I think OP was talking about the academic/artistic elites, which nowadays seem more divorced from the general population than they used to be. And I think that has more to do with the internet than movie prices.
People who want to get into the "theoretical" aspects of a movie can go insanely deep very quickly, whereas the average person won't care as much. On one hand you have a bunch of nerds trying to make/recognize increasingly obscure references as our ability to remember and find things gets better, and on the other hand you have people who just want to see stuff get blown up.
People who want to get into the "theoretical" aspects of a movie can go insanely deep very quickly, whereas the average person won't care as much. On one hand you have a bunch of nerds trying to make/recognize increasingly obscure references as our ability to remember and find things gets better, and on the other hand you have people who just want to see stuff get blown up.