It seems to me that movie studios, production and distribution companies are to blame for the decrease in attendance in movie theatres
disclaimer that I haven't done much research into this thought and it's mostly anecdotal but I doubt I am wrong?
I personally don't go to theaters, except for comicbook movies. and the only reason I go to theaters for comicbook movies is just cause I liked to discuss the comicbook movies on social media as soon as possible, but honestly, either I am getting really old or the redditors on /r/marvelstudios are getting young and younger everyday cause i go to those comments and it's not really a place I'd describe as open to a civil and non-memey discussion of the latest Marvel movie but I digress.
Point being, I personally prefer to wait for movie to arrive at streaming services. why?
- I don't have to deal with other people.
- I went to watch Creed 3 near the end of its theater run. 3 people chose to sit in front of me when the whole auditorium was basically empty (they looked to be in their mid-late 20s, maybe even early 30s.) I didn't care. What I did care was that one of the dudes spent half his time on his fucking phone. To the point that I literally had to bend over and ask him to put it away and he still didn't. this idiot just attempted to angle the phone in a manner such that I couldn't see it, or so he thought, the light still was there, just less. At that point, I just got too resentful of theaters to tell him off again but felt very stubborn about not moving away from my seat.
- I went to watch Aquaman 2 (iirc on opening weekend). I knew the movie was not gonna be great going in, just wanted to mark the end of the DCEU in theaters. 3 young girls were sitting in the middle section. as the movie started, these girls started taking selfies of themselves for the grams or snapchat or whatever the fuck it was. The light from their phone was bright. There was a couple sitting a seat or 2 to my right. the dude and I collectively rolled our eyes at the girls. They took 1 picture. I was like "OK, thank God". 2 pictures, I think "let's hope the second take works". Third picture "this is ridiculous". by this point, I wanted to throw something at them and just leaned over and asked them to put their phone away. I may been asshole cause it seemed like I scared them with that comment and to be quite frank, I took pleasure that I scare them, even accidentally.
- Theaters are extremely non-inclusive. This one bugs me a lot just cause of Eternals and CODA and Hollywood pretending they are woke. Not sure if anyone here has ever tried to use the closed captioning devices. I am personally not deaf, but I do have trouble processing words. I am the kind of guy who will often ask people to repeat themselves to fully understand what they said. Obviously can't do that with a movie but reading closed captioning helps me process. I finally decided to start trying the closed captioning devices in theaters around the time of Avengers Endgame I think. It's very hit or miss. either the theater forgot to charge the device so it gives out halfway through the movie, or it's just all old and it's neck doesn't retain it's form when I twist it into the good position and it ends up pointing the closed captioning at someone who is a good 1 foot shorter than me or it's fully charged and can retain its form but the studios behind the movie didn't put any serious effort into the closed captioning so half the fucking words are missing, rendering it pointless. My gf and I went to watch Mad Max Furiosa in theaters the other day and the theater didn't even have any remaining, they had given their to the studio to fix and didn't have any in stock as a result.
- Not sure about the states but up here in Canada, our big chain is Cineplex and they are so desperate to charge us extra that they now charge an extra "service fee" that you get charged only if you buy online.
- And the classic complaint of "just the snacks cost us a movie and a half nowadays"
However, I don't know if I blame the theater for my issues.
I've read the stories about how Disney have theaters over a barrel with how controlling they are with how much of a cut of a theater tickets goes to Disney and how Disney insists on how many auditorium the theaters devote to their movies. And how theaters charge so much for concession cause they are trying to keep the lights on to some extent cause the studios demand so much of the profit. And if it's a struggle to keep the lights on, I am not surprised they can't be more enforcing with the policy of no-phones during a movie.
It seems to me the studios, in an attempt to "maximize" their profit as much as possible, demanded as much as possible from theaters, while not realizing that the less of a cut that theaters take, the less theaters can invest in a welcoming environment where people actually want to go to and therefore people come less cause couple that with streaming services, why wouldn't people come less?
So I think the demise of theaters and the rise of streaming service can't just be attributed to how much more convenient it is to wait 8 months for a movie on streaming service but it's also attributable to the decline in quality at theaters which I think is cause studios are bleeding them dry.
So I find it odd that studios and production companies bitch moan and complain that people don't go to movies more in a time where a movie has to make 500 million $ just to be considered profitable but they've never really done any proper self-reflection on a possible reason why people don't go to theaters as much anymore.
