Guess what? Cinema is not dead. Let’s stop with the prophecies of doom for a moment.

When I became the television critic for the Los Angeles Times in early 2007, many people told me it was a terrible idea. Why would I give up my job as a movie writer to criticize television? Didn’t I know that “The Sopranos” was ending? And that, with few exceptions, original scripted television was dead, murdered by reality TV and endless Internet content?

Fortunately, I didn’t hear any of this. Instead, I got to watch and write about one of the most amazing artistic revolutions of our time. The pendulum (and Hollywood’s penchant for excess) being what it is, television is now facing a financial crisis due in large part to this wonderful period of growth. But while the industry is in a phase of belt-tightening, no one is predicting the art form’s total demise.

I think of television in 2007 every time a consortium of experts announces the end of something. I certainly thought of it a month ago, when so many people were announcing the end of cinema.

In May, “The Fall Guy,” “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” and “The Garfield Movie” all failed to meet pre-release expectations. Instead of questioning the wisdom of expectations themselves,,Especially in light of the crippling strikes by writers and actors, the industry, and many who cover the news, have preferred to announce that the sky is falling.

“People don’t want to go to the movies anymore,” one person said out loud and in public.

Then “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “A Quiet Place: Day One,” and especially “Inside Out 2” came out and suddenly everyone was going to the movies again. The box office took off again and “Deadpool & Wolverine” wasn’t even out yet.

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It turns out that people still want to go to the movies. Maybe not as much as they did before streaming made television autonomous and available 24/7, or before a global pandemic shuttered theaters for more than a year and studios decided to make movies available for home viewing just weeks after their theatrical release. “A Quiet Place: Day One” has already grossed more than $100 million worldwide in its first five days, despite Paramount announcing a streaming release date of July 30.

As this film and other releases in June or July prove, when there is something (and this is important) that people actually like, want to seeThey’re all there, chatting and laughing and waiting in line to pay $17 for a ticket and $10 for a bucket of popcorn. I saw “Inside Out 2” a full week after it came out and it took me almost half an hour to find a parking spot.

After last year’s strikes, this summer may not live up to the magic of “Barbenheimer” or whatever other criteria analysts want to use. But that’s beside the point.

The question is: why have we become so eager to pronounce time of death when the patient is obviously still breathing?

This country has been through a lot of trauma in recent years, but we’re doing ourselves a disservice by constantly jumping from “problem” to “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it catastrophe” about everything. (Don’t even get me started on the mad rush that followed the presidential debate, but subtext, subtext, subtext.)

Not only is it exhausting and sometimes embarrassing, but our addiction to hyperbole makes it impossible to distinguish the real DEFCON-1 emergencies—the climate crisis, the homelessness crisis, the internal threats to our democracy—from less dire problems.

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This is not to belittle the situation in Hollywood. For those working in the entertainment industry, the current period of restrictions is an immediate problem that threatens livelihoods. But to view the failure of a few films as an indicator not only of the state of cinema but also of the state of mind of billions of people is not only useless, it is also proof, as recent history has proven, that it is completely stupid.

Television was dead until it wasn’t. The summer box office was dead, but it’s not. Publishing had no future until Oprah started a book club and “Harry Potter” came along. Oh, and remember how people told Taylor Swift she was in danger of ruining her career because of “overexposure”?

There is both pathos and poetic justice in the fact that Inside Out 2 is currently “saving” the summer. Much of the story revolves around how terrible life is when anxiety takes control; anxiety can only imagine the worst-case scenarios and inevitably strives to avoid them.

This is not to say that some of these scenarios are not possible or even probable; it simply means that we would do well not to rely solely on anxiety to define life’s problems and provide the solutions. Give joy, sadness, or even embarrassment a chance.

Pixar isn’t going to change the state of the nation (it has its own problems, after all). But the pained laughter elicited by the film’s climactic scene—in which Anxiety piles on one dire prediction after another—is telling. Between the state of American politics, social media (and traditional media’s attempts to keep up), and the trauma inflicted by the pandemic, we’ve become a nation of adrenaline-fueled anxiety junkies, ignoring the good, pouncing on the bad, and making sweeping generalizations about very complicated things whenever something seems wrong.

Or even before it does. Like anxiety, we are all increasingly in the business of prediction. Whether on Instagram or CNN, analysts (professional or self-appointed) behave like modern-day soothsayers, scanning polls, social media, music videos, and the general zeitgeist to utter words of prophecy and, increasingly, doom.

Of course, crises exist and we must avoid knocking them down. The film industry faces many challenges, like many other industries, as it always has and as it always will. Alarm bells are important, but they become less and less effective if they are rung every hour.

It is not always necessary to make an immediate decision. Even referees often resort to slow motion video. Some moments require a calm assessment of the problem and possible solutions. It is easy to run around screaming that the sky is falling, but it is harder to determine whether what has actually fallen is an asteroid or an acorn and whether something can or should be done about it.

A lot of things change, for better or worse, but some things don’t. The entertainment industry needs to find a more solid financial footing, sure, but people will always want to hear stories told from the shadows.

Although it is quite difficult to find a parking space.

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This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.