Outside Los Angeles’ iconic Hollywood Bowl, a mass of zillennials wait with bated breath to step into a box truck and purchase DVDs.
They’ve been meticulously scheduled, each of them the lucky winners of a lottery boasting over seven thousand entries for just over five hundred time slots. Time slots because, all throughout the country, crowds approaching ten thousand people have lined up at the crack of dawn for their moment in the truck. Steps away, a different crowd, just as young and as eager, gathers in folding chairs to watch films by Fellini or Kurosawa or Buñuel in an open-air tent. Many of them await their own turns to step into the truck, if they haven’t been there already. And over twenty thousand people claimed those tickets the first week they were available.
Such was the atmosphere at the event colloquially known as the “Wes Bowl,” a gargantuan weekendlong celebration of the singular canon of one Wes Anderson. Centered around a series of LA Philharmonic concerts at the Bowl paying tribute to Anderson’s iconic scores and soundtracks, the festivities sought to bring the auteur’s famously meticulous aesthetic to life — creating a sort of cinephile summit in the process.
For the latter part, Anderson and the Bowl leaned on The Criterion Collection, a company perhaps most cleanly identified as a home entertainment merchandiser dedicated to the cinematic canon, though such a label doesn’t come close to the full story. It’s also a specialty streamer, through its Criterion Channel (which boasts monthly themed programs like Starring Courtney Love or And The Razzie Goes To…), a social media juggernaut with its Criterion Picks series, and a sort of lifestyle brand in the same way, say, A24 has become.
Despite its origin back in 1984, the company seems to be experiencing its peak thus far, thanks to an unlikely hero: Gen Z.
“They treat film discovery the way earlier generations treated music discovery,” Criterion CMO Anne Kawalerski says of young audiences’ embrace of cinephilia. “Deeply social, deeply online, a little competitive in the best way.” She echoes the agreed-upon industry doctrine, in the wake of Obsession and Backrooms’ blockbuster moment, that Gen Z is “the most active moviegoing generation in the country.”
The whole Criterion moment, as well as the Wes Bowl programming, feels distinctly like a mismatch with the young crowd on paper. After all, we’re talking about DVDs — long considered a casualty of streaming — of Tarkovsky films and orchestra shows where Beck and Jackson Browne cover songs that were already vintage when Anderson needledropped them twenty-plus years ago. To be sure, much of the crowd was the typical Hollywood Bowl sort, season passholders with boxes and all the archetypes one conjures when thinking of people who attend orchestral concerts in 2026.
In other words, the folks a certain Best Actor nominee-turned-gambling shill gestured at earlier this year.
But there was an unmistakable youthful electricity about the crowd; all around me, costumed twenty-somethings enjoyed novelty candies and cried to a cover of Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” (so devastatingly employed in The Royal Tenenbaums).
Red beanies in the vein of The Life Aquatic’s Steve Zissou abounded throughout the thousands-strong crowd; a friend of a friend with that girly-pop demeanor so common among the kids claimed to have hundreds of them on hand. She offered to grab me one during intermission, but the show started back up before I was able to retrieve it. Even still, I believe her.
Photography courtesy of Criterion and Timothy Norris
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