I wish we didn’t call them shorts.
Movies are stories, and good ones leave impressions that are timeless. Referring to a group of them based on runtime is an oversimplification at best, and at worst, using a word that our brains associate with concepts like small, brief, or cursory unfairly colors our perception of a movie before it even begins. Our mindset affects how we experience things, and calling a movie a short can trick us into thinking it’s somehow less than its feature-length siblings.
Of course, the runtime of a movie can be an important fact to know. As few of us have the luxury to play movie roulette, we shouldn’t get rid of a quick way to distinguish between longer and briefer movies. But we should be more thoughtful about how we express that difference.
So I propose the following; if we’re calling these movies anything other than movies, let’s call them bites—a digestible experience giving you all the flavors that something has to offer.
Tasty, no?