This year’s Oscars telecast introduced a completely new way to watch movies.
Dubbed “CinemaStreams,” it allows customers to watch films “in a building that’s dedicated to streaming movies.” Instead of watching something on one smartphone, you get to enjoy it on 800 smartphones glued together.
You don’t even have to hold it, the ad promises, the building holds it.
Of all the comedy bits on this year’s Academy Awards, this was my favorite. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the one that would have looked most at home on an old episode of Late Night With Conan O’Brien, assuming that streaming services had existed 25 years ago.) Still, the fact that the Oscars, whose history stretches back to the silent film era, would air a faux ad spoofing modern audiences total ignorance of the big-screen experience speaks to just how rough things have gotten for movie theaters.
According to The Numbers, domestic movie theaters grossed $8.6 billion in 2024, down from $8.95 billion the year prior. While that was better than the first couple years of the pandemic, it was also well below the industry’s annual returns all through the 2010s. Prior to the pandemic, you need to go all the way back to 2001 to find a number that low. It’s no wonder you regularly see articles online with depressing headlines like “Is the Death of Movie Theaters Upon Us?”
I’m not sure I’m ready to write my eulogy for movie theaters yet. In fact, barely 24 hours before Conan O’Brien joked about CinemaStreams, I got an incredible reminder of the magic of movie theaters, and why “a building that’s dedicated to streaming movies” is still the best way to watch them.
Bankside Audience
READ MORE: 10 Beloved Movie Theater Chains That No Longer Exist
I spent the Friday and Saturday prior to the Oscars at Filmspotting Fest, a weekend-long festival celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of the very first (and surely the longest-running) movie podcast on the planet, Filmspotting. In honor of their milestone 1000th (!) episode, the podcast, led by hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen and producer Sam Van Hallgren, screened several of the show’s favorite films from throughout its 20-year run in Chicago with filmmaker and film critic guests. — including yours truly. (I used to co-host a Filmspotting spinoff podcast about the world of streaming video called Filmspotting: SVU.)
My official duties at Filmspotting Fest involved participating in a Q&A after the screening of Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter. The film is a character study of a man (played by Michael Shannon) who experiences horrific nightmares and apocalyptic (and possibly prophetic) hallucinations. As the visions worsen, Shannon’s Curtis fears the world is coming to an end — either broadly, in the form of some sort of weather-related catastrophe, or more personally, because he worries he may be losing his mind and have to be committed to a mental hospital, in much the same way his own mother was when he was a child.
When Take Shelter debuted in 2011, I thought it was the best film I had ever seen about living with anxiety, and I picked it as my #1 movie of 2011. But the film is so intense and so powerful, it isn’t one that I revisit regularly. (“Ah, now to relax after a long week of work! What should I put on to unwind? Oh, I know! The film about the man experiencing a mental breakdown brought on by terrifying delusions involving cataclysmic storms!”) Prior to last month, I hadn’t watched Take Shelter in at least a decade.
Timothy Schmidt, courtesy of Filmspotting
Like Shannon’s Take Shelter character, I like to be prepared. (Anxious people usually do.) So before the festival, I rewatched Take Shelter at home on my TV. Then I watched it again, during its packed screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center during Filmspotting Fest. I didn’t intend that to become an experiment about the impact of movie theaters on a viewer’s experience, but that’s sort of what happened. The movie remained the same both times, but the venue where I watched it elicited two strikingly different responses.
Take Shelter at home was more of an intellectual exercise. I thought about the performances, the screenplay, and Nichols’ clever use of metaphor — like his choice to make Curtis a construction worker who discovers that building walls will not solve his personal problems. At the Gene Siskel Film Center, Take Shelter had a much more visceral impact. It wasn’t the size of the image, necessarily, that affected me, but rather the size of the sound. My home speakers don’t compare to the ones in a good theater like the Film Center, which made the cacophony from Curtis’ dream storms so intense you could practically feel the howl of the wind and the rumble of thunder inside your bones. It was almost overwhelming — which is exactly Curtis’ reaction to them. The way Nichols puts you inside that character’s troubled perspectice is really remarkable — but it only happens in a theater.
Timothy Schmidt, courtesy of Filmspotting
That’s just one example of the power of movie theaters I witnessed first-hand at Filmspotting Fest. There were plenty of others. I had seen Kogonada’s Columbus, the festival’s Saturday night film, before, but only once on a press screener. I liked it, but when I watched it at home, it didn’t leave a huge impression. A few weeks ago, if you had asked me to describe Columbus, I could have told you who directed it, the names of its two leads, and offered only the vaguest plot description.
In a theater, Columbus felt like a completely different film. It’s a two-hander about a pair of lost souls who meet when Jin (John Cho) arrives in Columbus to care for his ailing father. Jin’s dad collapsed and slipped into a coma shortly after his arrival in the city to give a lecture about its architectural marvels. While waiting for updates about his father, Jin bumps into Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a library staffer and self-taught architecture enthusiast who has eschewed a collegiate education in order to live at home and keep an eye on her drug-addicted mother. From that chance encounter, an unlikely friendship blossoms.
Columbus is sort of Before Sunrise for modernism enthusiasts; Jin and Casey’s conversations play out against the backdrop of the city’s famous buildings, like the Miller House and North Christian Church, both designed by Eero Saarinen. At home, those buildings seem tiny and remote. Seeing Columbus in a theater allows you to examine and study these buildings along with Jin and Casey. On the big screen, they loom over you the way they loom over the characters. If watching the film small does not defeat the purpose, it at least blunts it.
After Columbus, and in between all the festival screenings, I had a series of stimulating discussions with other attendees. We talked about the surprising amount of comedy in Rian Johnson’s neo-noir Brick, the bold use of iPhone cinematography in Sean Baker’s Tangerine, and the way some of us saw ourselves reflected in Take Shelter’s haunted hero. This is a far cry from the conversations that typically take place in my house after I watch a movie. Even though I try to engage with her, my dog almost never responds when I ask for her reactions to things.
Timothy Schmidt, courtesy of Filmspotting
Admittedly, the folks who attended Filmspotting Fest were not a typical Saturday night multiplex crowd. This was a group of dedicated cinephiles, some of whom flew in from around the country to watch movies they could stream or rent, for the opportunity to see them in a dark room full of like-minded film lovers with post-screening commentary from podcasters and directors. Nobody took pictures of the screen or loudly answered phone calls during Pather Panchali. That definitely helps.
So you could argue this is not a representative sample of the moviegoing (or, more often, not-moviegoing) public these days, and you would probably be right. Still, what I saw at this event is that an audience is out there, and they are hungry for connection with films and other film lovers. If you cultivate that audience, they will show up, even for movies that are decades old and widely available at home. When they do show up, they will see films the way they were meant to be experienced.
As that CinemaStreams commercial from the Oscars shows, we have invented technology to make it easier than ever to watch movies. We have not yet invented technology that makes it better than the old-fashioned method of 800 smartphones glued together and hung on the wall of a big dark room. If you haven’t tried it in a while, you might want to give it another shot.
Every Movie Theater Candy, Ranked From Worst to Best
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