I guess it goes to show just how much this year has changed me, because I greeted the latest news in the slow-rolling death knell for movie theaters with sort of a shrug.
Now, the movies that are debuting on HBOMax -- which include Wonder Woman 1984 as soon as three weeks from now -- will also be playing in theaters. Warner Brothers is not robbing its audience of the chance to see these big spectacles on the big screen. It's just also providing them a small screen option that an increasingly large number of people may avail themselves of, which spells the long-term doom of movie theaters.
Oh well.
Seriously, this idea made me hyperventilate not long ago. It was only April 30th when I wrote this post, in which I bemoaned participating in a decisive experiment by Universal in which it charged viewers $19.99 to rent Trolls World Tour at home. So many of them did -- so many of us did, I'm ashamed to say -- that I worried I had played a role in changing the very paradigm of going to the movies.
But as 2020 has worn on, I've realized a couple things:
1) You can't fight change, nor can you fight the circumstances that lead to it, however unexpected they are, and however intrinsically unrelated they are to thing itself that's changing.
2) I'm just one man, and my opinion doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Of course, the second one is a bit defeatist -- maybe they both are. I certainly don't subscribe to that "just one man" and "can't fight change" logic when it comes to voting in elections. And buying movie tickets -- or home rentals -- is very much like voting in an election, in that you are telling the purveyors of the thing you're voting for what you want, and what you don't want.
But as this year has gone on, I've realized more and more that the kind of sea changes an industry goes through are a combination of many, many factors, almost all of which are beyond our control, and most of which we don't even notice happening as they are happening, until it's too late to do anything about it.
Twenty twenty has certainly made those changes noticeable, as an unexpected event has pushed us forward maybe five years sooner to a place we were going anyway.
I think of a recent bemoaning of mine of Facebook, about how when I was growing up, we had these syndicated afternoon TV shows we watched when we got home from school, like The Brady Bunch and Three's Company. I was a WLVI guy in the Boston area, and whatever they put on in the afternoons, I watched.
Kids today, I bemoaned, watch people play video games on YouTube. Very much unlike a syndicated TV show, which is defined by playing time and time again until you memorize the dialogue, these videos are essentially ephemeral, never to be watched a second time, never to produce any memorable lines of dialogue, never to help build a common frame of reference and inside jokes among a whole generational of people. I can say to anyone in my age group "Mom always said, don't play ball in the house," and they will immediately think of the Brady Bunch episode where the Brady kids break Carol Brady's favorite vase with an errant throw of a football. What's the 2020 equivalent of that?
But a commenter helped me see the flaws in my own argument, how it's naive of me to expect anything to stay the same. Our parents, this person said, listened to radio dramas when they were that age. Which, you might note, are also essentially ephemeral, as I don't know the extent to which they were rebroadcast, and whether kids bothered to listen to the same one again.
They turned out okay, right?
A paradigm shift is not the aberration. It's the norm. While some kids, like mine, do watch these YouTube videos on a television, some have actually done the same sort of device shift as our parents' radios to our TVs. Some watch these videos on an iPad or a phone, a device we couldn't have even conceived of when we were kids. At least our parents knew what a television was, and most probably had one, even if it came later in their childhoods.
As long as movies don't go away, as long as they still make them, as long as I can still watch them on some device, maybe it will all turn out okay.
This does not mean I am giving up on movie theaters. In fact, I have been paying for all the movies I've seen since theaters first closed in March. For a while my critics card wasn't being accepted, as the local theaters behaved as though they were hanging on by tooth and nail -- which they probably were. But now, some of them have started accepting them again, with the rest to follow soon enough. And even though I could go to the movies for free if I just selected the right theater, I've been supporting the "wrong" one at $20 a pop -- six times now since the movies opened again. I want my vote to count for something.
And the thing is, none of the theaters I've regularly visited in Melbourne have actually closed. Even the single-screen ones are still afloat. They are as determined as I am.
And being as determined as I am, I like to think that I'll go to all those Warner Brothers movies in the theater, so that my vote does count. But will I make that choice? For the purposes of this argument, let's pretend I'm actually an HBOMax subscriber, which means I can select either option available to me. Will I?
The results of the same scenario involving Netflix are not hopeful in that regard. To this day, I have yet to go to the cinema to see a movie Netflix had given a short theatrical run prior to making available on its service. Not Beasts of No Nation. Not Roma, though I later regretted that, as I thought seeing it on a big screen may have made me like it more. Not The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Not Marriage Story. The closest I got was when I tried to buy us tickets to a rooftop screening of Mank a few weeks ago, when the guidelines surrounding movies were stricter than they are now, but it was sold out on the night we wanted to go. So I will watch Mank on Netflix as well.
In every case, I have thought, "I could watch that on the big screen, and I'm sure it would be cool. But it will be available on Netflix in just a few weeks anyway."
That makes me different from the lazy viewer I am implicitly contrasting myself with how, exactly?
But I do have hope.
Even if going to the movies wanes for a time as a social activity enjoyed by groups of people on a weekend night, I can't see how it will ever really go away. Just last night at dinner I was discussing with some friends how commercial districts, especially during pandemic times, may recede, and there may be a lot of FOR RENT signs in the windows, but that new businesses tend to eventually take their place, like vegetation growing again after a forest fire.
And so it will be with movies theaters. Some will close for good, no doubt. That space will be reused for something else, even possibly having all its seats gutted to pave the way for an entirely new function that is not based in performance. Free-standing buildings may even get razed.
But most, or at least enough, will probably reemerge at some point in the future, with a new name, a new ownership, a new source of financing that has not been crippled by dying out in 2020 in the first place.
Maybe in those five years I discussed earlier, movie theaters will return as a novelty item, and young people raised on screens will rediscover them as a sort of retro activity, like when drive-ins started becoming popular again. Everything phases out; the good things are remembered and reenergized for future generations.
My understanding is that Warner Brothers' ploy is not intended to persist past 2021, at least not so far as they have announced. Optimists are viewing it as a short-term attempt to cash up by leveraging the streaming services and the mysterious financial realities that swirl around them.
Pessimists -- and maybe realists -- are seeing it as perhaps a watershed moment in the end of movie theaters.
Me, though, I am an optimist, something I discover more about myself all the time.
I guess I'm also a realist, though, otherwise I wouldn't be wearily sounding the alarm in this post. Can you wearily sound an alarm? If so, I am.
But going to the movies is a good thing, that I am sure of. And as I said earlier, the really good things persist.
Record stores may disappear, but they are like the reruns of The Brady Bunch in this scenario. They have a specific nostalgia associated with them because they remind us of a time and a place in our lives, which our kids will never be able to experience.
But people have been going to the movies for a hundred years, and I believe they still will in the future. Those of us who want to will be able to. Those who don't want to will have that option as well.
And this, too, shall pass.
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