think that you're speaking deep thoughts here. I assure you your not. There's a narrow-mindeness you want fil makers to talk about you and the world YOU live in. The fact that you can't recognize the world in the past honestly says more about you then this essay