Movie theaters have been in decline for a very long time. Many cities have former movie theaters that were converted into something else decades ago. Complaints about the prices and the rudeness of other people are just as old.
Meanwhile there’s been competition from cable TV channels, video rentals, DVD’s, DVD’s by mail from Netflix, online steaming. And the devices got better. Now it’s common to watch video alone with a phone or tablet, and listening on wireless headphones.
Movies have always been a thing for the young. Do kids and teenagers go to the movies all that often these days?
There was a somewhat famous theater in Hollywood which was popular among film aficionados called the ArcLight. It had a lot of first-run and limited releases showing there, and it was clear that it was a place where the people actually cared about it. The picture and audio quality was noticeably better there than at chain cineplexes, and it had a really well designed and maintained lobby. It closed down at the start of the Pandemic, along with the handful of other theaters they opened over the years. I didn’t go there very often, but since then I haven’t really felt the need to go to cinemas.
Other cinemas were never as good as the ArcLight, but they have all gotten much much worse in the time since. The quality of their presentations are atrocious and the maintenance on the rest of the buildings are even worse. We invested in a nice OLED screen, and sadly that means I can watch better quality pictures at home.
This is without even going into how bad the film selection has been lately.
Alamo Drafthouse in DTLA is where we ended up going once ArcLight closed down. It's not perfect, but at least you don't (or didn't, moved away so haven't been in a while) get talkers and phone users.
My instinct for what will save movie theaters (as someone who was once a theater enthusiast) is that theaters will need to emphasize venue and curation.
What we need are different types of theaters for different audiences. There should be theaters with strict talking and phone policies, for the serious cineastes who really want to concentrate on their films. Maybe afterwards, have a panel of people to talk about the film and the impact it has had. But I think with that, there should also be more "fuck it" theaters where people can be more casual, where some teens can hang out and laugh and joke and vape through the screening, and no one cares.
As for curation, there needs to be more double features, or even just mini-festivals of say horror or action or comedy films. Come up with some crazy theme that connects a bunch of old films that you don't need to pay crazy royalty rights to, and show those. Perhaps find some neglected classics. Or some films that went straight to streaming that might deserve a chance, years later, to be viewed on a big screen.
So it’s important to note that theater attendance was actually increasing until it reached a peak in 2002. And has been in decline ever since (with a small increase since COVID shut down theaters) and the only (non-COVID) year to increase in attendance was 2018 thanks to non-traditional blockbusters like A Star is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody.
That’s important to note because the decline of movie going predates many of these issues (and are we really gonna say ticket and concession prices were so much out of the budget of people back in 2003 because I feel like that’s the price people wanna go back to). It predates Disney’s strong arm method that they used back in the 2010s.
An issue that I took with your post was saying you can wait eight months to stream a movie. Which is not exactly true. That would be a longer wait than what we’re currently used to. Movies go to PVOD so much quicker now, many times it’s a matter of weeks not months, especially when the film isn’t a huge blockbuster like Inside Out 2 or Deadpool and Wolverine. Universal has a rule that if a movie opens below 50M it goes to rental in two weeks.
Even going to a streaming platform doesn’t take as long as eight months as Anybody But You took about five months to stream on Netflix after its theatrical release.
As for your closer captions argument, not sure that’s ever been a problem on a large scale, especially considering that theaters put much more effort now than they did back in 2002. Theaters now have screenings with subtitles included, those may be like once or twice a day but there’s more being done about that than 20+ years ago.
In a way studios are to blame because they were busy chasing streaming for so long they didn’t realize that they could make more money through theatrical and the ancillaries that come after a theatrical release. But I don’t necessarily think any of these issues are it. It’s audience habits changing to the degree that “they only watched comic book movies” in theaters or they’ll watch like Inside Out 2 or Barbie if you’re a different demographic.
The window before movies started ending up on VOD was shrinking to just three or four months, even before the pandemic. I think a lot of studios box office woes could go away if they just returned to that three month timeframe.
I wanted to chime in with a bit of an outside perspective, as someone who recently started going to the movie theater very often. For reference, I have moved around Europe a lot in the last few years, but I am currently living in Spain.
Before coming here, I rarely ever went to the cinema, if not for big blockbuster movies which felt like they had to be watched on the big screen. The experience was never bad per se, but never felt worth the cost, which between snacks and tickets was never below ~25€.
