Variety’s report was brief, and read like an obituary: “More than 50% of exhibition executives polled in a new survey believe that the ‘traditional cinema experience’ has less than 20 years remaining as a viable business model.” Six paragraphs and 10 sentences, clean and indifferent, written by people (or robots) who are inclined to agree, if not with exhibitors, then with sales and distribution executives, who “were the most pessimistic in their forecasts, with more than 60% believing that the model had less than 20 years.” What is “the model”? Not everyone agrees, with some hedging bets on premium formats like 4DX and IMAX. Revival theaters and arthouses aren’t mentioned at all, presumably because there are so few left; as always, it’s New York and Los Angeles where the moviegoer has choices, often on 35mm or 16mm film—but how much longer will those prints of Paris, Texas and Nashville last?
Not mentioned in the Variety piece is the lack of options at the movies. Martin Scorsese was right: theaters have become theme parks, with a surfeit of video game adaptations, kids movies, legacy sequels, and horror. “The average moviegoer” is still around, but, as I’ve overheard many times at the Charles and the Senator over the last few years, “we want to come, but there’s just nothing to see.” The bread and butter of small theaters and arthouses disappeared from distribution after 2019—movies like The Meddler, Puzzle, Emma, Wakefield, Leave No Trace, 45 Years, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and of course all the Woody Allens. My generation bought into false techno utopianism, and only went to the movies if it was an event; children of the 21st century (and the tail-end of the 20th) don’t go to the movies, they go to a movie.
And this was enough to sustain a business that provided a mass shared cultural experience for over a century. The loss of real mass moviegoing, which happened a long, long time ago, is something to mourn: an audience of hundreds, even a thousand, enthralled by the same dream and still full in their belief in this parallel reality where movie stars were soldiers, housewives, bandoliers, pirates, thugs, lovers, insurance salesmen. There were snoots then as always, but in the end, film was the medium that defined the 20th century; before the global coronavirus pandemic, there was no reason to believe that it couldn’t survive into the 21st just as the novel remained relevant until relatively recently. Worst case scenario, all theaters close, there are no new movies being shown to an audience of people together alone in the dark—does streaming save the day? Of course not, nothing really exists on streaming, it’s just like a used bookstore, everything is just as anonymous and obscure as everything else. The Criterion Channel is fine, but the films they program aren’t discussed or really taken seriously by most people, because it’s all just TV. Things would be different if the “media ecosystem” were healthier and if people read and talked about art more, but this is all stating the obvious.
Variety buries the lede just like me, at least I hope this is the lede: “over 50%” means basically half. The advance obituary doesn’t account for the kind of sea change that occurred in the 1960s, the early-1990s, or the early-2010s (when Marvel reared its ugly head). I never saw it, but Avengers: Endgame was one of those “events” that some of my friends inexplicably saw; just two years ago, Barbie and Oppenheimer briefly brought us back to the anticipation, publicity, and crowd sizes of the pre-digital era, when everything new was projected (if not shot) on film, and you just went to see what was playing.
This premature burial is coming from above. I know that, given a variety of options, more people will go to the movies. The tetchy relationship between exhibitors and producers, strained since 1948, continues apace; I see hope, and I know where my head’s at.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits