Name: Why Are There So Few Smartphones In Popular Movies?
Uploaded: 2026-02-10T17:25:59.000Z
Duration: 7 min 43 s
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This is what a collective anonymous body of majority wants to see on television.

I think about this quote a lot from Werner Herzog.

He was talking about television and specifically WrestleMania, but

I think it applies to any form of popular entertainment.

The basic idea is that the most popular things, the biggest movies and TV shows and even digital media, are a reflection of what we want to see, so we can read from them insights about our desires and aversions.

As Professor John Hunter from Bucknell pointed out recently in a TEDx talk, which I'll link below, our tentpole movies aren't entertaining by accident.

If you're investing in something that costs anywhere from 200 million to $300 million, you aren't taking any chances.

Every second of these films and TV shows is scrutinized by editors and photographers and directors and producers and marketing people and studio, and

To your desires to be as popular as possible, to as many people as possible.

Hunter argues that what our biggest movies tell us is that we're not interested in seeing reality as it is.

We prefer worlds that are animated, or in a galaxy far, far away.

We prefer a universe populated with superheroes, or an island populated by dinosaurs, or a super advanced kingdom hidden away in the jungle.

Now to be fair, popular entertainment has always had an escapist ele, though you could say that it's more prominent now than in the past.

But what I find more interesting about Hunter's argument is a specific aversion that he finds in the entertainment of today.

Those ever present things that connect us to social media and capture more and more of our free time every year.

If we look at our most popular movies, he says, what we don't see is our devices.

I immediately became interested in the truth of this claim.

So I decided to take a closer look at the highest domestic grossing movies of this year, 2018, to see if smartphones were in them and if they were, how exactly they were being used.

Okay, first in Black Panther, America's highest grossing movie of 2018 and likely to stay that way, there are three brief instances of smartphone use.

She uses her phone to intercept security footage.

Then we see a couple shots of people taking pictures of t' Challa after a chase sequence.

Then Claw uses one to text someone later in the film, though we don't see who or know why.

In Avengers Infinity War, there are exactly zero smartphones, none however, Tony Stark, the most technologically advanced human on the planet who wears a suit made of nanoparticles, does use a phone in the movie.

In the third highest grossing movie of 2018, the Incredibles 2, there are also zero smartphones having to do with the fact that the world has this mid century modern aesthetic.

Even though there are some high tech things, it's confusing.

However, there is no shortage of older phones.

In Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, we get our first look at a major character using a smartphone for something other than communication, and

Claire is reading the news, though it's brief, and

the other three instances of smartphone use in this movie are all phone calls.

In Deadpool 2, we get one phone call, one mindless surf from Yukio, and

In Impossible Fallout, Ethan Hunt, the Linda of these movies, repurposes a smartphone to use it as a Tracker twice.

There's one FaceTime call and one phone handoff.

In Ant man and the WASP, there's just one FaceTime call and one regular call.

And finally, in Solo, there are no smartphones at all because this is a far future galaxy that's set in the past that has what George Lucas thought future things would look like 40 years ago.

Altogether, that's 16 smartphones in the top eight grossing films of 2018.

I couldn't get access to 9 and 10 because they're still out in theaters, but

The uses break down like five phone calls, two video calls, four what I'll call single use spy stuff.

One news source, one camera, two unknown Claw and Yukio, and one say anything homage.

If we're trying to determine the truth of Professor Hunter's claim that the lack of smartphones is is indicative of a popular resentment toward the way these devices control our lives and eat up our free time.

We should compare the way that people use smartphones in these movies to the way that we do.

Through that lens, you can see that at least five of these uses have little or no relationship to real life.

Phone calls, similarly, are an activity that could just as easily be done on Tony Stark's flip phone or Mr.

Video calls are, I don't think, something that most of us worry about when it comes to time wasting.

And as for Yukio and Claw, we don't even see what they're doing.

That leaves this single instance of Claire checking the news now for me at least, that is definitely a common time sucking use of my smartphone.

In the end, you can decide for yourself whether this evidence is conclusive.

I think there is enough here to at least partially support Hunter's claims, because though there are smartphones in some of these movies, their combined runtime comes out to only about a minute, if that.

And I don't think we really see anyone using them in the ways that we might be frustrated with in our on average 3.3 hours of mobile usage a day.

And I'm more convinced when I realized that in all of these films there are no references or mentions at all of social media.

According to the data company apptopia, across the 100 most popular apps, 54% of screen time is spent in apps owned by Google or Facebook.

That's things like YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

None of these apps or any generic equivalents appear in the highest grossing movies of 2018.

The time wasting, data mining, addiction, creating activity that has become a key, maybe even a defining feature of our relationship with these devices is absent from our most popular entertainment.

This doesn't mean that our smartphones and social media don't feature in any movies.

In fact, one of the best movies of this year in my opinion, Bo Burnham's eighth grade, is all about the ways that our devices and the social Internet shape the way we interact.

Confronting that relationship is and will be an important subject for film.

But our most popular movies have never really been about confronting our fears and resentments.

Hey man, they're about escaping them for a couple hours at the end of a hard week.

And in that spirit, I think you can say that smartphones may play a big role in our lives.

Bigger maybe than we want to admit, but they barely have any part in our biggest movies.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving.

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Why Are There So Few Smartphones In Popular Movies?

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