Now, I live close to an old school privately run movie theater. Think flat seats with the screen high up so that everyone can see type of old school. I first started going there because every Monday they sell tickets to any movie for 5€ each, so with my girlfriend we made it a tradition to watch something every Monday night. Why not, right?
While the offer brought is in, it's the experience that kept us there. The theater has a lot of screens, albeit most rooms are quite small. This gives it huge variety, screening both blockbusters and small indie movies from all over; furthermore, movies stay at the theater for longer, giving you more chances to check them out. All the movies are in their original language with Spanish captions. The lobby is full of memorabilia such as props from movies, rare DVDs that you can purchase, and black and white printed "movie cards" for every movie being screened with a description, an interview to the director/actors and/or some reviews that you can take home. The place just seeps passion for cinema from every corner.
And that passion is contagious. Nowadays we never miss our one movie of the week, and even if we don't go on a Monday, we don't mind paying the full ticket price (which is still affordable compared to big cinemas). We often go more than once a week. We are looking to start participating in their weekly sessions where they screen older movies and then host a discussion about them with some (included) wine and snacks. Our house is filled with movie cards, which lead us to often reminisce and talk about the movies that we watched this year. We watched movies that we would probably never have without this, and those became some of our favorites for the year (an example: Past Lives, great movie from last year!).
All of this to say, I think a lot of it is down to the theater itself. For me it made all the difference. This theater is one of my favorite things about living here, and I soon want to start donating to support it. It feels like a little oasis of passion and appreciation for the art, and has made me truly passionate about movies, which have never before occupied so much of my thoughts.
I don't know how the economics behind all of it work exactly, but to me this is proof that it is still possible (at least here) to still make the movie theater an unforgettable and unreplaceable experience, when passion, and not profit, is what is fuelling the project. The latter will follow suit (and again, I am proof of that - never in my life have I spent so much money on a movie theater before!).
Everyone here grew up watching movies, but I think sometimes we forget that movies were a new form of entertainment, and that all new things eventually become old and become much less popular.
It's not as popular to go to an opera now. Or a symphony. Or live stage plays. Yes we still have them but we don't have them as much as before. Maybe cinemas will go the same way: one tiny art house and one "casual re-run" per city and that's that.
Maybe it's not worth lamenting.
People listen to music at home now mostly, as opposed to live performances. We still go to live shows and they still make money, but we'd be crazy if music execs expect people to turn up 4 times a year in every city across the country.
And that's okay. Movies will go back to being smaller tighter budget and uses more imagination + planning than CGI, and directors will have to be deliberate and clever again instead of coming up with ideas in post that must use slave labour to finish.
I, for one, don't care about audio visual spectacles if the story is dumb. If the story is good I don't care if it's a guy wearing a paper mache mask : it helps, for sure, but it doesn't have to be hundreds of millions to have an impact.
Think of how good the hallway scene looked in Inception (2010, $160m) vs how horrible Dr Strange Multiverse Madness looked (2022, $350.6). Both of them have the city folding thing done with CG, but in 2010 it was new and shocking, whereas in 2022 it was money wasted that neither wow'd audiences nor made the action more exciting. And the hallway scene with no CG is still more memorable 14 years later than the CG Paris city fold.
So maybe cinemas are going to die and studios collapse into something that can only afford to make 1 blockbuster a year collectively. That's fine. We had about a hundred years and had a grand old time. Small little theatres can probably survive by showing reruns of a hundred years of classic films if we pair them with thoughtful discussion nights or theme double feature nights.
Movies have existed for literally 100 years. They are not going anywhere anytime soon.
Live theater has existed for thousands of years, and yet today many Americans can count the number of times they’ve been to a play, musical, or opera on one hand. It wouldn’t surprise me if movies, in 100 years, were something the average person went to 0-1 times per year, and only diehard fans would go more than a couple times per year.
100 years is a blink of the eye, my friend. It's a "fad" in human civilization time scale. Movies will continue to be made, especially how cheap camera has become and "film" (memory) is basically free. Everyone makes movies now if you will, and someone will always be practicing the craft somewhere somehow. We still have opera singers and we still have orchestras, but that was my point: it's going to become a dwindled, less popular art form.
As an entire Tinseltown industry, as an event where entire families go out at least twice a year and spare no expense, like they did for circuses coming to town or like they did for carnivals or entire family going to an arcade....that's not coming back. We've already seen cinemas' golden age.
