Movie Theaters are more than Just a Big Screen
We are a week away from the most anticipated opening weekend of recent memory. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer hits theaters on the 21st, sharing the release date with Greta Gerwig’s live-action Barbie movie. Up until now, it’s been pretty much unheard of to intentionally share a release date with a Christopher Nolan movie and go head to head with him at the box-office. However, as tracking data gets released, the showdown—now dubbed “Barbieheimer”—indicates that Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s female-skewed, Mattell-inspired comedy might rake in around $80 million domestically while the wartime biopic of the scientist behind the atom bomb is only expected to net in around $40 million on its opening weekend.
The competition between the two movies has been friendly, though. Greta Gerwig recently posted a picture of her and Margot Robbie smiling with their Oppenheimer tickets and the internet is eagerly waiting for Christopher Nolan to post a picture of him and Cillian Murphy with their Barbie tickets. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter which movie makes the most money this weekend because in the age of streaming, the real winner of this whole thing is the movie theater.
Now that it is all but certain that the theatrical business is here to stay, I wanted to use this opportunity to look back—to only six months ago—when movie theaters’ future was still in jeopardy. The words that follow are my argument, my plea, my reminder for why movie theaters need to stick around.
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On a drizzly Friday evening this past January, I found myself in the back of my friend Sam’s Subaru on the way to Crenshaw. I was too tired to go out to bars but not tired enough to stay in. Sam had mentioned to me earlier that week how the new Puss in Boots movie was getting good reviews and asked me if I wanted to go. I completely forgot about his invitation until Friday night when he sent me a text saying, “U still down?” Ross, one of my roommates, joined us. Miles, was in the front seat curating aux when Ross and I climbed in the back. The opening drumbeat of Drake’s Feel No Ways bounced through the speakers as the car jolted forward.
We parked in a fluorescently lit parking structure next to the theater. As we walked into the Mid-Century Modern Cinemark, a group of teenagers was hanging out on the steps listening to British rap music on a portable speaker. One of them quietly—but loud enough so we could hear—said that we looked like a bunch of nerds. They laughed to themselves as we went through the doors. I split a large popcorn with Miles and Sam while Ross got gummy worms for himself. We sat in the middle of the theater—choosing not to sit at our assigned seats because the theater was mainly empty.
The reviews proved true. Puss in Boots was fun, had crazy animation, and offered something for all ages. I remember this one moment when Puss made a joke about a Quinceanera and the Hispanic family behind us giggled as one of them said, “¡Parece como mi propia Quinceanera!” I smiled, grateful for my years of Spanish class in high school.
We drove back to campus in the rain and discussed our favorite parts. Ross was still holding onto his bag of gummy worms as he said how the animation reminded him of Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. Sam agreed. Miles played Feel No Ways again. He and I have always agreed that that song never gets old.
Movie theaters offer us many things no home viewing experience can. They act as a third place, they offer a ritualistic experience with friends, they give us an excuse to treat ourselves, and they allow us to fully feel the magic of movies.
For starters, they are a place where people can engage with others from their community—like overhear a family talk in Spanish or get made fun of by a group of teenagers. To quote film historian Steven Ross, “[Theaters] are a social experience. [They] are a communal experience.” Movie theaters can also be seen as a third place—a place in between work and home. Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University, talks a lot about third places in his book Starbucks: Everything but the Coffee. Simon writes, “People seek a sense of belonging and acceptance from larger groups—families, neighbors, church members, business associates, peers, and the guys at the barbershop and the women at the beauty salon… Without these kinds of connections, we are susceptible to loneliness and social anxiety.” Watching a movie at a theater with an audience is no different. A movie theater offers so much more than a bigger screen. It’s a place to connect, belong, and feel the sense of community that was robbed by a Pandemic and streaming.
