Grammer police: what’s the difference between a ‘film’ and a ‘movie’?
Ever since the dawn of Hollywood, there has been a creative tussle between cinema being art or entertainment. This wasn’t such a controversy for cinematic pioneers like the Méliès brothers, who directed A Trip to the Moon, with the technological marvel merely being a fascinating cultural leap-forward, but as cinema grew increasingly more complex, introducing sound, colour and special effects, a line was drawn in the sand.
It was popular blockbuster cinema that really brought about this division, with elite film critics wishing to distance themselves from such light entertainment in order to associate themselves closer with the independent arthouse releases of the same era. Coming around in the 1970s, these blockbusters drew vast crowds thanks to their bombastic storylines and flashy style, with George Lucas’ Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being two pioneering examples.
Despite sharing the same grammatical definition as that of a film or motion picture, these types of blockbusters are often referred to as movies, being larger commercial properties built for profit that are used to attract the mass market. Films, on the other hand, are considered the exact opposite, being focused far more on furthering some sort of artistic conversation, exploring deeper themes to stimulate the audience intellectually rather than simply snatching their money.
The difference is slight, with some directors constantly crossing back and forth between being a filmmaker and a moviemaker, depending on their respective projects. For example, Martin Scorsese, who is recognised as the most popular director in the world, is capable of making classic movies like Gangs of New York or The Wolf of Wall Street but has also made such films as Taxi Driver and Silence, which certainly prompt a little more intellectual thinking.
Yet, truthfully, accepting the difference between a film and a movie is subjective, with many considering it to be a haughty exercise carried out by the so-called ‘elite’ to separate their tastes from the masses. Some motion pictures so closely border the line between being a film and a movie, for example, that to categorise it as either seems entirely futile. After all, by their grammatical definition, both words mean the same thing.
Still, the apparent difference between the two states of cinema is often brought to the attention of cinema lovers. When the great Quentin Tarantino appeared on Jimmy Kimmel back in 2022, for example, he called Spileberg’s Jaws “possibly the greatest ‘movie’ ever made”, using air quotes while referencing the word ‘movie’ to point to its identity as a blockbuster that gripped the commercial market.
So, when does a movie become a film and vice versa? Well, that’s also somewhat subjective. If you find a motion picture intellectually stimulating, then it’s probably a film, and conversely, if you purely gain pleasure from a flick, then it’s probably a movie.
In today’s motion picture market, studio-backed blockbusters based on pre-existing intellectual property earn the ‘movie’ mark, while the more thought-provoking indie releases are called ‘films’. But such is only an industry-made distinction that certainly isn’t officially adopted, being instead the kind of pernickety grammatical peculiarity that only a true motion picture purist would pick you up on.
