The dictionary definition of cinema is two-fold. The word can mean “a movie theater” or “the production of movies as an art or industry.” Despite being fully aware of this definition, when I refer to cinema I’m referring to something specific: the experience of going to a public theater, to see a film on a big screen, either alone or with friends, and in the company of an audience of strangers. Meanwhile, I use the term film to mean movies in any context.
Film is doing fine. Cinema is in trouble right now.
We could argue about the quality of films being made, or the variety therein, but it’s clear that existing studios are still making films, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, while new studios are popping up all the time. The industry is in a state of flux, and much like the music industry and the publishing industry, it will likely need to recalibrate its finances, but I see no reason to worry that there won’t be film in the future. I do worry there won’t be cinemas, and home viewing will be the only option for watching most movies.
But Can’t I Just Recreate the Cinema at Home?
I do the best I can to approximate the experience at home, but it's a far, far cry from seeing a film in a theater. A movie screen is usually between 20 x 60 and 30 x 90, and in better theaters it’s even larger. And then there’s IMAX for when you absolutely, positively need that super-sized cinematic experience. Even in a very small theater, the screen will be 10 x 30. Comparatively, a 100" TV is approximately 4 x 7. A large screen for a home projector measures 5 x 8. Unless you are wealthy enough to build an actual cinema in your home, which probably 99.9% of us aren’t, you’re going to be watching a much smaller image.
The sound system will be better in a theater, where it has been installed and optimized for the vast concert hall of a room it occupies, a room with acoustics designed specifically for film soundtracks. Some home viewers may fool themselves by installing a sound system that plays at a very high volume, or has room-shaking bass, but no one outside of that lucky 0.1% mentioned above is going to come close to mimicking at home what they hear in a theater. This is the reason many people are forced to turn on closed captioning (subtitles) when watching a movie at home, but have no problem hearing every word of dialogue in a cinema.
What comes next simply can't be duplicated at home: 300 or more strangers coming together as one to create an audience. Don’t be fooled, an audience makes a massive difference. Think about how rarely, if ever, you laugh out loud while watching a movie alone at home, or with a few friends, then compare that to how often you laugh when you’re watching in a crowded theater. The same is true for dramatic moments. They hit harder when you witness them as a part of a collective whole. I can still remember palpable feelings of tension at key moments of films I’ve watched in theaters, and the times when I was part of an audience that laughed, gasped, or drew back in horror in reaction to what we’d just seen onscreen.
More than the size of the screen or the clarity of the sound, it’s the audience that creates the cinematic experience. Humans are social creatures, and we evolved to participate in rituals. From the shamans of old to the screen idols of today, there have always been figures who bring us together in groups, where we lose ourselves and become a part of a collective whole for a couple hours of worship and revelry.
Even our lucky 0.1-percenters are out of luck here. You can argue that they have the wealth and wherewithal to invite 300 strangers over to watch with them, but even then they’ve failed, because at that point they no longer have a home theater, and have instead unwittingly become the owner of a non-profit, public cinema.
This doesn’t mean it’s pointless to watch films at home. Of course you should do that. Between physical media and streaming we have historically unprecedented access to the full body of existing films at our fingertips, and it would be silly not to take advantage of that fact. I certainly do! I have a room in my house dedicated to watching movies, in which I have a projector and a 9 x 5 screen. I watch movies there all the time, but accept that I'm getting at best 10% of the cinematic experience when I do so. When a movie I want to see is playing near me— even if it’s a film I own on physical media— I go see it, if at all possible. When I travel, I arrange my itinerary to accommodate what’s playing in my destination.
Why is Cinema Dying?
If you ask some people, they’ll tell you it’s because the movies being made today aren’t as good as the movies of the past. Others will tell you it’s because ticket—prices are too high. Still other people will invoke politics, and explain that people have stopped seeing movies because Hollywood has gone woke. Yet another camp swears it’s because cinema-goers are prone to misbehavior, and they don’t want to watch a movie in a room full of people using mobile phones, talking, fighting, and so forth.
How valid are these reasons? My short answer is “not very,” but let’s look at each argument.
Movies Today Suck
Were movies better in the past? Maybe. Probably not. Sure, my favorite films were made between about 1927 and 1945, with the absolute heyday of cinema being the 1930s, but if you ask others when they think the best films were made you’ll probably get as many time periods as people you ask. Everyone has their own favorites, and it’s human nature to believe that things were better in the “good old days.” For as long as I’ve been old enough to talk about movies with people, I’ve heard the argument that movies were better “before.” I’m old enough to remember when the ‘70s were widely dismissed as a decade of terrible films. Now, people speak with reverence of that same era of filmmaking. Attitudes change over time, and I won’t be at all surprised if I hear people in the 2050s waxing nostalgic about the golden age of cinema that was the 2020s.
