Who Killed the Movie Theater?
On the war between streaming and theaters, why theaters are falling off. Plus a weekend *watch* recommendation!
A Murder Mystery
The movie theater experience is universal. Getting your tickets, buying buttery popcorn, climbing up the stairs and hushedly looking for your seats, watching the trailers stream by, the lights dimming, and the film lighting up.
But will it be universal for long?
The theater experience may be dying. Streaming is killing movie theaters, putting them out of business everywhere. Big chains are taking financial hits left and right, while simultaneously buying up failing local theaters. All of these trends were supercharged by COVID, which kept people streaming at home for over two years.
Today I want to unpack what a path forward might look like for theaters, and why I think the experience is still worthwhile. Let’s start with the main perpetrator: the rise of streaming.
To Stream or not to Stream
Streaming has undeniable benefits. It’s convenient. It’s cheap. It’s safe. It offers you access to a wider range of content than we’ve ever had before. It offers every advantage you could possibly think of over theaters.
It’s also been somewhat of a boon from a creative standpoint. With streaming, you lose the barriers imposed by theaters. A theatrical release for a movie is a huge financial investment, requiring licensing deals with the theaters, more marketing to get people to buy tickets, greater expenses while filming for theater formats like Dolby and IMAX, and shifting the creative process as studios work to maximize showtimes per day. Streaming avoids all of these and still draws eyes (perhaps even more).
If it were not for streaming, for example, Zack Snyder never would’ve been able to release his 4 hour cut of the Justice League, his truest creative vision that was never theater feasible.
With the lesser financial risk, however, comes lesser profits for studios, who make vastly less off of streaming than real ticket sales.
The Silver Screen
What, then, is the value of a theater for the audience? From a technical standpoint, it’s the size of the screen and the speakers, especially in those specialty formats. But with home theaters advancing the way they are, does this matter as much anymore?
Is it exclusivity, then? If you’re itching to watch a movie and it’s not available on streaming, you basically have to go into the theater (short of illegal streaming). I’d say this is what draws out audiences to most films now – they want to watch them and can’t reliably get them anywhere else.
But that can’t be all of it either. Many studios, including Disney and Warner Bros, experimented with same-day streaming releases throughout 2021. Many understandably did poorly at the box office, including The Suicide Squad, Matrix: Resurrections, and Black Widow.
Others, however, succeeded. DUNE, for example, was a roaring box office success despite its same day release. So it can’t just be exclusivity. There must be something fundamental that still draws audiences to theaters.
The best theater movies are visual extravaganza. They are dazzling on the big screen, they transport us to new worlds in ways that your TV at home could never do. This is why directors fight so hard for their movies to go theatrical – they don’t build these experiences for our home TVs. They are monumental in scale. These are what will keep theaters alive.
Does the average movie-goer care about this? Maybe. I think it’s a combination of all these things that bring audiences, especially younger ones, out to the theaters. While I love streaming for how accessible it has made good films, I’d prefer a theater 9 times out of 10. What do you think?
Weekend ‘Watch’ Recommendation
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022), dir. Daniels. Available at your Local Theater
In the vein of this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d provide a reason for you to hit your local theaters, rather than stream this weekend. I’ve reviewed this movie already, check it out here (spoiler-free)! This movie is truly something remarkable, and is an indie success story that we haven’t seen in years. Even after its 6th week in theaters, it dropped 0% in weekend box office earnings, and is getting played on more and more screens. Believe the hype — check this out.
That’s all for today! See you all again next week. Until then, please get in touch if you have any thoughts or suggestions you’d like to share. If you want to keep up with what I’m watching, follow me on Letterboxd @atharv_gupta.