We Come to This Place for Magic

Recently, the entire Remap staff was at the movie theater. We're somewhat of cinema aficionados ourselves, but actually going to a theater is a bit of a special event. You'll hear all about our time taking in Megalopolis on My Turn next week, but the experience left an impression.

Cado is fortunate enough to live in a part of New York City where there's a lot of options. Good projection, clean theaters. It's a place where people value movies as movies. That's less true for Patrick, who's subject to whatever the suburbs can offer, and for Rob, finding the best often means hopping in the car for a long time.

Movies used to be a pillar of society's media diet, but these days, the so-called Attention Economy has something to say about that, combined with the rise of decent home theater setups and easy access to streaming movies. What is the future of the movie theater, and what would get us to come back more often?

Rob: So I was watching Megalopolis and after a few minutes I noticed, as I often do, a bunch of scratches on the screen that created bright slashes when the light from the projection hit them. This particular theater has a bunch of issues like this, but honestly I cannot remember the last time I saw a projection that was flawless. Maybe the Arclight (RIP) in Hollywood, the one at the Cinerama Dome?

On the other hand, I was one of three people in the audience at 4 PM on a Friday. Matinees are always slow, of course, and Megalopolis has been a huge bomb, but this is almost always what I find when I catch an afternoon movie. A lobby full of bored employees who look surprised to see someone else there as they prepared for the evening crowds, and then an almost entirely empty theater with two or three obvious maintenance issues that make you question the value proposition of a movie ticket versus watching it at home on streaming in a few weeks.

It got me wondering: is this just the state of movie theaters since the COVID shutdowns and the shift toward shorter delays for stream releases, or was this something that was always going to end up happening with the multiplex model?

You and I came of age in a world where the huge suburban multiplex was relatively new and served as an easy default for moviegoing and it was hard to argue with the convenience. Everything was showing there, and for more popular movies you could have your pick of showtimes. Now admittedly, only one or two of those screens was anything approaching the kind of movie theaters my parents had taken me to when I was little but, again, the convenience was hard to argue with. If it felt like movies weren’t hitting the same as Independence Day or Toy Story did when I was little, well, surely that was just because I wasn’t a little kid anymore, right?

Even if there was a significant difference in experience between the smaller shoebox theaters at the edges of the multiplex versus the larger auditoriums that were the default in the 80s and 90s, it still blew the doors off what you could get at home. HD flat screens were a rarity, and no matter how good an audio system you had, you just weren’t going to have anything approaching a cinematic experience. One of my uncles, after a series of boom years for his construction business, splurged on a huge projection system for a dedicated home theater room and I remember him showing us his DVD of Air Force One on that system and thinking that it was, indeed, awesome… and also still incredibly short of what a movie theater could do. The image always looked a little washed-out, the focus never quite right.

But it never occurred to me what the multiplex would turn into when it was no longer brand-new, when the equipment and furnishings were aging. Those small, narrow theaters were “good enough” when they were in good shape and a good home theater was beyond the means of most people and consumer technology at the time. But man, when that same theater has a projector that looks like it might have burned its bulb, the screen looks like a used napkin, and half the seats feel like their padding has collapsed, it’s hard to imagine a worse way to see a movie. Vulture ran a great article where they surveyed the stated of moviegoing with a professional projectionist and he detailed point-by-point the ways theaters’ lack of maintenance and poor staffing and cleaning practices have caused these endemic issues but one of the big things that stands out to me is that almost none of the big theater chains can afford to fix what’s gone wrong with their theaters.

Obviously the pandemic plus the proliferation of streaming were going to pose a challenge to the film industry. But every time I attend one of these eerie “ghost ship” multiplexes, I wonder if they weren’t uniquely vulnerable to the competition that streaming provided. If your whole pitch is convenience, you don’t really have a plan B when something significantly more convenient comes along. And to offer that convenience, a lot of these places had already made some compromises on quality, meaning that they did not have far to fall before they invited unfavorable comparisons to watching movies at home.

Did your relationship with movie theaters follow a similar arc? I know that living in LA and having access to really good theaters probably woke me up to how lousy theaters were in a lot of other places, but I also wonder how much of my irritation with going to the movies now just reflects being in a different place in my life and relationships.

Patrick: A huge part of what we’re talking about depends on what you’re getting out of attending a movie theater. For the longest time, it was a combination of earliest possible access to a new work, plus an audio and visual experience that could never, ever be matched at home. Movies have adopted a similar arc to arcades, you know? The advent of powerful gaming consoles capable of accepting arcade ports is pretty similar to the one-two punch of perfectly adequate home video equipment and convenient streaming.

I still attend the movies on a regular basis. When my wife and I have a date night, it’s almost always to attend a movie. In the past, it was superhero spectacles. These days, it’s more likely a horror movie. Just last weekend, I was there with a group of friends for dinner, drink, and the new Joker. We all basically knew the movie was going to blow, but it didn’t matter? We were showing up to an adequate but hardly special AMC in the suburbs, but no one cared? It was an opportunity to get out of the house—and in this case, everyone had children—and spend a few hours together. The theater was a chance for community.

Community, I suspect, is what’s going to be part of the second act for movie theaters. If we keep the arcade analogy, the rapid expansion of arcades in every mall eventually died out. (So did malls, mostly!) But now, you don’t have to go that far to find an arcade. The difference now is the “arcade” is often dropped into the middle of a fancy adults-oriented experience. There are family-friendly options like Dave and Busters, sure, but increasingly you’re seeing video games as part of a reason to lure adults out. 

In these places, you find brand-new arcade games you can’t find at home. Too many of them are adaptations of mobile games, but between some of the original work still being done, the well-maintained arcade experiences from the 90s and 2000s still kick some serious ass. Sega made so many bangers.

But ultimately, it’s trying to make a compelling argument for why you shouldn’t just hang out at home.

Which is all to say that, in my opinion, the future of the movie theater requires a similar reinvention. It needs to become a destination for reasons beyond early access or technological marvels. 4DX, where the chair shakes and water’s spit in your face, is goofily extreme—but it gestures in the right direction of trying to rethink why we sit in a dark theater with other people. I’m sorry, but equipping a movie theater with terrific projection and incredible sound is not going to move the needle anymore. People don’t give a shit. 

You can easily imagine, though, a theater that explicitly caters to people who do give a shit. You could charge them whatever you want. How much would you pay for it, Rob? But for everyone else, for the masses,I think it starts with “why do people want to get together?” and works backwards from there. 

It is, perhaps, a small thing, but what’s been some of the most talked about parts of movies over the past year and change? It’s the fuckin’ popcorn buckets. They’re exclusive. They’re ridiculous. They create a reason to attend the movie. On some level, those popcorn buckets suggest a path forward for theaters.

Rob: I could be wrong, but my instincts say that the popcorn buckets are more aimed at getting people who were already coming out to the movies to pay a bit more. Same way a collector’s edition of a video game is aimed at upselling a guaranteed $60 sale into a $100 sale. Looking at the popcorn buckets that get released and seem to move the needle, they seem like they’re either for long-running franchises or the kinds of big movies that once upon a time would have had all sorts of collectible tie-in deals with fast food businesses in the 90s. Which feels like it is the direction a lot of business is going: faced with the awareness that lots of people cannot will not pay more for the same service, you look at ways to sweeten the pot for the ones who are able and willing without massively increasing costs.