The form has collapsed and been rebuilt twice, and each collapse left behind a cohort who think of musicals as something that happened to other generations. After sound arrived, Hollywood released more than 100 musicals in 1930; audiences saturated so fast that studios cut songs out of films already shot, and only 14 came out in 1931. The second collapse was more expensive. Mid-1960s hits encouraged studios to commit to very large musical budgets, and the run of failures in the late 1960s and early 1970s damaged the finances of several major studios badly enough that the genre stopped being a default. What replaced it mattered too: by the 1970s film prestige had moved toward gritty realism, and the open theatricality of a character stopping to sing read as old-fashioned rather than normal. Animated musicals from 1989 onward rebuilt an audience from childhood up, and the 21st-century revival has arrived mostly as biopics and darker adaptations. The 30% neutral in the polling is the honest middle: not hostile, just never inducted.