Hello, you Sadistic Penguins, the Cubes Fan is here to tell you things you won’t like and this time it is that the theater sucks and movie studios are going to kill them off.
I know the cinephiles out there like Tom Cruise will scream from the rooftops that you need to see movies on the big screen and that watching at home is not the same experience. That is true. Watching at home isn’t the same experience, it is better.
Look, going to movies at the theater was a highlight of my childhood, but that was a long, long time ago. Our TVs back then were somehow giant and small at the exact same time. The picture also looked like crap, the sound was probably a 4 inch tweeter or something, and a lot of us only had one, so if you wanted to watch something, you probably had to sit with your whole family to do it, so that could limit which movies you were going to see.
Now, it wasn’t all bad. I remember some really nice nights sitting with my family watching movies, but as I got older, that was less of a fun thing. I also remember the great nights sitting at a friend’s house watching movies late at night after the parents had gone to bed, which was always a good time unless the parents got annoyed at us for being too loud.
Back then, going to the theater was the ultimate experience. Instead of a 25 inch tube tv with one tweeter in your house, you were seeing a 30 foot by 50 foot screen with surround sound and an amazing picture. Nobody had access to that kind of thing and because of that, theaters were packed on the weekends and movies would actually play in the theater for weeks and sometimes months because people were willing to go back multiple times.
But the screen size, clarity, and sound was kind of where the good stuff ended. The seats in those old theaters were pretty crappy. There are a number of reasons that movies only ran between 90 and 120 minutes back then, but I would not be surprised if one of the reasons was because it was painful for anyone to sit in those seats much longer than that.
Plus, the slant of the floor was so gradual that if you were short at all, it was pretty common for someone taller to sit in front of you and mess up the whole viewing experience. You might think you could just move seats, but back then the theaters were pretty full so that wasn’t an option many times.
This brings me to the other thing that often messed up the theater experience; the crowd and crowd control. Back in the day, we had no internet, so you could not check to see if a theater was going to be full or not. You had to literally go there in person to find out. You might show up at 6:30 for the 7:00 show and find out that the show is sold out, so you end up waiting for the next showing. To be fair, that was often only an extra 15 to 20 minutes, but it was still annoying.
The other part of that is that there were no assigned seats. When you bought a ticket to a movie, it was general admission so you had to go into the theater to see if there were any spots open. You might have 3 or 4 people with you, but there might not be three or four seats together left in the theater. So, you might not even get to sit with the people you went with. Of course, that is probably good for everyone else because if you are sitting alone, you probably are talking to each other and annoying the living crap out of everyone else.
Thank goodness that screen was big and the sound was good because the rest of it was not the way you would probably choose to watch a movie if you wanted to enjoy it.
All of that was an issue, and I will say that theaters in general have fixed many of those issues. Of course, they didn’t do it because it was good for the customers, they made changes because people started to realize it was better to just watch the movies in their houses where they didn’t have to deal with all that other stuff. It worked too.
Theaters maintained a pretty good hold on the movie experience as they started to make changes like having the seats at a sharper angle so there were no stupid tall people blocking your view. Then they started to allow you to go online and purchase specific seats so that it wasn’t a free for all when you got there. It also allowed you to choose not to go to the theater when you saw it was going to be full, which significantly reduced the stress involved with going to the theater. Then they started to put in more and more comfortable seats. You can just go to the theater now and lean the seat back, kick your feet up and take a nap if you wanted they are so good. That’s a good thing too, because movies are crazy long now and you are going to need to be comfy.
This gets us to the modern day issues with going to the movies and how the movie studios seem like they are doing everything they can to not only murder theaters, but commit suicide themselves.
It starts with that run time on movies. As I said before, there were a number of reasons movies were usually closer to 90 minutes, but rarely more than 120 minutes. The first being that films were actually shot on film and that is expensive, so they had to keep them a bit shorter so as to not spend a ton of money just on the film. It would have cost the studio less just to murder Stanley Kubrick than let him burn hundreds of hours of film with thousands of takes. You cannot run out of film anymore, so you can just shoot whatever you want. Sounds great, but if you’ve ever seen The Hobbit Trilogy, you know they will shoot many, many hours of garbage for no good reason.
Plus, on the consumer side, when movies were on film, they were actually on film in the theaters as well, so shipping movies out to theaters required sending many reels of film that they could run through the projector. It’s cheaper to have shorter movies so you don’t have as many reels to ship. Now that everything is digital, they literally just have a computer hooked up to the projector and it plays with no physical film at all so there are no shipping charges.
