He described Netflix as “a very consumer-focused company. We deliver the programme to you in a way you want to watch it.”
That is what someone does when pushing product. Artists f–k with you.
P.S. Always try to 
posts, Dustin, but I cannot do so here.
The other key thing in my opinion is how good the experience now is at home. Many people have HD televisions and surround systems. For me, I will go see Bond in the theatre and a few other movies. For the most part, I get a pretty damn good experience watching movies in my man cave and I am usually happy to wait for a home release (whether it be streaming or a purchase).
To me it seems really down to a shift in culture. I’m not even sure it’s such a major shift, more something that’s been happening for decades already; only gradually and in slices. But I seem to remember Stephen King described sitting in 1950s Saturday matinees with other kids and lots of shenanigans, even through films they loved. So perhaps the emphasis has been on consuming for much longer already? And connoisseurs were always the avant-garde but rarely the norm?
I suspect the main reason why people went to the cinema has probably always been firstly to have a good time. At times they did encounter something truly moving, something that got them thinking, wondering, laughing, crying whatever. But that happened often by chance and with hindsight, not always in the moment. Today, people have a good time in the comfort - the significantly improved comfort!, thanks @Pushkin - of their own homes and with much smaller bites of entertainment.
That’s lamentable, no doubt about it. A piece of culture that’s in acute danger of becoming obsolete. I just have no idea what to do about it.
There probably is nothing one can do about it because people have changed their behaviour so much.
Sitting in a crowded cinema, with people reacting to a movie with delight, laughing at the same situations, gasping in shock at the same moments, staying quiet in sympathy or even sobbing due to the experience of sadness - all this made the cinema experience so wonderful and unique but required a shared understanding of morality and also decorum.
That is gone now. Hence, the insulation in our homes.
And I also prefer watching a movie without being pestered by people who kick my seat, laugh hysterically at characters crying, or talking on their phones during the movie, stinking up the place with their junk food brought in from home.
I sympathize with you/anyone having to deal with cinema-goers doing all those irritating things that you and others often mention. However, in my experience–and I used to regularly go to movies (not nearly as often since Covid in large part because the films aren’t as good as they used to be)–but I have RARELY ever encountered a film experience with any of those things happening to me or around me. I guess I’ve been pretty lucky. 
Same here. My reluctance to go to a theater has never been born from bad social experiences. Rather, strongly more about the fact that I’d rather be at home when I realize that the story I’ve been watching is passable-to-horrible, than be away from home.
Movies that have heavy cinematographic investment, I will make the trip for. As I would for something that I think would be much better in IMAX. Other than that, there has to be some other compelling reason. There are just too many duds per buck. And this is coming from a former die hard theater goer.
The audience in The Netherlands is terrible, al those things earlier mentioned happen in Dutch cinema’s, that’s why I went the last ten, fifteen years to Belgium for my cinema experiences, since COVID and the passing away of my wife I didn’t go anymore.
New York City Audiences can be bad, but just as often they hold their fellow moviegoers in line. And some of the new chains have people who police the theaters, and escort phone users and talkers out.
…but to take a plane to New York from the Netherlands all the way just to see a movie? I always thought driving all the way to Antwerp plus the price of drinks and snacks cost so much money per movie. 
I took a plane all the way from NYC to London to see Dame Maggie Smith in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which I had already seen in NYC. Also ended up going to the National and seeing “Sweet Bird of Youth,” and the Barbican and seeing a Japanese version of “Macbeth.”
I’m not sure I enjoyed any of that, really. So many times people seemed to laugh in the wrong places (sometimes over the actual punchline), and treating the whole thing as a live spectacle, which it ain’t. Cheering in particular always struck me as idiotic. It is a film, people, not a live performance: those actors did what you’re seeing months ago or more, and they will be neither rewarded nor chastened by your cheers, jeers, laughter or catcalls. The guy who yells at a character on screen not to open that door is an obvious dullard, but is it any less ridiculous to applaud at the end of the film? Do people think the actors and director will appear from somewhere to take a bow?
Anyway, I generally find movie-watching more satisfying and immersive as a solitary pursuit: I’m not interested in what the guy in the next row thinks is funny or tragic, and I’d like to be able to hear the dialog clearly and make up my own mind how to receive what’s being presented.
