This is an interesting perspective, and it makes me think. Back in the 50s I know there was concern that TV would be the end of cinema, but that never came to pass for lots of good reasons. I wonder if it really is now happening, though, given the absolute glut of available material on various streaming services, much of it either brand new or close enough to not matter? Among the things that kept TV from stealing cinema’s audience in the early days were the relatively puny size of the screen, poor image quality, inferior sound, lack of color, commercial interruptions and the relative staleness of movies once they finally made it to broadcast (usually with lots of edits). None of that really applies today: most people can at least approximate the theatrical experience in their home, without commercials or cuts from network censors, and the amount of choices – all totally on-demand – is overwhelming. At this point the last thing some of us need is even more options to choose from, let alone ones that necessitate the inconvenience and expense of leaving the house and having to show up on someone else’s schedule. And if we know it only takes a couple of weeks of waiting until we can see a film at home, what’s the hurry? If anything, the tables have turned as far as the irritation of advertisements: the average cinema screening includes a half hour of (mostly terrible) ads before the film even kicks off. Why pay for that experience, and indeed make a special trip to endure it?
I haven’t seen a film in the cinema since, I think, January of 2020 and so far I’ve had no interest in going back. That could change, but it’s hard to imagine.
Cinemas are at a crossroads now. They’ve been coasting by on the back of the fact that they get the movies first and for a long window of exclusivity. This led them to not update their facilities, have poor sound systems and screens, and, ultimately, to not care one bit about the customer experience by allowing people to just do as they please in the theater without any kind of expectations of audience behavior. You misbehave in other public places, you face some form of consequence (for the most part), but sadly it’s just been accepted that if you’re going to the theater, you’re going to have to deal with a bunch of people talking because extremely overpriced ticket you purchased affords you no rights to actually, you know, experience the movie. They need to either significantly improve the customer experience or they very well may fall into being something of a niche experience while Netflix and Amazon become the new Regal and AMCs of the world.
The only theaters that I will entertain going to anymore are the small, one-screen theater near where I live and a drive-in that’s a decent hike away. Outside of those, I very seriously doubt anyone will ever see me step foot inside a Regal or AMC theater ever again. I’ll wait the 3-6 weeks for it to arrive on streaming and watch it in the comfort of my own home.
If you look at the release schedule for the remainder of this year, yes, you see the strikes from last year wreaking havoc - but you also see that the studios have completely forgotten how to program for every quadrant of the audience.
They gave up on mainstream drama, comedy, biopic and thriller.
And now they are surprised and fear their tentpole sequels of burned out IP will open weakly.
„There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people. My son’s an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone.”“
That happened well before this. Once the cinemas made it so insufferable to even go to the movies anymore, that was the end. You can only go now for something that you really want to see, there’s no taking chances on a film you know little to nothing about because the stakes of going to the theater (high prices, terrible facilities, annoying and downright rude audience members, etc.) are so high, it’s no longer reasonable to go to see anything that you don’t have your heart set on.
That, and once a particular studio introduced the concept of “Phases” and had a new movie out seemingly every weekend, cinema has reached a point from which it can no longer recover.
They should do what they should have been doing for a while now and operate these things on a smaller budget with more focus on actual storytelling.
Given how much the budgets on the Craig films really began to balloon towards the end, it never really felt, IMO anyway, that they were getting much bang for their buck. They spent all that money to travel to these exotic locations, yet they feel like they barely feature in the film. They made a big deal about going to Shanghai for Skyfall, but what did we really get there? A couple of exterior shots?
If they can reign in things like that, they should be able to offset whatever they’re going to be missing out on at the box office.
Going to far out locations has been a thing of the past for some time now. It’s true that production costs have spiralled into budgets hardly any film can successfully recoup.
The sensible way would be to scale down, make films like „From Russia with Love“. But studios still are hellbent on believing that they have to make „Moonraker“ for the cost of „No time to die“.
What I’m missing for some time now is a sense of location like YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, or even FOR YOUR EYES ONLY used to show. NO TIME TO DIE went a little in that direction again, roughly until the ship sinks. After that it’s one huge blurry location, vaguely Scandinavian. Especially the Safin island could be anywhere at all.
I wouldn’t mind a story concentrating on a single location, or two at the most. Something that unfolds at one place and time and doesn’t immediately move across the globe. I get that Eon still smarts from the LICENCE TO KILL experience. But that result was so underwhelming because the story wasn’t particularly exciting and it all was filmed on a shoestring budget. Mexico and the Keys would offer a lot more than that. SPECTRE’s pts alone was leagues above LICENCE TO KILL’s visual attractions even with the weird filter.
With the new cg screens it even becomes possible to deceive anyone to believe real location work was done - so money for a whole crew to travel somewhere, being dependent on good weather and cheap accommodations is not an issue anymore.
But the main problem seems to be what a Bond film or any major blockbuster wannabe should be narratively now. The rather simple stories of yesteryears have become convoluted climaxes after climaxes, in need of constant attention exposition and action full of explosions, topping themselves until the length of the film is at least two and a half hours.
It’s all excess after excess, and audiences were so much conditioned for this that they would feel cheated out of their overpriced ticket money if it were just a 90 minute story precisely told.
And if now the expectation for a big enough spectacle is the only enticement for bringing people to the cinema, we have reached a point of necessary return.
But streamers like Netflix already have conditioned audiences to react Pawlowian like to a certain narrative. And these audiences don’t care about visual storytelling as the main ingredient for the art form cinema. In other words: if you really think you only need to see Lawrence of Arabia on your phone you have no idea what cinema is.
I think that there would be less of a problem with this if the films weren’t essentially once in a generation events nowadays. I mean, if they take another four years to make the next film, which is looking increasingly likely, we’ll have been two decades with only three films. At that point, the films need to be a bit more to justify the prices that people pay and the length of time that the fans have waited for them.
If they got these films out on something that at least has more than a passing resemblance of the old release schedule, I think audiences would be more forgiving and it would help to temper expectations.
One at least gets the feeling that EON is burned out on Bond - there is no need to earn money, and the increasing difficulty to create a new Bond film doesn’t help either, nor does the fear of hurting the brand with a flop which in today’s climate is likely to happen.
Yeah, I did see that. While everybody thinks he has secretly filmed a new movie I am absolutely certain it’s going to be him reading a phone book from 1954 or something:)
As someone who works in the movie theater business, it was busy where I was at. I think one of the honest reasons that Garfield didn’t do as well is that people are getting sick of Chris Pratt and Samuel L Jackson do the same things over and over again.