I’ve noticed lately that my peers don’t seem to enjoy going to movies as much as they used to, or at least not in the same way. The same situation occurred in my family with my parents and older sister. Going to the movie theater used to be a treat, an event. We would clear whole halves of our day, buy snacks and sit down to enjoy a movie almost every weekend. Now it seems to be something that people do when they’re bored or want their kids to sit still for two hours. I became interested in the reality of this phenomena and found out that indeed research shows there was a recent decline. Of course, people argue that film cinema has been dead for a while, and research states that over two thirds of the over 130,000 theaters are now digital. So what does this mean for the medium as a whole? As Emily hinted, is every medium headed to the internet? Will our moviegoing experience be reduced to watching a new movie on a computer while eating a TV dinner?
In 2011, the moviegoers’ ticket sale number dropped from 10.6 billion to 10.2 billion, not too significant when you’re looking at the numbers but enough for the average person to notice. However, our recent trip to the Imax headquarters and the talk with Greg Foster seemed very positive about the movie theater industry (Imax sales specifically), and that positivity rings true as well. In 2012, the ticket sales went back up and jumped to 10.8 billion. A large number of these sales can be attributed to Imax and 3D movies whose ticket sales have been jumping enormously, as they are the newest medium.
I was happy to see that these numbers reflect how I personally feel about movie theaters. A few years ago I, too, felt a certain ambivalence towards the theater. I would go months without seeing a movie or paying attention to movies and not really care. This could be attributed to the high ticket prices or development of new platforms such as Netflix and Hulu Plus that met most of my screen viewing needs. However, I found this year that Netflix or Hulu Plus will never take the place of the movie theater. I’ve been going often, sometimes as often as once or twice a week, seeing almost every movie in theaters. I don’t think it’s because ticket prices have gone down or because I have a better salary, I think it’s because I’m making a conscious decision to put my money towards what I enjoy and that happens to be movies over most other activities right now. There’s something to be said about the experience as a whole. Clearing part of your day for nothing but enjoying a movie is incredibly relaxing. It’s also nice to go to a setting where everyone is there for the same thing, to watch the same movie. Whether it’s the rowdy crowd of a midnight premiere movie, or the quiet crowd of a drama, experiencing a movie with the people around you is unmatched in any other setting than the theater.
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