Additionally, if any one thing has been true my entire life, it’s that terrible movies have consistently reaped massive amounts of money at the box office. Occasionally a good movie sneaks in and makes money, but I think it’s inarguable that there is no correlation between the quality of a film and how much money it earns, so if cinema today is worse than ever, it stands to reason that studios should be setting new profit records every week.
Tickets Cost Too Much
Have people stopped going to the movies because of the price of a ticket? The average cost of a movie ticket in 2019 was 9.16. Today, in 2024, it’s 10.78. That’s an 18% increase. Meanwhile, gas has jumped from 1.97 per gallon in 2019 to 3.22 today, up 64%. Milk is up 35%. So while yes, it costs more to go to a movie today than it did in 2019, relative to the value of the dollar, movies are cheaper today than they were five years ago.
Go Woke Go Broke
Is it because Hollywood is shoving left-wing politics into films? Maybe, but that’s nothing new. I know there was a time long ago when movies espoused more of a traditional or conservative point of view, but for at least the past 60 years Hollywood has been a bastion of liberalism, and the ideology put forth in movies has been progressive since at least the late '60s. One might make the case that Hollywood is even further left than ever, but a counterpoint is that many beliefs that were fringe 50 years ago are mainstream today, so while the liberalism of ‘70s Hollywood may seem quaint now, to the people of that time it was likely just as far-left as today’s is. It’s also worth noting that if woke politics are what’s keeping people out of theaters, it’s hard to explain how films like Super Mario Bros. or Barbie, both of which are overtly left-wing and feminist to the point where they sometimes feel like parody, somehow managed to pack theaters. If audiences are sick of woke-ness, DEI, and feminism, why did so many people pay to see those films in a theater?
Hell is Other People
So it must be the other cinema-goers. It must be those rude, talkative boors who refuse to shut up and put their phones away and watch the movie. Right? But be honest, how often do you encounter that behavior in a theater? I’ve seen 113 films in a theater so far in 2024, and I’ve yet to see even one person on their phone, overhear a conversation happening while the film is rolling, or witness any rude behavior whatsoever. The only exception is when I take my children to see movies aimed at kids, where I occasionally hear a child say something or a baby cry, but that’s par for the course at a kiddie flick.
Lately, as I have been mulling this article over in my head, I’ve asked many people— friends, family, and strangers— how often they encounter rude behavior at the movies, and only one person has answered anything other than “never.” The producer on a different podcast I co-host told me he sees people using phones in the theater “all the time.” Perhaps it’s a matter of where you see movies, and there may be certain theaters, or certain cities, where crowds are more prone to rudeness, but I get a strong sense that movie audiences are by and large well-behaved. They certainly aren’t any worse-behaved than they were prior to 2020, when theater-going was still booming.
So then, why aren’t people going to the movies anymore? I may be wrong, but I firmly believe there is a much simpler answer:
People are inherently lazy.
We’ve All Turned Into Potatoes
If we’ve learned anything during 6,000 or so years of recorded history it’s that if you give people an easier method to do something, even if it’s less rewarding or less healthy, most people will take that easy route.
It’s less expensive to go to the store, buy groceries, and cook them at home, and the food will taste better, and be better for you, but it’s easier to tap your phone and have DoorDash bring you lukewarm fast food.
It isn’t as easy to quantify human interaction as it is one’s supper, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s better in most every way to go out into the real world and interact with people in order to make friends or find romantic partners, but it’s much easier to tap your phone and ask Tinder find you a date.
Think about nearly anything people do while sitting on their couch tapping their phones, in comparison to its analog counterpart, and you’ll find that while it’s better, cheaper, healthier, safer, and other-er things to do it yourself in the world outside your home, it’s easier to do it at home on your phone, and most people will choose ease over anything else, every time.
Until recently, there was no “sit at home and tap your phone” way to go to the movies, but the advent of streaming, in tandem with being shut inside our homes for a year or longer due to the pandemic, has taught people otherwise, and so, like bookstores, video stores, record stores, and other pubic gathering places before them, cinemas are next in line to become a communal space destroyed by digital technology.
How Broken Even Is It?
In the not too distant past, people went to the movies all the time. It wasn’t at all unusual for couples to go see a movie nearly every weekend, and many, many people went far more often than that. I used to see at least 3 or 4 films every week.
