There’s nothing more powerful than a marginalised group standing together and asserting its dignity in the face of prejudice. That’s why I was moved almost to tears over the weekend when People Who Like Opera and Ballet (PWLOB) launched a blistering hashtag campaign in response to Timothée Chalamet. “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about it,’” the actor sneered during a recent conversation with Matthew McConaughey about the future of movie theatres. “Nay, Mr Chalamet…” the PWLOB community cried in one voice, posting pictures of their Carmen and Giselle ticket snubs: “#WeCare”. 

On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t that deep. As someone with no strong feelings about Timothée Chalamet and a vague fondness for opera and ballet, I think a lot of people are being annoying and bizarrely self-righteous about his comments. As well as the indignant culture vultures, and a cutting riposte from Doja Cat, the backlash has veered into some bizarre directions. One Instagram voice expert analysed Chalamet’s vocal delivery in the manner of an FBI agent profiling Hannibal Lecter (his “register drop and vocal fry” is “supposed to diffuse accountability”; he’s “softening his dismissal” so “it reads as an offhand observation as opposed to an attack” – an attack on who!?). Several commentators have argued that Chalamet’s remarks suggest a sinister rightward turn, a desire to cosy up to MAGA dude-bros and an anti-art philistinism bordering on the fascist. “In trying so hard for macho bravado, he stepped into old homophobic, anti-intellectual tropes,” wrote the artist Leo Herrera, suggesting it was part of a broader trend of “toxic, anti-woke, anti-arts bullshit.”

This is the kind of criticism I’d normally be sympathetic to, but in this case I’m just not seeing it (partly because I no longer think of ballet and opera as particularly gay-coded – maybe if Timmy had come for Addison Rae…). While his delivery was a little smug, Chalamet’s point wasn’t all that objectionable in the context of a long discussion about the future of movie theatres. At a time when cinemagoing is losing its position as a culturally central form of mass entertainment, he was pushing back against the popular idea that Gen Z’s attention spans are too fried to allow them to sit still in a dark room for two hours. The main point wasn’t that cinema is superior to ballet; it was that the theatrical movie experience still has a future for a mass audience.

That hope, however, can only be cautious. It’s true that there has been a cinema revival among Gen Z, as Chalamet pointed out, this has been driven either by arthouse and repertory cinemas – mostly in big cities – or by a handful of major releases, many of them video-game adaptations. The overall trend is downward, and it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that going to the cinema will one day become, like ballet and opera, a niche, rarified pursuit kept alive by a relatively small number of enthusiasts. In fact, the kind of rhetoric Chalamet is alluding to with “hey, keep this thing alive” is already being applied to cinema-going. What was once one of the most popular leisure activities in the world is increasingly discussed in “use it or lose it” terms – the sort of civic obligation normally reserved for your local anarchist bookstore or subscribing to the Washington Post. It’s hardly surprising that a Hollywood actor would push back against that framing. What he wants is something simpler: films that feel like cultural events again, the kind everyone goes to see and talks about the next day.

Of course, he could have made this point without disparaging other art forms, but it’s hard to get too outraged at someone using hyperbole: it isn’t true that “nobody cares about ballet and opera”, but it is true that not very many do. I also don’t think we can blame Chalamet for the fact that opera and ballet are no longer mass entertainments. In 2026, there is probably a cap on how many people would be interested in giving them a try, but they are both prohibitively expensive and as such deeply exclusive – a lot more people would care about them if the average ticket didn’t cost upwards of £100 or $100 (although London’s Royal Opera House has, to its credit, a cheap tickets scheme for the under-30s). Beyond changing tastes, the real culprit is years of government funding cuts, both in the UK and the US, which have left many of the world’s great opera houses struggling to keep the lights on. You could argue that the dismissive attitude typified by Chalamet’s remarks has helped to create the context for those cuts, but it would be a bit of a reach. 

While both ballet and opera have their elitist histories, rooted in high society and royal courts, they have at times been widely accessible and popular forms of entertainment. That is no longer the case. Chalamet’s delivery might have been snide, but I don’t think it’s inherently insulting to either art form to hope for something different for the future of cinema, that it might retain – or even recover – its status as one of the most normal things you can do on a Friday night.