Spoiler: Movie Theaters Are Dying Because They Mostly Suck
Earlier tonight, I went to go see a film. In a theater. I do this a lot. I love watching movies this way. And I’m sad that I’m increasingly in the minority in this way. And then I remember why.
Well, to be fair, there are two (main) reasons why. First, Hollywood has way, way, way over-indexed on sequels/prequels/spin-offs. The reason for this is obvious: such films are a lot less risky than producing original content. But it’s a short-term gain for long-term pain. We’re starting to see the beginnings of decay with this model.¹ But Marvel and now Star Wars are still largely masking the fundamental flaws. They won’t forever. I know it seems impossible now, but even Disney will one day fall.²
Anyway, the second reason for why the theater model is failing is more interesting because it’s far more obvious and yet often overlooked, even though it’s right there in front of us: most movie theaters suck.
I was reminded of this tonight as I’m on the road, and as such, away from my usual go-to, great theater. So I was stuck to try to find one that was merely suitable for our cinema-going purposes. Spoiler: it was not.
Aside from the person sleeping (!) in the back row when I walked into the theater, the room itself was filthy. The seats were far too close together. The viewing angle was seemingly a joke (were we meant to watch an aerial show?). The ads before the movie — sorry, the fucking ads before the movie… Etc. Etc. Etc.
Look, it really is this simple: there are a handful of theaters, most of them indie, which offer great — in some cases, truly great — movie-going experiences. The rest are by and large, total shit.
In periods of scarcity, people will pay for shit. But thanks to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and the like, we’re no longer living in a world of scarcity. This, mixed with bigger, cheaper and better screens in the home, and it’s all very obvious what’s happening. The only shock is that anyone is surprised that theater attendance continues to fall.
MoviePass can’t fix this because the problem isn’t actually the model, it’s the experience. People may be more willing to pay $1 for a shit experience in the age of paying $10 to $15, but at the end of the day, it’s still a shit experience. It’s already begging to be replaced and the convenience of viewing at home is right there. The night out at a movie palace has been replaced by going to an uncomfortable, largely empty room with a screen that is hopefully slightly larger than the one you have at home.
Movie theaters have at first thrived and now survived largely on false scarcity. The studios now conspire to ensure release windows are maintained. This is not sustainable. The windows will continue to shrink and one day will go away entirely. It’s inevitable. Then what are the theaters left with?
A lot of big empty rooms beyond a few people sleeping in the back rows.
¹ We’ve all been trained to go to theaters for these giant blockbusters and increasingly little else. As long as the blockbusters are great, this works (for the folks creating the blockbusters). But when they’re not great, the model fails very quickly. As do the studios who had to pay the massive budgets to make such movies. And, of course, the theaters.
² Though I expect them to continue to hoover up IP until there is no more they can attain. And with such IP, they’ll continue to build massive universes of content that will all tie into each other eventually. It’s a genius strategy that extends both viability and money-making ability for years, if not decades — though you need very deft hands to pull it off.
