In this article, Dr Andrew Webber argues that American fi lms today have been divided into mainstream and art house products, with mass audiences for the former and niche markets for the latter. This is very different to American cinema in the 1970s when the fi lms appealed to wide audiences regardless of subject matter. The article concludes, therefore, that audiences today are generally far less sophisticated in their tastes and tend to be increasingly narrow in terms of the range of fi lms they are prepared to watch at the cinema.