All that said, I will freely admit I am a victim of early onset misanthropy, having been a card-carrying wet blanket since adolescence. But the point is, I don’t miss the cinema.
One of my favorite film viewing experience memories is being at Cinema Village on East 12th Street for BARRY LYNDON when it was released after several years of unavailability. I sat in the balcony in an almost empty theater and was transported.
The house was divided into three screens to survive, and is one of the few remaining indie theaters in NYC. May it be open for as long as movies are projected.
I admit that I am interested in audience reactions–not as a main or even secondary concern, but experiencing the vibe of the audience is an ancillary pleasure to which I devote a small portion of my brain.
During my student years the town I lived in regularly held sneak previews of upcoming films, and the atmosphere in that huge packed auditorium always was celebratory, constructive, filled with joy and anticipation. So many great films I saw with that audience, and the joy spread and made every good film seen there even better.
So that’s what I am coming from.
And I would still say that a great comedy can be even funnier in a cinema full of people who laugh at the right instances. If a punchline is lost in the laughter, it’s all the more reason to see the film again.
The applause, actually, is something I do enjoy, too, because it shows how much a big part of the audience really loved a film (or a particular sequence).
Again, that joy can be very contagious and uplifting.
Decades ago, Anthology Film Archives tried a viewing experience where people had partitions between them (it was way before my time, so I do not know exactly how it worked), but friends who experienced it told me that it was abandoned when they showed some Keaton movies, and no one laughed.
I’m trying to remember some of the more interesting audience reactions from past viewings.
I remember seeing “The Wrath of Khan” and when the USS Reliant soared overhead, filling the screen, some wag down front yelled “De Plane! De Plane!” I normally don’t care for the class clown types, but that was admittedly pretty funny, given we were all waiting for Montalban to appear.
Cap wielding Mjolnir in “Endgame” got a big cheer, obviously, and Indy shooting the guy with the swords in “Raiders” had folks howling.
I may have had the most fun with a viewing of OHMSS about 5 years ago. Draco’s “spare the rod, spoil the child” got laughter with an “OMG, the things they used to get away with” vibe, then at the end when Tracy was shot, some lady down front gasped, “Oh NO!” which got a big laugh, because who would have shown up for that movie not knowing what would happen? As far as that goes, who could grow up on episodic TV and not know the hero’s new bride always gets killed at the end? Anyway, that one was a special case because I already knew the film backwards and forwards, so using part of my brain to monitor audience reactions made it more interesting, not less. It was unexpected fun to realize so many people in the audience were utterly unfamiliar with such an old film.
When my wife and I watched the Guy Pierce version of Count of Monte Cristo, a family sat behind us who checked off every negative trope in the book: one of them read subtitles out loud, another constantly asked questions like “which guy is this again?” and another yelled warnings and instructions to the characters. At first it was annoying, but then it got to be funny, like we were on Candid Camera or participating in some piece of performance art.
Another memorable experience was “Star Trek 5: the Final Frontier.” At the start, the room full of Trekkies laughed at every joke, no matter how lame, out of love for the characters and conditioning from the previous, comedy-oriented entry, but when the film ended and the lights came up, there was no applause, no conversation even, just a funereal silence as we all filed sullenly out of the theater looking down at our feet, as if in some unspoken pact never to reveal to anyone that we’d all been at the scene of the crime.
My husband and I saw COLLATERAL in a Downtown Brooklyn theater, and in the row behind us, two male friends–sitting with seats between them as straight men will do–were continually warning Jamie Foxx about the dangers he faced. My husband refused to go to that theater ever again. [For full context of the anecdote: my husband is Black, as were the two other moviegoers. The theater, since closed, was known to attract a Black/Latinx audience, since it was easily accessible by several major train lines. The residents of the neighborhood where it was located were glad when it shuttered.]
I love it. I have had those experiences–at both the cinema and the theater. Aesthetic trainwrecks of such caliber are rare.
“Say hello to gravity.”
Myself, 004, 009 & Miss Brand have “no comment” per Section 26, Paragraph 5…
