You’re walking down a dimly-lit hallway. You hear the sound of boots behind you, but no one is there when you turn. You continue to approach the black door looming at the end of the hallway. As you approach it, you can hear the sounds of something big moving around on the other side. It’s too late now. Your hand is on the doorknob, the handle crreeaaks open….and BOOM! Someone just kicked you in the back of the chair for the 6th time jolting you back into the dark theater. You were so heavily invested in that scene too. What a shame. 

When was the last time you went to the movies? If you’ve been in the last two months, when was the last time you enjoyed going to the movies? It seems that every time we decide to fork over twelve dollars to go see the newest blood-filled Tarantino flick, it’s overrun with rude moviegoers, dirty aisles, and children. It’s not the age of the children that’s necessarily the main problem. It’s the fact that the parents do nothing when kids run around, cry, scream, and talk during films. It’s the parents on their cell phones during a film. People are ruining the movie theater experience. Movies have lost the respect that they once had from the audience. You should remember that you should go to the movies because it gives you an experience that you cannot get at home, shares ideas and stories, and also supports the growth of the film industry. 

Time to ask another question: When was the last time you watched a movie at home? Whether that be Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or on television. Probably a greater number of us than the first question. The television was one of the greatest inventions ever created. It brought motion pictures to every home. Now, the entire family could gather around the bright screen to watch a show. Saturday morning cartoons. News networks. Football games. Holiday Specials. Advertisements. While everyone loved the television in the first 30 years of its existence, it was still necessary to go to the movies to see a film. An average Friday night in a small town became amazing when you could just meet your friends at the town theater. But movie theaters in small towns began dying out. Rotting away in the shadow of what they once were. Well before the 1980s hit, small town theaters realized that they would have to show 5 times the amount of feature films than a theater in a major city would (Putnam, 2000). Not only has the growth of television impacted the role of movie theaters in our society, but movie rentals changed the way we saw cinema. Now, you would only have to drive to your nearest Blockbuster to watch any movie you wanted at home. It felt like freedom. Then the internet joined forces with Netflix to become a titan, destroying every Blockbuster and providing every middle-class American with a gargantuan selection of films. That is, if they wanted to dish out the cheap $7.99 per month. Now anyone can watch a movie without even leaving their room. We’ve all see students in schools watching shows IN CLASS. Surely this freedom is the greatest thing God has ever put on this planet. You might be thinking, “How does watching ‘Fight Club’ hurt movie theaters? They don’t even show that film in movie theaters anymore.” This is true. Netflix isn’t really the problem. However, not going to see a film that is being released in theaters because you want to wait for it to be released to Netflix may be a different story, but I’ll get to that later. It has been found, however, that 56% of frequent theatergoers still prefer watching a movie at home rather than going to the movie theater (Milder, 2008). Television has grown to an enormous scale thanks to big budget shows and miniseries. Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are both television shows that require enormous budgets for each episode. Each episode itself becomes a sort of movie, beckoning the viewer to return every week for the next episode. Shows and miniseries which are exclusive to streaming services are also becoming popular. Stranger Things and Black Mirror both are Netflix exclusives, meaning that someone would have to pay for the service in order to watch the shows. Many big name actors are also starring in more television shows, which can encourage more people to watch the show. Many movies made exclusively for Netflix have a financial net that will catch them if they don’t turn out as expected. With Netflix, someone would be able to watch an entire season of a television show in one sitting, or 3 movies in a row in a couple of hours. This saves money, and makes it easy to find hundreds of shows and movies in one place. This can also encourage binge watching. Due to the overload of entertainment available, it is common for people to watch television shows for many hours. Without commercials or other advertisements, the amount of breaks is lowered, and the amount of actual time watching the show increases. The ability to pause the show or movie in order to take a break also encourages the habit of missing the airing of an episode, and instead waiting for it to be released on Netflix. Movie tickets are not only more expensive than ever, but the price of concessions has risen. If movie theaters want to survive, they must find a way to compete with Netflix. It is important to improve the theater environment without becoming distracting or too expensive. This rise of home entertainment has been both a gift and a curse. No longer do parents have to hire a babysitter to watch a storyline unfold in front of their eyes. No longer do teenagers have to schedule their day around the one time a movie is being screened. No longer do groups of friends meet at the movies to hang out on Friday nights. Home entertainment is both a gift and a curse, and we need to be careful not to abuse the power home entertainment provides to us.  

When a ticket is purchased to go see a movie in a theater, it tells the movie studio that someone like you was interested enough in their advertising to drag yourself out of your home, drive to the theater, and spend your hard-earned cash on their product. The film may turn out to be the best film you have ever seen, or it may not. This doesn’t matter to a studio, as they only see you as a walking dollar bill. However, if no one supports the best film you have ever seen, that film won’t be given a sequel. The director may never be given work, and nothing like the film you just saw will ever be made again. Studios don’t care about the quality of a movie. They would release a movie about a talking block of cheese if it made millions at the box office. If the talking piece of cheddar makes enough at the box office, it’s given a sequel or a film with a similar premise. Now the studio is making yet another movie about talking chipmunks instead of your movie. You might laugh and think that this is something fictional and doesn’t happen in the real world. Not supporting good movies is something that happens quite frequently, and more commonly than ever. Steven Spielberg’s The BFG is one such film. The film only made $20 million dollars on its $140 million dollar budget on the opening weekend. The film was well received by critics, which shows that it wasn’t the reviews that turned people away from the film. Many other recent movies that have bombed at the box office had similar budgets, and the films could cost movie studios millions of dollars. The cost of marketing and distribution is higher than ever, and when paired with the cost of the actual production of the movie, can lead to financial troubles for studios (Rainey, 2016). This is why you should go see any film that interests you in any way. It was found in a study that only 15% of the public show a need to be the first to see a new film release (Basil, 2001). This low number shows that people either want to wait for reviews in order to save their money, or are just not interested. This could also be due to the number of people who wish to wait for months for the film to be released to DVD and streaming services. Many films are relying on DVD sales and rentals to make up for what they aren’t making at the box office (The Economist, 2011). Some films rely on merchandising to make the greatest amount of money. According to the Los Angeles Times, Cars is a film which was given a sequel not only due to the money made at the box office, but also due to the merchandising and products sold (Chmielewski, 2011). Other films such as Star Wars have built an entire franchise not only based on the money that the films themselves make, but what they sell in stores. It’s the t-shirts, plastic lightsabers, and lunchboxes that give the franchise a face. But supporting a film in theaters tells the studios what sorts of films should be made. The power doesn’t really lie in the hands of a studio. It lies in you. The audience is the ultimate decider of what gets made, and what doesn’t. You are free to use this power however you wish. No one can force you to act a certain way, to buy certain things, to wear certain clothes. But others can make you think about how your actions affect them. 

