Throughout childhood, I was always a strong believer in movies needing to be experiences at the movie theatre. I think that many of our favourite childhood memories took place in movie theatres—this goes for people from our generation and the generation before us.
For example, when I was little, my dad told me a story about the first time he went to see Star Wars: A New Hope. He told me how amazing it was to hear Ben Burtt and his amazing team’s revolutionary sound effects for the droids (especially C-3PO and RT-D2), the lightsabers, and Darth Vader, and he told me how mesmerizing the starship fights looked on the big screen.
Unfortunately, over the last several years these experiences have been competing with the rise of streaming services. Because of this, a lot of people—even before the pandemic—have stopped going to theatres to experience movies in this way.
The pandemic certainly did not do the theatre business any favours by making major studios such as Warner Bros. strike deals with streaming services to release their films “day-and-date,” meaning that most films nowadays just get dumped on streaming the same day as the movie gets released in the theatres. (However, this might not last: Warner Bros. has announced their 2022 movies will have a 45-day theatre-only period with AMC Theatres before streaming, and Disney is releasing some of its biggest movies exclusively in theatres.)
Sadly, this approach results in a lot of the movie-going audience basically going, “Hell yes, I don’t have to go out to see the movie I want to watch, because I can basically pay a $20 subscription and just watch it for free.” This hurts movie theatres because very few people end up showing up for the movie, at least in terms of what theatre traffic was like pre-pandemic.
Still, it’s important to note that this streaming generation, even before the pandemic, has filmmakers, theatres, employees, themselves, and, arguably, Hollywood in general locked into what I like to refer to as the war of the streaming services. What I mean is that right now it feels like everybody is fighting over the right way to consume their movies, because of the rise of streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus.
But there is a glimmer of hope for the movie-going experience. This summer, the ninth instalment of the popular Fast and Furious franchise made over $700 million dollars. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings made approximately $94.5 million over the four-day Labour Day holiday weekend. These examples prove that that there is still an audience for the movie-going experience, which is very encouraging.
Yes, you can argue that the combination of the streaming era and the pandemic has pushed the theatre-going experience toward extinction. But that doesn’t change how much the motion-picture experience needs us to go to the theatres so that we can all keep enjoying high-quality filmmaking the why it’s meant to be scene: on the big screen, in a darkened room, with a big bag of popcorn stuffed on your lap.