Matthew McConaughey’s biggest issue with modern Hollywood: “It’s the first thing that gets cut”
Every movie fan has their own era of Matthew McConaughey.
If you’re an older lover, then you’ll know him as a romantic lead, charming the likes of Kate Hudson and Jennifer Lopez in various noughties rom-coms, and if you were around for the glory days of the ‘McConaissance’, then you’ll remember epic moments like his Oscar win, his performance in True Detective, or him spinning around for three hours in Interstellar. If you remember him from Dazed and Confused, then I hope you’ve also remembered to take your pills today.
The smooth-talking Texan hasn’t just undergone changes in his own career. He’s been around long enough to witness Hollywood and the film industry at large change drastically, and has been very vocal on a number of hot-button issues. He recently trademarked a series of his iconic catchphrases in a bid to prevent AI from using them to make deepfakes of himself, but it’s not just technology that he has a problem with.
In February 2026, McConaughey sat down with his old Interstellar co-star Timothée Chalamet for a conversation co-hosted by CNN and Variety, and naturally, one of the topics was about the state of modern cinema, where the younger star recalled something he’d read recently about Netflix asking filmmakers to frontload movies with their “their biggest action set pieces”, which made McConaughey very upset.
“In this day of shorter attention spans and vertical 12-second spots, are we losing the patience for act one?” he theorised (via Variety), “Because it’s the first thing that gets cut. It’s the first thing a studio wants to get rid of. I’m seeing act two, more and more, start on freakin’ page 12 [of a script]. I’m seeing ten part series where, bam!, act one’s over 32 minutes into the opening episode, and you’re off on the conflict right away. It feels abbreviated to me.”
Much has been made over the supposed short attention spans of the younger generations. You can’t read any film criticism these days without seeing comparisons between recent movies and TikTok, and it doesn’t help that more and more people are watching films at home instead of in the cinema.
The distractions of phones, laptops, and countless other shiny toys are eating into people’s abilities to sit through a feature-length presentation. Netflix infamously released an edict that all of its shows should feature repeated references to the exposition, more exposition and fewer subtle visuals so as to accommodate audiences not paying attention.
Interestingly, there are other trends in Hollywood that suggest our attention spans are longer than ever. It feels like blockbusters are getting closer to three hours in length every single year, and there’s data to prove that. Movie researcher Stephen Follows has produced a number of graphs and tables showing that popular films have steadily been getting longer for years, but what McConaughey said can still be right.
Movies might be getting longer, but perhaps they’re skipping long set-ups to get straight into the action, and I don’t have the data to back that accusation up, but it’s definitely something to bear in mind next time you watch a film.
