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This introduction reviews and revises the traditional narrativization of Mexican film history that overlooks 1960s to 1980s cinematic production and labels an era of “crisis.” A recent conflict between Mexico’s national film institute, the Cineteca Nacional, and the cinema of El Santo, a beloved figure of popular culture, illustrates the institutional and academic biases that contribute to the exclusion of commercial genre films that lack aesthetic quality. Opposing the critical and scholarly prioritization of auteur, art, independent, and prize-winning cinema, this chapter centers the lost cinema, providing an overview of its shared qualities and a fresh take on Mexican film “crisis.” The chapter reframes the (typically lamented) departure from didactic, Golden Age displays of Mexican national identity as predicating the creative liberty for cinema to explore what it meant to be modern in ways untethered to revolutionary nationalism.