Covid changed people’s relationship with movie theaters. I don’t think it can be explained better than that.
I’d say it drastically accelerated an existing trend, but absolutely. Lots of people finally got that 50+ inch LCD and at least a sound bar, and whaddaya know, 99% of the audience was never in love with the cinema as a ritual, they just wanted to see new shit on a big screen in a dark room with nice speakers, and the last three are probably still “nice-to-haves” for many. I have many of my own little personal rituals and quirky things that evoke meaning for me, but I’m not narcissistic (enough) to presume that my pet preferences are objectively the only way to experience whatever core activity they’re tied to.
Only the movies that demand the biggest or benefit from a communal experience (Minecraft movie, K-Pop singalong) are going to be reliable performers in multiplexes. Large public screening rooms are simply settling into the use cases they actually serve best, like live theaters before them. It’s no surprise that the decline of cinema-going is dovetailing with a massive expansion of IMAX screens.
If we lose self-contained A/V storytelling in a 2-3 hour format, I think that will be a terrible shame, but I have little sympathy for the “auteurs” who want to tell quiet stories about small people with nuanced visuals but think a commercially viable number of people will go sit in a threadbare public fart-muffler with sticky floors and try to time their piss breaks just-so, simply because that small story is showing on a big screen.
I’d say it drastically accelerated an existing trend, but absolutely. Lots of people finally got that 50+ inch LCD and at least a sound bar, and whaddaya know, 99% of the audience was never in love with the cinema as a ritual, they just wanted to see new shit on a big screen in a dark room with nice speakers, and the last three are probably still “nice-to-haves” for many. I have many of my own little personal rituals and quirky things that evoke meaning for me, but I’m not narcissistic (enough) to presume that my pet preferences are objectively the only way to experience whatever core activity they’re tied to.
Only the movies that demand the biggest or benefit from a communal experience (Minecraft movie, K-Pop singalong) are going to be reliable performers in multiplexes. Large public screening rooms are simply settling into the use cases they actually serve best, like live theaters before them. It’s no surprise that the decline of cinema-going is dovetailing with a massive expansion of IMAX screens.
If we lose self-contained A/V storytelling in a 2-3 hour format, I think that will be a terrible shame, but I have little sympathy for the “auteurs” who want to tell quiet stories about small people with nuanced visuals but think a commercially viable number of people will go sit in a threadbare public fart-muffler with sticky floors and try to time their piss breaks just-so, simply because that small story is showing on a big screen.