We Used to Have Movie Stars. Now We Have Girls With Podcasts.

Isabella Pettitt

11 minutes ago

3 min read

Gone are the days when Hollywood glamour shone. Now the studios look tired, the Hollywood sign looks dilapidated, and no one is making good movies anyway. The death of the cinema doesn't just come down to streaming; it's about the death of the star.

Marketing firms are throwing millions at trying to revive the traditional celebrity. They're spending fortunes on press tours, but for the most part, Gen Z isn't buying it. The truth is our attention spans are shortening, but that's not the only factor. Without even realising it, we crave the unfiltered content that TikTok feeds us daily. We want something real or at least something that feels real.

The traditional celebrity economy is broken. Singers don't make money from the music alone; Spotify pays fractions of a penny per stream. So what do the artists do? They tour constantly. They grind their way through global circuits, not necessarily because they want to, but because that's how they earn a living. To make matters worse, the live music industry has become a hostile environment for artists. Venue owners routinely demand up to twenty per cent of an artist's merchandise sales. When you factor in the skyrocketing costs of tour buses, crew wages and travel insurance, hitting the road is no longer the luxe experience it seems to be. The stars can’t kick back and relax, waiting to collect their royalties. They've been subjected to a gruelling and high-risk job where they’re forced to work to the bone.

The actors are still going to drama school, hoping they'll make it onto the big screen, but instead they're coming out unknowns and staying unknown, no matter how talented they are. And hot take: the ones doing well are doing so because they have good agents. Traditional institutions are losing their grip on cultural capital. The gatekeepers who once decided who was worthy of the spotlight are finding themselves completely irrelevant in a landscape ruled by user engagement rather than executive approval.

So who are we idolizing now? Well, the new celebrities are living in our pockets. Olivia Neill, Tallulah Metcalfe, and don't lie, you definitely know Shay Sullivan's entire life story.

Although we love the influencers, this level of intimacy is actually a highly profitable strategy known as manufactured authenticity. We watch these creators take us along on their mundane shopping runs and their break-up announcements. They show us all of their raw flaws; we let our guard down, and then comes the GRWM content as always. They have successfully weaponised the concept of being “real” to sell us a lifestyle, turning friendship into a commodity.

Our phones have become portable shrines, and these girls are the deities we check on daily. They invade our lives not through the silver screen but through the glow of our TikTok For You Pages. We don't have to wait months for their film to come out or their new song to drop. We get them constantly, as their job is so demanding.

Back in the day, the old Hollywood model meant you saw the star at the movies or in a magazine spread, but now we see them in bed before we drift off on the morning commute. It's as though we live our lives with them, these influencers. We're forming parasocial connections with people we follow online because they are with us every step of the way. Do you ever catch yourself saying I think we would be friends if I knew her in person. It's parasocial. This change marks the complete democratization of attention, where relevance is dictated by a hyper-active feed rather than a studio marketing budget.

When fame becomes this accessible, does the word celebrity even mean anything anymore? Are we witnessing the deconstruction of fame in real time? Maybe in two decades, celebrities as we know them will have phased out, and we'll just have influencers. A never-ending cycle of cancel culture and newfound fame, all living in the palm of our hand.