Will cinema grow up next year?

As the news has become harsher, cinema has become even sillier. That mirror Soderbergh talked about has been smashed — and nothing at the multiplex reflects our unstable world. With La La Land’s brash and lively dominance of the awards imminent, the brain drain will be complete. Damien Chazelle’s singalong in vividly coloured outfits will steal oxygen from quieter work (Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight) that directly addresses our world and doesn’t flinch from telling us how tough it is.

It is rare that mainstream audiences want such stories now. Cinema for many has become hygge-away-from-home, the big screen a refuge from the black parade of news on the handheld screens all around us. Audiences are becoming ostriches, and the multiplex is one of the last remaining patches of sand.

Our need for escapism has developed fast. It’s hardly as if 2013, when I spoke to Soderbergh, was a vintage year at the movies. The highest-grossing film at the UK box office that year was Despicable Me 2. But read down the top 40 and button-pushing work is still there: Captain Phillips (16), Django Unchained (17), American Hustle (21) and Philomena (29). Go back to the 1990s and films about Aids, the Holocaust and serial killers were commonplace in the top 10.

This year, the only films in the UK top 40 to make anybody think about anything beyond their snack of choice were The Girl on the Train and The Revenant, and only the former, with its plot about drink and domestic abuse, remotely held up a mirror to contemporary society. The upper reaches of the chart are dominated by animations, fantasy epics, hen-do remakes, dim comedies and a biopic of Eddie the Eagle.

“If I’m paying to watch a film, I want to see beautiful people in it,” posted a commenter on a website recently. “I can see ordinary-looking people in the street for free. I use the mainstream film industry for escapism, not social comment or therapy.” He is no expert, of course, but this was the year experts were declared over, and, considering four of the top six films in the US were about animals, and the other two starred Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds, he’s more in tune with audiences than any theorist I’ve read on the subject.

Or, indeed, most of the film-makers I’ve spoken to. From Charlie Kaufman to Paul Verhoeven, they have talked about money and how studios finance lowest-common-denominator franchises and safe-bet sequels to maximise returns. Kaufman said furiously: “We’ve degenerated from a cinema culture into something else... There were periods when people wanted to see movies that were interesting.”

This is certainly one reason 2016 has been dominated by films for children — Finding Dory, The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Really, though, such projects are the chicken to the egg, a reaction to the shift in habit that has seen viewers seek out light, rather than dark. Blaming studios for not making them like they used to is disingenuous. The general public don’t want films the way they used to be at the end of the 20th century. The top 27 movies of all time each earned more than $1bn, and 24 of those have been released in the past 15 years. No studio will care if their plotting is simple as long as people flock to see them. This is going to be the way it is for the foreseeable.

If La La Land is a financial success, though, it could lead to copycatting and more grown-up fare that, even if unchallenging, does at least offer excellent cinematography and slightly complicated characters on a large scale. Films like La La Land and what may follow it can be seen as an attempt to grab back the part of the audience that ditched cinema date nights for a Netflix subscription when they tired of yet another superhero film.

Universal seems to be pitching to this stay-at-home audience with its own version of Marvel’s successful multi-character model. The studio is putting together a vapid-looking expanded-universe franchise featuring a ragbag of its well-loved monsters — Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man — with added CGI. Tom Cruise, rather improbably, launches the series next June with The Mummy, and it is clear that its marketing will be aimed at adults who don’t like comic books, do remember these cinematic beasts, but, like everybody else, don’t want to be challenged at the cinema.

One valid criticism of the escapist stranglehold is that too many movies have become indistinguishable from video games. There are vibrating chairs and sensory screening rooms, while some directors even film scenes like first-person shoot-’em-ups, lest teens be alienated by having to follow a story, rather than controlling it.

Perhaps inevitably, there is also work going into putting viewers in charge of the story. A few weeks ago, a London cinema hosted the UK premiere of the “world’s first cinematic interactive movie”, Late Shift. The audience sat with their phones and the film played out, steered by the decisions they made at various points by pressing their touchscreens. Vue is trialling the game — sorry, film — and plans to roll it out across the country next year.

I had a go. It started like a normal thriller, with a voiceover and aerial shots of London, as Matt (Joe Sowerbutts) stands on a bus. Suddenly “Selfless” or “Selfish” popped up on screen, but as I wasn’t expecting this, the options vanished. Next, when a man asked Matt for help on the Tube, the choice “Help” or “Board” appeared. Feeling — finally — like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, I went for “Board”, but Matt still missed the train. It was an inauspicious beginning to my new experience, which could last between 74 and 92 minutes, depending on the options taken.

Soon I was having fun, though. Matt works in a garage, where a thug turns up with a gun and asks him to be the getaway driver. I press for him to run before going back to the start, choosing everything differently and being impressed at how varied the story becomes. I see no reason why this won’t catch on. Imagine being able to tell Brad Pitt in Se7en not to open the box. It’s not exactly intellectually challenging, but this kind of film has the potential to be hugely effective, given a decent budget. Late Shift feels like the most important film of the year. What fan of the fisticuffs-obsessed Avengers wouldn’t want to decide who wins between Captain America and Iron Man?

Maybe, though, turning cinemas into theme parks is actually a good thing. Who wants to go out any more anyway? It’s expensive and an experience not that far removed from our home TV sets, which get bigger and bigger.

Distributors of more grown-up fare have latched onto this sentiment. The Curzon chain releases its films online simultaneously with, or soon after, a theatrical run. Spike Lee’s incendiary Chi-Raq is already available, as is Louis Theroux’s Scientology documentary. After premiering at Sundance, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, another Oscar contender, was bought by Amazon, ensuring it a longish life on its streaming service.

The small(ish) screen looks like the future for films that reflect our world, while the multiplex turns into a safe space, a playground, where the only challenge is finding a seat that isn’t sticky with dead popcorn. It is the living room where rivals for the prizes La La Land wins will end up. That isn’t so bad. When serious directors shoot films to be released online and in cinemas simultaneously, the viewer gets a choice. Rushed curry before a scheduled showing miles away or a takeaway at a time of your choosing? Now that’s a no-brainer.