I can only speak for myself, but there are a number of reasons I went to the movies less often in 2024 than I did in 2004. First and foremost, there are simply fewer movies to go see. More and more studios are eschewing screening films in theaters and sending them directly to streaming services. The films that are screened in theaters, unless they are one of a handful of potential blockbusters, get limited releases in a handful of cities, and only play for a few weeks. If a film even makes it to my city, I have only a week or two to catch it before it’s gone. Those short, limited runs are coupled with a near-total lack of promotion, which means I often don’t even know a film exists until long after any chance to see it in a theater has passed.
A recent example of this is The Return, an adaptation of The Odyssey that reunites Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, who starred together in both The English Patient and Wuthering Heights. That reunion alone should have been newsworthy, and in previous years I can easily see this film contending for an Oscar, but in 2024 it was released without a peep, and had I not happened to catch an interview with Fiennes on NPR, I’d have never known about it in time to buy a ticket. Fortunately, I did get to see it, but that hasn’t been the case with far too many films I’ve discovered this year, only to learn they are no longer playing in a theater near me.
I try to stay in the loop regarding upcoming films yet still miss many of them, so imagine the average movie-goer, who likely never hears about anything but the hyped-up blockbusters. Of course that’s all they go to see, because they don’t know what else is out there. The Return opened to a whopping $361,507 at the box office. That’s thousands, not millions, of dollars.
And that’s led us to where we are today, where it seems that for the majority of people, one or two trips to the movies per year is the norm. A few “event” movies per year capture the zeitgeist, and audiences will go to see them en masse, but wait to see everything else at home. This year it was Deadpool & Wolverine, Wicked, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, last year Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Exceptions to this are movies aimed at kids, which seem to be doing as well as ever, but fewer and fewer films for adults are selling tickets. I predict that this will be the new norm: every year two or three non-kiddie films will experience massive success, and everything else will struggle to turn a profit.
Is Cinema Worth Saving?
"So what,” you may ask, “who cares if cinemas go they way of the dodo bird?” I care. Maybe you should care, too.
Communal experiences are important. I alluded to this earlier. Humans are social creatures, and we need interaction with others to keep us sane. If you don’t believe me, look at the stark decline in virtually every metric of human happiness and sanity since the introduction of social media. The more time people spend alone on their phones, the less capable they are of interacting and relating to other people, and the more miserable they become. They’ll tell you they’ve never been better, and boast about how the combination of a mobile phone and the internet connects them to more people and more knowledge than was ever possible in the past, but when you take a closer look, you find that to be false. If you don’t believe me, research this topic, and look at what’s happened to all the mental health and happiness trends since the invention of the iPhone.
In terms of media, society has lost the communal experiences that were once facilitated by TV and Radio. Until quite recently, everyone watched the same television shows, at the same time, and heard the same songs on the radio, again, at the same time, as others in close geographical proximity to them. Those shared experiences, even if a person was alone at the time they watched or heard, connected them to others. The next day at school, kids would talk about the songs they’d all heard the night before, dissecting the lyrics for hidden meanings, or simply comparing them to other songs. At work, people in an office would discuss a show they’d all watched the previous night. There was no worry of spoilers, as you either watched it or you didn’t. There was no “on demand” way to watch a show; binge-watching did not yet exist. If you missed an episode, you missed it, and relied on friends to tell you what you’d missed. Now, you can’t discuss any show, because a person might be waiting years to watch it, and doesn’t want it spoiled.
People have core memories about watching movies on TV. I meet people today who 40 or more years ago watched a movie on Creature Features at the same time I was watching it, and we talk about our memories of that night. We may live in completely different worlds now, but we share that common bond of being in a dark living room, somewhere in the Bay Area, 45 years ago, listening to Bob Wilkins joking about the movie he was about to show.
Radio and TV are less than an afterthought today. People stream music and TV shows, and listen to whatever, whenever. All sense of community around them is gone. Movies are the last form of art that survive in that arena, but for how long?
If Hollywood isn’t careful, cinema will end up like opera. People will rarely go to see a movie in a theater, and most people will never go even once in their lifetime. Wealthy people who are film connoisseurs will spend hundreds of dollars on a ticket, dress up, and spend an evening watching a film or two projected onto a screen in a lavish movie palace.
And opera, despite costing a person hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to attend, still needs massive public subsidies to survive. Opera houses employee full-time development staffs to cajole donations out of wealthy patrons of the arts to supplement the income they receive from ticket sales, and even then, they still turn to the government for additional funding. Cinema could very well end up in similar straits of something isn’t done to save it.
