Movie Theaters are Mostly Dead

Russell Michaels

Russell is inside his own mind, a comfortable yet silly place. He is also on Twitter.

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13 Responses

  1. Michael Cain says:

    …the entire price of those subscriptions goes right into the studios’ pockets…

    Someone, somewhere, is paying for all the backbone bandwidth and server farms needed to generate and transport hundreds of millions of video streams. All of the services’ favorite customer is still the household that pays $9.95 every month and watches two movies. And hate the ones that for the same price watch two movies every evening.Report

  2. Pinky says:

    I heard that Wonder Woman 1984 cleared $10 million domestic ticket sales on its opening weekend, which included Christmas. The studio is happy with the results, and is moving forward on a third movie. How would you even explain that to one-year-ago you?Report

  3. Doctor Jay says:

    One of the things the pandemic has illustrated for me is that it is very pleasant and desirable to be in a space with a bunch of other human beings doing the same thing. Watching a movie, watching a sporting event, worshipping, and so on. Fighting through the mall, maybe not quite so much, but that too.

    So, movie theaters won’t be the same, but I’m not sure they will be dead.

    In the meantime, Happy New Year to you all!Report

    • Pinky in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      Some people speculate that the theaters could see a revival this year, following thinking along the lines of your comment. For my part, I’ve been killing so much time watching movies and tv that I’m looking forward to going somewhere there’s not a screen.Report

  4. North says:

    Happy New Year to everyone.
    Yeah movie theaters are dead but the masses want entertainment more than ever and the entertainment producers still need to be paid.
    So the money movie theaters flowed to the producers will need to come from somewhere else. Advertising, subscriptions or viewing fees or something else; they money will have to be paid.Report

  5. Dune has been pushed back a year, and the only reason I can see for that is to be in theaters next Christmas season.Report

  6. Oscar Gordon says:

    Theaters won’t die, probably, but any of them that were on the margins are toast. I think we will see a significant contraction of available theaters, especially in rural areas and smaller cities where there just isn’t enough population to fill the seats on a consistent basis.

    The nice, big theaters that regularly filled the house and had good concessions, etc. They’ll recover, just because some movies are awesome on the big screen.

    And in that vein, I think we will see a lot of movies that are not spectacle going straight to streaming. I’ve never found a lot of added value of the theater for a movie like “Pieces of a Woman”, whereas “WW84” or “Monster Hunter” gains a lot from the big screen.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Does the word “movie” retain any meaning at that point?Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

        Cinematic spectacle is probably more apt.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          Yeah, those would still exist, but I was thinking about the rest. People will watch TikTok videos for 10 seconds, and they’ll binge-watch 8-episode seasons of streaming shows. “Movie” just becomes an arbitrary designation for one-shots that are 80-130 minutes long. The only forces maintaining the designation would be convention, the awards system, and those big theater event movies. We could see creators given the freedom to tell a story in however long it takes, with no studio pressure to pad it out or to cut out essential parts that only make it to the director’s cut. If everything’s on streaming services, you can make something that only runs 40 minutes, and you don’t have to negotiate with a separate entity to make a three-part 6-hour product.Report

          • InMD in reply to Pinky says:

            You’re forgetting a big driver of feature lengths: children. I think there will always be one-offs structured for their unique attention spans and attachment to a particular, condensed story that begins and fully resolves in a single sitting.Report

            • Oscar Gordon in reply to InMD says:

              A single sitting in a theater, mind you.

              My kid can binge watch the hell out of a show. You could do longer format kid movies if you brought back the intermission for potty breaks.Report

              • InMD in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                My son will watch certain shows but I don’t think he’s old enough to understand story continuity across multiple episodes of something. Conversely he’s very much into yet another viewing of the same Disney/Pixar movie we’ve already watched a thousand times.

                I’ll be curious to see how Disney et. al. respond. I assume that will be the leading indicator for everyone else.Report