There, I said it. For years, that sentence would have been the whole blog post. Now I need a few hundred more words to explain why I was wrong, and why I was also kind of right.
I grew up loving movies. Still do. I loved how film made everyday life look cinematic and beautiful, how the right film stock and an anamorphic lens could make a parking lot look like a scene worth remembering. The theater experience is a huge part of that. Watching that art form on the biggest screen possible, with sound wrapping around you, turns a movie into an experience instead of just a viewing. Don't even get me started on IMAX.
That obsession followed me into my own work. Wedding films, film photography, whatever I'm shooting, movies are the reference point. A shot composed for a big horizontal screen pulls you into a world. You get a sense of scale you simply cannot get on a phone. That's not an opinion; that's physics.
So you can imagine how it feels to spend hours lighting, framing, and color grading a shot to look like a scene from a film, only to have a client ask if we can also get a version that's "vertical."
Here's the part where I stop being bitter for a second and just tell you what's actually happening. Right now, more than 75% of all video content is watched on mobile devices, not TVs or theater screens. People are holding their phones vertically roughly 94% of the time they're using them, which means a horizontal video is asking someone to physically rotate their hand just to watch it. Vertical video, unsurprisingly, holds attention longer because it fits how people are already sitting there scrolling.
That's the whole story of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts in one sentence: they didn't create the vertical habit; they just built for it. And now everyone is filming their own "movies" on their phones too, whether they call it that or not.
Our lives keep getting more accessible and convenient, with social media and AI leading that charge. The content people actually want to watch has gotten rawer and more unfiltered right along with it. Videography used to be its own trade. Now anyone can film something on their phone, drop it into a CapCut template, and watch it outperform a professional production.
Meanwhile, I can spend hours on pre-production, filming, and post-production, editing in Premiere or Resolve, sifting through footage, cutting a timeline, color grading it until it's buttery smooth, and it can still get less engagement than someone's unedited phone clip. That used to make me furious. Now I think it's actually telling us something important.
Movies aren't going anywhere. It's still an art form that IMAX enthusiasts and phone-movie enjoyers can both love. But raw, unfiltered content performs so well right now because people are exhausted by things that feel fake. Between AI content flooding every timeline and commercials that create expectations no real product can meet, most people just want a slice of life. They want to see how something actually shows up in someone's real day, not a paid actor hitting his marks in a staged living room.
I'd rather watch a real person test a product on camera than a polished ad selling me a fantasy. I pay extra for ad-free streaming. I'm a proud YouTube Premium subscriber. If I have to sit through one more AI-generated actor pitching me a product, I might actually lose it. Kidding. Mostly.
Honesty feels like a minority position right now, and a lot of us are tired of that. For anyone making content or ads today, that's the actual takeaway: audiences aren't rejecting quality; they're rejecting anything that feels staged. Real, specific, a little rough around the edges: that's what earns the watch time now.
Does vertical video still bother me? Yeah, a little. But I get why we need it right now. It's not replacing cinema; it's just meeting people where they already are: on their phones, holding them vertically, wanting something real. I'll keep shooting for the big screen. I'll also keep exporting a vertical version. Both things can be true, even if only one of them makes me feel something when the lights go down.