Cinephiles are upset that the great Alfred Hitchcock’s work is being repurposed for a new generation on mobile devices.
On Monday, January 26, Deadline reported that the acclaimed horror director’s 1927 silent film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, will be among the first classic movies to be recut, reframed and rendered as a microdrama designed for vertical viewing on mobile phones.
The film is currently available in the US on Tattle TV, a platform designed to repurpose longer stories into microdramas, essentially short episodes of a larger story broken down for mobile-first viewing. It achieves this on existing movies like The Lodger using “cutting-edge AI tools.”
“By repurposing British classics like The Lodger, Tattle TV aims to introduce iconic cinema to a whole new generation of viewers, bridging the gap between film history and contemporary mobile audiences,” the company said in a statement, per Deadline.
According to The Daily Mail, many have criticized the decision to essentially use AI to take a classic movie and put it in a form it was never intended to be viewed in.
“This is so incredibly bleak,” the outlet reported one fan commenting, while another wrote: “If you can’t sit down and watch a 90 minute movie I feel sorry for you.”
“Reframing Hitchcock into a microdrama sounds less like innovation and more like we’ve officially lost our collective attention span,” a third person wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “It’s wild that we’re taking the Master of Suspense and chopping him up for people who can’t sit still for more than ninety seconds.”
The Lodger was Hitchcock’s first serious film, which he reportedly hoped would establish him as a serious director, per Deadline. It stars Marie Ault and Ivor Novello, and focuses on a serial killer following his next victim.
According to a different profile from Deadline, Hitchcock’s classic thriller is just the first feature-length movie that Tattle TV is hoping to convert to a vertical microdrama. The platform is reportedly currently eyeing the Monty Python catalog of films to cut into bite-sized microdramas next.