Now, without the limitations of physical media, it actually seems more rare that a movie is less than two hours long. They just put everything they can in there and call it good. I’m sure they consider run time in some ways, but it isn’t because they have limits on film or shipping or any of that, so the run times of movies have continued to expand. So, even with the better seats and the improved views, it can still get frustrating to go watch a movie because it is a 3 hour or more process instead of 2 hours or less as it had been in the past.
Dinner AND a movie? I don’t think so. If you eat before, you better install a catheter. (I’ll get to that later) If you wait until after the movie, you might be trying to find food at midnight when you left for the movies at 7pm. That’s tough to do sometimes.
Now let’s talk about that bathroom break. These movies are so long now, that it can be a Herculean task to get through it without going. I mean, we are planning this thing a week out, not eating big meals, lowering our intake of fluids, and training our bodies by not going to the bathroom for at least 30 minutes after we feel we need to go. How will we ever know what we missed at minutes 183 to 195 in the Brutalist? We have to train for these things. If you are at home, you can just hit pause, go take a piss, maybe grab a snack, and then get back to the most boring 216 minutes of your life without having missed anything. I’m pretty sure they had time to build an entire skyscraper while I watched that movie.
Of course, there is always the picture and sound quality. I mean, how will you ever be able to experience the thrill of Conclave if you don’t see 20 foot tall Cardinals discussing the Pope? You might want to see that one on IMAX to get the most out of it. Or you can watch it on one of your multiple large screen high definition TVs that you probably have in your house connected to a nice sound set up that will make you go check the front door of your house when you hear one ring in the movie. The theater quality really cannot beat what you have in your home anymore. Maybe you like to see an action or horror movie on a giant screen or something because there can be some fun in that, but nobody needs to have the giant screen for simple dramas or comedies anymore. Plus, if you do miss something, you can just jump back a minute or so to watch it again, so there’s that convenience.
Speaking of convenience, we don’t even have to wait for movies anymore. Some movies come out on streaming the same day they come out in theaters, so there is literally no wait. Other movies are released only in theaters, but if you have any patience at all, you can watch it in a few weeks at home. It is insane how quickly movies are posted to the streaming sites now. Streaming already killed video stores, and now they might kill theaters too. One reason that theaters were able to hold on so long was that, back in the day, none of us would be able to see the movie for a long time if we didn’t see it in theaters.
In the 80s, we might have to wait an entire year for a movie to come out on VHS. Even by the early 2000s when DVDs were much quicker to produce, we would still wait six months or so. That delay pushed us to go see the movies in the theaters. This meant more people, and the theaters would keep the movies longer, and that would help them make back their money on the licensing fees they paid to get the movie. Bad movies used to stay in theaters for at least a few weeks. Good movies would stay months in the same theater. I remember seeing a discount theater still showing Crocodile Dundee a full year after it was released. I remember because the VHS had just come out and I couldn’t believe it was still in any theaters.
And that’s the point I’m making with this; if a movie is going to not only be released to video within a few weeks, but right into my living room so I don’t have to leave my house to find it, why would theaters keep movies for much longer than that? The crazy thing is that the studios have the power to stop this. They do not have to release these movies into the world quickly if they don’t want. That would actually make people go back to the theaters to see movies because they would know, like we did in the 1900s, that we wouldn’t get to see it for a year or so. It is this, more than anything in my opinion, that is killing theaters.
The wild thing is that it’s suicide for the studios too. They talk about movies not making money in theaters even as they undercut the theaters with streaming. How is a studio going to make more money offering a movie on Amazon for $15 that multiple people can watch all together rather than each one of those people needing to pay $15 to see it at the theater? Sure, they see a quick influx of money maybe, but it won’t be the same type of sustained money that they could have if people felt like they needed to go to the movies to see something. Not to mention that it is much harder to pirate a movie that is playing in theaters than it is once that thing is digital. It is a literal murder suicide with studios ruining the revenue model for theaters and then making it so easy for people to pay less, or nothing, to watch the movies at home almost immediately.
Well, this was a long one, and maybe you disagree that it’s better to watch movies at home than the theater, but if that’s the case, I would suggest getting your theater experience while you can because it will probably be killed by streaming, which will then probably lead to the studios dying off as well because it will become even harder to make money on movies, so they will just spend less and make crappier and crappier movies. In the not too distant future, it will be Troma Studios level entertainment for everyone, and like this blog post, you aren’t going to like that.
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