The movie-going experience—from the car ride there to the buying of concessions to the previews to the end credits to the car ride back—is also ritualistic. Anthropologist Tok Thompson emphasized this point to me when I met with him on Zoom, telling me how the “modern concept of theaters derived from religious rituals of ancient Greeks. The most important similarity is that it is a ritual that brings people together.”
Seen this way, theaters are not just a place to interact with locals but also an opportunity to simply spend time with your people. Take Shorya Gupta, a Business Major at USC. The movie that’s playing isn’t what attracts him. Shorya will go “as long as there is reasonable interest from my friends.” He also likes the previews. Similarly, Jake Shpiner, an aspiring filmmaker, loves watching a movie in theaters because it “is the opposite of solitude.” He loves the ability “to experience other people’s real-time reactions especially when [he’s] feeling the same reaction as them.” Anne Globe, a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the former Chief Marketing Officer at Dreamworks, goes once a week with a group of fellow Hollywood female suits. Zach DeZee loves going to the movies and wishes he went more too. In fact, if Luke, Zach’s friend from home, lived closer, he would. He always enjoyed the conversations with him on the car ride back when they would discuss what they saw. Avid music fan and Marshall Professor Andrew Daw captures the specialness of movie-going best: “There’s something about the ephemeral reality of it. You were at something, you captured something, and that was a cool special thing you got to experience with people there.”
Going to the movies is also an affordable luxury. This idea of self-gifting is as relevant to buying overpriced Frappucinos at Starbucks as it is buying buttery popcorn at an AMC. To quote Professor Simon again, “In our post-need world where shopping has become a form of entertainment, self-expression, and identity making and where other institutions are receding, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people seek individual comfort and solace in consumption.” Take John Lytle for instance, a design student at USC. For him, theaters are an excuse to treat himself to Nerds Clusters, a large popcorn, and a Coke Icee. Kate Maloney, a Global Health major, would go once a week if she could. She loves the reclining chairs. Oliver Montgomery is willing to pay the premium for pristine sound and image quality. He’s a purist when it comes to watching movies: “It has to be a Dolby or IMAX.” Eliana Yeager, an aspiring stage actress, told me how she happily paid $19.00 for a juicy burger at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater downtown when she went to see the gory Crimes of the Future because “it’s just the thought of feeling like you’re there with them. And it’s a little bit disgusting but it’s safe disgust.” So, while people go to the movies for different reasons, what’s ubiquitous is the fact that they all do it as a way to treat themselves to a relatively affordable pleasure that they wouldn’t otherwise do at home.
Finally, the most important thing that movie theaters offer audiences is the opportunity to let go. “You can’t control when lights turn on or off, you can’t control who is sitting next to you, and you can’t control when previews end.” The only thing a viewer is left to do is look at the flickering screen. According to Neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan, it is this environment—which can be traced back to storytelling around the fire in Hunter-Gatherer societies—that “takes us out of the business of here and now.” This setting offers viewers to get in a suspension of disbelief. Jonas coined this experience “voluntary involuntariness,” when “you intentionally give yourself over to something.” Eliana, the aspiring stage actress, agrees. “There are simply no distractions. It’s immersive, seamless, and much easier to get wrapped up in the drama” compared to her screens at home. Simply put, people can’t press pause when the lights go down.
Movies are meant to be watched in theaters. While it sounds like a moot point in today’s work-from-home, everything you want on streaming, physically isolated, digitally connected world, the importance of theaters as a place and movie-going as an experience cannot be overlooked. “There’s some awe-inspiring feeling in a theater. Maybe there’s something that makes the self a little bit smaller.” In theaters, we get to connect with strangers and friends, treat ourselves to buttery popcorn, “get wrapped up in” stories, and watch an art form the way it was intended to be watched. Martin Scorcese captures it best when he said “I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.” Even in the post-pandemic age of streaming, movie theaters still serve a human purpose.
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I wrote that six months ago, but enough worrying about words from the past. Go see Barbie! Or Oppenheimer! Or both!