I saw Parasite at the Hollywood Theatre in November, in a sold out room of people who did not appear to be struggling. They laughed in the right places. They gasped in the right place, the big one, the one everybody has agreed not to describe. Nobody left.
On Sunday it won Best Picture, the first film not in English to do it, and the industry spent Monday morning acting surprised.
I was not surprised. I was annoyed, which is a different thing.
For most of my career I have sat in rooms where somebody says, with total confidence and zero evidence, that our audience will not read. Will not read subtitles. Will not read a paragraph. Will not read past the headline. It is never presented as a hypothesis to be tested. It is presented as a fact about human beings, and it always arrives forty minutes before a good idea gets simplified into a bad one.
Audiences do not refuse difficulty. They refuse difficulty that is not worth it.
Bong Joon Ho put it better in January when he called subtitles a one inch tall barrier. The barrier is real. It is also one inch tall. People clear it constantly when the thing on the other side earns the climb, and they refuse to step over a curb when it does not.
Here is the part that gets lost. The assumption in the brief is almost never about the audience. It is about the work. When a team says people will not read this, what they usually mean, without knowing it, is that this is not worth reading. That is a fixable problem. The other framing is not fixable, because it locates the failure in the customer, where nobody has to answer for it.
Patagonia publishes essays that run for thousands of words about supply chains and factory audits, and people read them, because the essays are about something. Powell's sells a staff pick with three handwritten sentences on an index card and moves the whole stack. Neither is fighting attention span. Both are earning it.
Audiences do not refuse difficulty. They refuse difficulty that is not worth it.
So the next time somebody in a review says our audience will not do that, ask how we know. Not to be difficult. Ask because the answer is usually a focus group from 2014 or a personal preference wearing a lab coat. If the honest answer is that nobody has checked, then what you have is not an audience insight. It is a permission slip for making the work smaller.
At karaoke last Thursday, in the sticky floored place off Belmont where the host calls everyone baby, a woman I have never met sang something in Korean and the entire bar clapped through all four minutes of it. Not one of us understood a word. Everybody got the point.