Do you mean movies or cinemas? Movies aren't going anywhere, but cinemas could easily go away (ie, lose enough popularity that there isn't >=1 in every town anymore).
Cinemas could definitely become more sparse but I live in Seattle which has some of the best theaters in the country so I haven't really seen the decline personally
I can't be bothered with the experience you describe any more. As a fellow Canadian, I only see movies in VIP now. Since you have to be drinking age, it gets rid of any kids. With people paying more, maybe they are more committed to watching the movie. I'm not sure, but I can't remember really having an issue with anyone in VIP but obviously it can still happen. My wife and I make it a date night and have dinner in the theater. While nothing special, it's at least not as expensive as your average chain restaurant. Combine that with the fact that we see significantly less movies than we used to and it at least makes the experience more tolerable.
I also hate the commercials. The bad personalities they have doing trivia and random gadget reviews.
At home I can have whatever food or drink I want, pause whenever I want (old man Blatter is in a sad state), my 4k TV looks great and my couch is more comfortable than any theater.
I think theaters struggle because at the same time the movie going experience got worse the home viewing experience improved drastically.
I think this is more then the movie theatre is a worse experience then home (sometimes).
Like music 2 decades ago people have more choice then ever of where to spend their entertainment dollar and movie theatres generally don't provide best value per dollar.
The other major issue is that Hollywood is massively risk averse these days. So we keep getting sequels and remakes. Hollywood essentially forces chains to play these movies at x amount of screens. So even if a theatre owner wants to have a more diverse selection of movies 3/4 of their screen times are used by "blockbuster movie". How many times have you been to a movie recently and the seating is basically empty.
The movie industry has problems though the entire production chain. I don't think they are going away but they are probably going to downsize a bit in the near future.
Preach and represent!
Studio greed has definitely pushed theaters into a corner. The theaters aren't completely blameless; they let it happen. They've signed the contracts over the years, let the deal between themselves and distributors (which are really just the studios for all intents and purposes) continually worsen until we're at the point where a theater often gets less than a buck per seat for a first-run showing of a first-run movie.
I don't really think that, if the deal was still 50-50, or some flat fee for the print and another flat fee per seat (rather than only getting to keep a few percentage points of the ticket price with the rest going to the studios), the main problems many former moviegoers have wouldn't be problems. The theaters would just be making more money is all.
The issues with theaters are they don't manage and maintain the moviegoing experience. Ushers, for example. That's what ushers were basically for. To monitor an auditorium. They (used to) exist for a reason.
Theaters decided they didn't want to pay for ushers. How much does it cost to maintain the usher? Two hours per movie, so basically two tickets more or less covers their wage. Or it did before theaters signed all the ticket revenue over to studios. Sure we can quibble pedantically over benefit cost loads, but what is that; another couple of tickets? Four, maybe five per theater showing, to pay for the usher? Or one person buying a jumbo popcorn/soda combo?
Theaters decided they'd rather keep that money. They cost cut.
And the thing about cost cutting is ... you might cut something that was a cost for a reason. By might I mean usually. You usually cut something that wasn't extraneous, but was rather integral. MBAs ignore that though.
Just as safety regulations are written in blood, business expenses are usually there to facilitate the profit. They're rarely something that can be lost without impacting profits. And certainly not if you only cut and don't restructure to cover the loss, to deal with the new process that's left after the cut.
An efficiency would be "have one usher continually walk between auditoriums to monitor the audience and deal with issues." A cut is "no more usher." One might impact the experience some, but still leave the process in place to do what it does for the movie experience that encourages movie customers to remain customers. The other just eliminates the process entirely, leaving us where we are now with customers no longer being customers.
MBAs don't see it that way though. They look at X amount of dollars in hourly operating costs and think "we don't need all that. If I cut some of it, I might get promoted."
So the theatrical experience has worsened over time as it's become more and more of a hands off thing. Stripping more and more from it while assuming (hoping) customers will just keep paying.
Now that enough customers have stopped paying, the industry is starting to freak out. But they're not going to admit they've gone too far and should add back some expense to encourage the revenue to return. They're not going to add employees, train them better, promote a better work environment to encourage more involved and invested employees, set non-disruption policies (which require invested employees to implement/enforce), or anything else like that.
No, they'll just sit for phone interviews with bored "journalists" for Variety and Deadline and whoever else lamenting the loss of customers. "Why doesn't anyone go to the movies anymore?"