How Do We Save It?
I have a number of ideas for things that might get people excited to go to the movies again.
Go back to the start: Serials
Task well-known directors with creating 10-15 episode serials, in which each episode is about 15 minutes long. They can be classic adventure serials, a la Flash Gordon and Captain Marvel, or modern tales of crime, drama, humor, or anything else. Imagine The Wire or The Sopranos, or Friends or Family Guy, but in which an entire compelling story is told in about 4 hours, split into 15 discrete chapters.
Run one episode each week before the films that are new that week, only show the episode in theaters, and only that week. The episodes never stream, and aren’t repeated in theaters, at least not in the short term. The more popular ones can again be serialized before films years later. They won’t be released on physical media for at least five years.
I would love to see what Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, and a host of others can come up with when prompted to work with that format, and I have no doubt they would jump at the chance to create something geared towards convincing audiences to return to the movie theater.
Doing this will give theaters a chance to compete directly with TV, and the best serials will end up like Game of Thrones, True Detective, and other shows that caught on with the general public, making weekly movie-going a must-do event.
Take Control of Streaming
Movie studios aren’t paying enough attention to how streaming is killing their product, and run the risk of making the same mistake the music industry did when mp3s showed up.
Studios need to take control of streaming when it comes to their own films. Disney has managed to do this, creating films for theaters and shows for Disney+, but even they are making the mistake of streaming their films too soon. Make people wait two years before a film ends up on a streaming service, and more people will opt to see it in a cinema.
The studios should be much more careful about allowing competing studios, like Netflix and HBO, to stream their films. I don’t think anyone wants every studio to have their own streaming service, but I do think making streaming services wait longer, and pay more, to show your films, or simply not allowing them to stream at all, but rather requiring viewers to purchase the film to watch it, is the smart long-term decision. Force Netflix to survive solely by streaming its own original content.
Take a Stand Against Piracy
Studios should crack down on piracy. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other sites insta-block copyrighted songs. If you post even a few seconds of any copyrighted music, within minutes your post will be muted or deleted. With A.I. it’s easier than ever to sniff out pirated content and take it down. We’re already getting all kinds of poorly-conceived, bad-looking A.I. movies, for once, let A.I. be a boon to the movie industry!
Experiment With Curated Theaters
What are curated theaters? That’s when you let local critics, film fans, and just about anyone create the calendar for a theater, sometimes for free, sometimes for a small fee. This could be a weekly event, where each month someone selects the films that are shown on, say Mondays, or it could be every day, where 7 people each control a night. It can be anything you can dream up. There’s already one theater in Austin doing this, and I hope more follow suit.
There’s a curated bookstore in Tokyo, where each section of the bookshelves is rented to a different person. The renters are free to choose whatever books they want sold in their shelf space. And when I say anything, I mean anything. One shelf offers nothing but handmade photo books of the renter’s cat. Imagine that, except rather than locals choosing what books are being offered, they choose what movies are being projected. You want a 2-month long Billy Wilder retrospective? Have at it. You can do that on Tuesdays, while someone else shows 3 Spaghetti Westerns every Wednesday, and Thursdays are reserved for classic horror films. Create a community of film fans by letting film fans from the community choose the films being shown.
Will Any of This Work?
idk. Maybe. If not, theaters can try other things. All I know for certain is that what they’re doing now isn’t working. Fewer people are going to the movies with each passing year, and I see no reason to believe that trend will reverse itself unless theaters dramatically change their tactics.
Cinema is precious to me, and it should be precious to you, too. Digital technology has robbed us of nearly every community space we once had, and movie theaters are about the last one left. Let’s try not to lose those, too.
Here in NL the cinema visits has been increasing year over year since the pandemic, and even the most obscure films from a corner in the world attract quite an audience
Personally when I lived in CA I found the film offerings quite monotonous, where the majority of films shown come out of Hollywood. Nothing wrong with that per se, but to me, film is also discovering and adventure and excitement of finding those hidden gems. If cinemas don’t offer that, I can imagine people will search for that online instead
Excellent points! I agree that Studios are sabotaging themselves by reducing the theatrical window too much. Many excellent movies don’t get any theatrical runs at all. It’s like a restaurant giving away endless free samples. People are too full to dine out.
I’ve pitched the idea of Streamers running select boutique theatre chains where they can screen their most popular movies at a member discount. But if only we can all figure out how to how 113 movies in a year, cinema can be saved!