Why you should care if movie theaters survive

The twinned disappointing box office results of The Fall Guy and Furiosa have ignited a kind of vicious cycle of online discourse. Film fans lament the precarious state of theatrical exhibition. Then, an endless array of others reply with complaints about the theatrical experience, ranging from the economic (it's all too expensive!), to the safety-driven (Covid still exists!), to the personal comfort-driven (people won't put away their phones!).

The anxiety around these films' relative struggles should, in theory, be easily answered by "Well, people just didn't want to see those movies!" Buried beneath that anxiety, however, is a growing fear that an entire artform is eroding out from underneath us.

The American film industry seems like it's increasingly in shambles. In a vacuum, this is okay. Similarly aimless periods have led to a creative explosion when studios started greenlighting new visions in a desperate attempt to see what might work. Yet this time, despite the successes of movies as wildly diverse as Dune Part 2, Anyone But You, Five Nights at Freddy's, The Iron Claw, and Poor Things, Hollywood seems terrified to greenlight things not attached to an IP that has already been a movie before. (Yeah, Dune 2 was a sequel to a movie, but you know what I mean here.)

What's trickier to parse out is how much worrying about the American film industry is connected to worrying about the movie theater industry and vice versa. It's become clear that every single studio owning its own streaming platform is a financial dead end, which should, in theory, result in a renewed commitment to theatrical distribution. Yet it's also clear some portion of the former theatrical audience is totally willing to wait a couple of weeks to watch new releases on their sweet at-home setups.

So in the midst of this, I've been turning a question over in my mind: Do I love a dying artform? Or at least a dying method of consuming that artform?

Now, to be clear, artforms don't die all at once. If "the movies" are going to die out as anything other than a niche interest, it won't happen in my lifetime. Entertainment you watch on a screen will always be with us. At the same time, significant portions of younger generations choose to use their screens differently. They are far more invested in video games and videos on platforms like YouTube than film and TV. And more power to them! There are a lot of great video games and a lot of great online videos.

Yet it's also not hard to imagine a world where going to a movie theater to see a film becomes something hovering around the level of going to a live stage play or musical. That sounds really shitty to me, but it's not like I can hector or shame people into going to movie theaters more often. And if I try to step back from my own feelings on the importance of theaters, I can admit a lot of things about the theatrical experience suck. It's too expensive! There are too many people who treat movie theaters like their living rooms! Lots of immunocompromised people might not ever be able to go back! Too many movies are disappointing!

The thing is: These problems are at least solvable. Creating more low-cost ticket days, hiring more ushers to deal with bad behavior from theater attendees, and perhaps creating mask-mandatory screenings here and there are all solutions I came up with literally right now. There are challenges to implementing all of them, but it's not like they would prove impossible.

Similarly, I would say that the problem of "making movies people want to see" is possible to solve, if not as consistently as Hollywood's new tech mogul masters would like. Somewhere in the 2010s, too many studios forgot that people just want to see a good story, well-told, rather than yet another corporate brand extenstion. The films that succeed are films that remind you what it is to be a human being, and they can arrive in any genre, so long as they're driven by our species-wide, deep-seated desire to say, "And you won't guess what happened next."

So we've solved everything, right? Well, what's less solvable is the problem of: Why go to a theater, rather than watch something at home, especially if you have a really nice TV and couch?

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My answer to that question would be more philosophical than practical, but I'll still make it anyway. We are living through an era when there is a renewed interest in doing things as a collective, and even if that's not always borne out in our global politics just yet, it's increasingly borne out in our storytelling. And as I've always argued, our storytelling often picks up on subterranean currents in our body politic before anybody else does.

Yet even as there's this growing, subconscious longing for spaces to come together, the physical world we all occupy increasingly seems resistant to our existence within it, both thanks to things as enormous as growing climate instability and as tiny as Target locking up its toiletries. It is as if we long to be part of a collective until we actually have to be part of a collective, at least when it comes to how the powers that be interact with us.

The solution to this isn't "movie theaters," but I also don't think there's as huge a gap between "I don't want to have to see a movie with a bunch of people" and "I should never have to see an unhoused person ever" as there might seem to be. We are, like it or not, on a planet with a whole bunch of other people, and we live in communities that need to feel a little less like an endless series of hyper-individuated city-states, even as the hyper-targeted marketing that bombards all of us insists otherwise.

There's been much written recently about the collapse of third places – spaces where we gather that are not our homes or workplaces. Movie theaters aren't exactly classic third places (they don't tend to promote a lot of conversation), but they are a space for gathering, and they're just about the last space for consuming art collectively that the vast majority of the population has access to. (Concerts and sporting events also serve this function, of course, but both have more chronological and geographical boundaries on them than movie theaters.) It is worth saving the idea of watching something together as an audience, of appreciating art in a collective, and movie theaters are kind of the best option we have available.

Furthermore, the movies that have become massive sensations in recent years have almost always fostered that sense of community, creating a sense that you had to see this in person with other people for whatever reason. What was Barbenheimer but an excuse to go out with friends and revel in two very different but terrific films that would get you laughing and talking? What was the Eras Tour movie but an excuse to go and sing Taylor Swift songs with your friends? What was Top Gun: Maverick but an excuse for dads everywhere to stand and salute their IMAX screens, tears in their eyes? The more the movies can lean into this quality – which exists inherently in every single movie ever made if you figure out how to bottle it – the better off theaters will be.

The movies are also frequently a great way to spur conversation. I know plenty of people in movie discussion clubs who all see the same movie (sometimes at the same time!) and then gather to chat about them. And we've all had the experience, I think, of walking out of a screening and finding ourselves drawn into conversation with someone we don't even know. A few weeks ago, for instance, on my way out of the beautiful but baffling film The Beast, I bumped into the woman I had sat next to in the lobby. "What the fuck was that?" she asked, and we talked for five minutes about what we thought had happened in the film's ending.

I find it tricky to balance the idea that I, personally, find going to the movie theater to be one of the best respites from the world available to me against the idea that for a lot of people, it's the opposite of that. But I would hope even the most anti-movie theater person alive would agree it's worth preserving some sort of space in which we all come together to react to the same thing in real time. Maybe that ends up being something other than the movies, but gosh, I hope it's still the movies.

This week's reading music: "Dream, Baby, Dream" by Suicide

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