They won't actually ask that question. Asking it would mean you then consider it. Think about it. Investigate it. Try to fix it.
Oh no. It's just a quote for the article. They say it, then go back to their C-suite activities of not fixing or maintaining the revenue stream that supports that C-suite. And, entirely incidentally, the business. What do the executives care though? They'll just springboard over to another C-suite soon anyway.
Modern business, capitalism, is like the Mongol hordes. Assault an asset, strip it clean, move on leaving ruin in your wake.
Fortunately lots of people like movies. And lots of people want to make movies. Studios aren't the only source of them. New sources (the tech companies right now) are stepping into the game, cranking out films. So movie lovers aren't in particular danger of not having movies.
Theaters are in danger of having no more moviegoers though. Maybe they should do something about that?
Naaaaahhhh.
If people are annoying you, can you not call on the theatre workers to handle it? Sometimes there is a number you can text. Or just leave and ask for your money back. That might make the theatres understand they have to do something about it.
If I go to a movie, I want to watch the movie. So "calling for a theater worker" to deal with a situation (audience, technical, or otherwise) means I'm ... wait for it ... missing my movie!
Plus, theater employees (at least in America) are minimum wage, which means not only are they not paid enough to care beyond the bare minimum, but their work environment (from how they're treated by their supervisors/boss, to their (lack of) benefits, their work loads, everything) is equally harsh and not at all calculated to encourage them to go more than the bare minimum.
So they have no interest in having to go into an auditorium, while the movie's running, and square off with an audience member over some claim by another audience member of disruption.
The kind of people who go to a movie and then do anything but watch the movie quietly are rarely the kind of people who are gracious and apologetic when called out for their disruptive behavior.
People would rather be angry, than wrong or humiliated. Anger is a defense mechanism for their sense of self. They'll dial the anger up, embrace it, lean into it, use it, all to avoid having to feel (or focus on feeling) like they have in fact fucked up and committed a faux pas.
So if someone (employee or patron) leans over to someone screwing around on their phone, talking to their fellows, or whatever it is they're doing that's disruptive, they do not respond with "gosh, oh my, I'm so sorry, I had no idea, I'll shape up immediately and cease my disruption." No, oh no. What usually happens instead is "how fucking dare you, why not mind your own damn business, where do you get off, leave me the hell alone, I bought a ticket same as you and can do whatever I want."
If I have to go to the theater and then get up and fetch a disinterested employee to try and police basic civility, I'm just not going to the theater. All I want is for the audience to sit quietly and watch the movie. That's it. Seems simple, an easy ask, nothing extraordinary. Just sit and watch. No phones, no talking, quiet and non-disruptive.
That's too much to ask for, or expect, apparently. The norm is to fuck around and be disruptive. Phone out in a dark room, taking calls, snapping pictures, live streaming. Cutting up with seatmates, carrying on conversations, telling jokes, narrating the movie, and so much more that's anything but sitting quietly and watching.
Pass. I have options that don't involve paying twenty bucks to have my movie experience ruined.
Theaters could stay involved and aware of their business and business model. They could monitor their customers, follow trends, anticipate and resolve problems, continually improve the viewing experience that they're offering for a price. Or, they could do what they've been doing; which is jack up prices, cut staff, and wonder "why don't people go to the movies anymore?"
They continue to choose option B.
So i just finished despicable me 4 (ugh) with my son (still delightfully silly). Movie exceeded my very low expectations, but I ‘m here to talk about the cinema where I saw it, Asheville Brewing.
It’s a killer concept that began life as a family friendly second run movie place with some later night groovy showings, passable food and great beer.
The cinema was sold out tonight. Tickets were $8!! Audience was engaged and friendly, lots of kids. Staff were adults, friendly, reasonably compensated. Seats were decent.
They have just the one screen. It’s a walkable location but also drivable. There’s a dining area and a gameroom. While Avl’s culture is unique, but I don’t see why the concept wouldn’t fly elsewhere. Alamo is a thing, their food is not better, but prices are way higher, and it’s not family friendly. Seems like a solid way forward.
Edit to add: i would not have enjoyed myself nearly as much at the suburban cinemas where I live or at home.
on the closed caption front, have you tried the caption thing for the theatre? It goes in the cupholder and has this stiff, awkward arm that goes out to the shittiest LCD panel... terrible system, even when it works.. which it doesn't always.
I don't bother with the theatre because
Anyway, try the caption thing next time you go. It might work well-enough for you.