Most weeks, this column labors to avoid sentimentality. But ’tis the holiday season, and our subject is the future of movie theaters. Indulge me.
Jerry Seinfeld, who presumably knows a thing or two about show business, has said the film industry as currently constituted is kaput, even if Tinseltown has been slow to understand what’s happened in recent decades. “They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over,” he told GQ magazine last year. “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”
Mr. Seinfeld may be slightly overstating the case, but his observation is worth pondering as Netflix and Paramount bid for Warner Bros. and its storied film library, which includes not only the “Harry Potter,” “Batman” and “Barbie” films but also classics such as “The Matrix,” “Dirty Harry,” “Rio Bravo” and “Casablanca.” The comedian’s comments were self-serving to some extent. At the time, Mr. Seinfeld was promoting his new film, “Unfrosted,” which was backed by Netflix rather than a legacy studio. Like more and more films these days, it had a brief run in theaters before debuting on the streaming service.
If Netflix acquires Warner Bros., some fear, the future is more streaming and fewer theatrical releases. The movie-going audience will shrink, and theaters will go the way of Blockbuster video stores. Others say that missile has launched, regardless of who acquires Warner Bros.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine and longtime film critic, wrote on social media recently that Covid might have killed moviegoing for good, but that the trend of shrinking audiences was already there.
“Maybe Netflix will show Warners movies in theaters or maybe it won’t. Maybe Greta Gerwig’s NARNIA movies will triumph in theaters, and so might [Christopher] Nolan’s ODYSSEY. There will be movies that make money,” Mr. Podhoretz wrote. “But the movie theater as we have understood it will not exist in a decade. Its footprint is too large in real estate terms and there won’t be enough foot traffic to justify the space. There will probably be ten theaters in Manhattan by then. And each city will have one or two.”
I pray the skeptics are wrong, but the data are on their side. In his book “The Hollywood Economist,” Edward Jay Epstein calculated that in 1929, the year of the first Academy Awards, an average of 95 million people, or nearly four-fifths of the U.S. population, saw a film every week. Moviegoing peaked in the 1940s and ’50s but began to diminish as more people acquired television sets. By 2010 average weekly movie attendance had fallen to about 30 million. In 2019 the year before the pandemic, ticket sales numbered 1.2 billion. Last year they were just over 760 million.
As a child in the late 1970s and early ’80s, I fondly recall grand movie houses with chandeliers, carpeting and upholstered seats. I remember uniformed ushers with flashlights. The ticket lines could be long. You had to arrive early for evening showings, particularly on weekends. But what resonated more than the setting was the shared experience. Watching “E.T.” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “Superman” on a giant screen in a dark theater with total strangers offered a visceral thrill that could never be replicated in my living room.
James Gunn, director of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise and this year’s “Superman” reboot, told Rolling Stone that Hollywood could correct course by simply making better movies. But I’m not sure that film quality per se is the biggest problem. Bad films have always outnumbered good ones. Audiences have never been particularly picky. Going to the movies was simply a popular activity, regardless of what was playing. It passed the time. One of the highest-grossing films ever made is “Titanic,” which will never be mistaken for “The Godfather.”
Mr. Seinfeld is right. Going to the movies was once an immersive experience and a common way of connecting with people through shared cultural references. It still is for those who venture to theaters, but too many people no longer bother. It’s expensive and inconvenient. Home setups are more comfortable. Fellow moviegoers can be rude. I get it.
Younger generations raised on smaller screens can’t miss what they never experienced, and they seem mostly to enjoy staring at themselves on their devices, which is a topic for another day. In any case, streaming allows them to consume movies on their terms rather than the theater’s, and Netflix is giving them what they want.