Movie theaters are no longer the place to hang out on Friday nights with a group of friends. However, you may point out that no one hangs out at roller-rinks either. What’s the difference? Are movie theaters outdated? The second question may have a surprising answer. First of all, the difference between a roller-rink and a movie theater is that movie theaters provide a unique experience that cannot be obtained at home. Roller-rinks are replaced with ice rinks, as rollerblading is something anyone can do anywhere, and roller-rinks provide the same exact experience every time you go. The fact that you know you will see a different film every time you go to a movie theater is enough to keep the experience different. Like a classroom is designed to keep students concentrated on the teacher and the lesson being taught, movie theaters are designed to keep the audience in the world created on screen. The dim lights, the position of the chairs, the location of the speakers, they all work together to provide you with an experience. The one thing that sucks someone out of this experience faster than anything else is the others around you. While the design of movie theaters are to provide an experience that cannot be had at home, home theaters are growing, and technology is constantly being developed. In response, movie theaters must react by developing technology of their own. Filmmaker Douglas Trumbull is one developer of this technology. Creating theaters with curved screens, surround sound, and higher framerates are some of the ways he hopes to lure people back to the movie theaters (Woyke, 2016). There is a dynamic between the movie screen and the audience that isn’t noticed by most filmgoers, but is an important tool for filmmakers. The theater is designed as a place to view art and reflect upon what is being presented (Wasson, 2016). The introduction of new technology can actually hinder this purpose. 3D, for instance, can act as a distraction rather than actually helping the movie experience. Many times, 3D seems as nothing more than a way to charge more money for a movie ticket. When a film is made to be paired with 3D, it won’t have the same effect when released on DVD. This asks if developing technology to try to improve the theater experience actually will bring back more people to the theater, or if theaters are just wasting their time and focusing on the wrong aspects. It might not even be the theater’s fault that films are doing worse. More and more films seem to be receiving worse reviews from critics, but studios don’t respect the creative process enough in order to produce abstract and thought provoking films instead of the seventh film in a series of action movies. If you go to the theater to watch a unique and creative film, you are supporting a work of art. The fact that the same action movies always make the most at the box office and the unique movies always do worse brings up an unsettling new theory. Maybe theaters dying out isn’t the problem, but only a result of the problem. Maybe art is dying out. 

Films themselves are important to many different aspects in our society. According to Thought Economics, “of the 23 million people who visited the UK in 2001, approximately 20% visited the UK because of the way it is portrayed in films or on television” (Shah, 2011). This may not be surprising, when you think about how almost everything you might know about other countries may have come from watching movies or television. I remember the first time I saw Slumdog Millionaire, I was amazed by how the country of India appeared. It wasn’t necessarily portrayed in a good way, in fact the other way around. The streets were littered with garbage, people were murdered on the street, and kidnappings seemed as common occurrences. But I was blown away by how the characters weren’t depressed by the state of their nation, and how they never gave up, no matter how many terrible things happened to them. The film gave me an insight to India and the poverty that grips most of the population. I began to see the country and the people in a different light, and realized that the people of other countries aren’t that different. Films are art, and art is a way to share ideas and experiences with the others in the world. Films can be a way to help people of different cultures and backgrounds connect with one another and learn about each other.

Think about your favorite film, and ask yourself why that film in particular stands out. It might be a film you can relate to, a film you find hilarious, or a film with a fictional world so immersive that you wish to leap out of your seat and dive through the television to live in that world for the rest of your life. This film would not have been possible without a production team, a movie studio, a director, a cast of amazing actors and actresses, and a team of editors in order to create this work of art. Despite all of this, this film could still fail if not enough people had shown up to the theater to watch it.  It’s not just you who should start supporting movie theaters, but it’s also movie theaters and film studios that should start listening. In order to keep the theater experience at a great level, we must remember to respect the others around us. Attendance of movie theaters has dropped over the past decade, and we have to remember the qualities that make a great theater experience. Theater companies should mix things up to bring back the old Americana nostalgia that made theaters great in the first place. Whether this be bringing back drive-ins, offering dinner along with the film, or finding other ways to change the atmosphere and character of the movie theater, some already do this, but not many. Just imagine watching a film beneath a star-lit sky with a group of friends. This is the magic that theaters need to try to create again. Studios should learn from how moviegoers react to their movie. Sometimes, no one wants to see the fourth installment of a movie franchise, or the reboot of a series. This could be the reason television shows have become grander and more popular. If movie theaters and studios want to grow their business and make money, they should find ways to change. Finding the magic that made movies great escapes in the first place should be a priority. Our chances of saving movie theaters is dependent on our chances of saving art. Or else movie theaters will become nothing more than the next Blockbuster chain, abandoned and silent.
