I started to create a reply to the above tweet but thought a blog post best, as I have thought about the Cinema-going experience for twenty-plus years. Even before COVID Cinema was losing ground to streaming. The movie-going experience has always been special to me because I grew up with it. However, I am not the target audience any longer. Younger people live on their phones and grew up watching streaming content on their phones or on their parents' massive big-screen TVs. And a lot of people don't want to be around other people as much as they used to before COVID. It's a dilemma for Hollywood.
While I like the reclining seats and films shot on IMAX film, is that enough to draw people into theaters in droves all year long? The short answer is no.
Over ten years ago, I started writing more TV shows than movies because it was obvious that streaming was the future of entertainment. People in the business can moan all they want about it, but that is the evolution of entertainment. You can delay releasing a movie from going to streaming by trying to force more people to go to the theater to see it. For some films that works. For others, not so much. Soon AI will be involved even more and helping to create content and new ways to consume it.
The main key is to make something great that deserves to be watched in either format. People like all kinds of stuff: Documentaries, Crime Dramas, Reality TV, Cartoons, and on and on and on. We are definitely oversaturated with content. No one person can or should even try and watch it all. It's too much. And that is all stuff people can watch at home.
If you want to get people to go to a theater and sit next to strangers for two hours, you better have something that most people would want to watch if you hope to get butts in seats. I am guilty of not going to the theater as much as I used to before COVID. But even before then I only had a handful of movies that I would see a year in the theater.
I'm of an age now where I have gained some experience and insight into things just on account that I've been around for a while. Through the past ten-plus years, I have tried to adapt my writing to accommodate for some of the changes discussed above. Though, I have never had anything play in packed theaters for weeks on end, so don't take me too seriously.
However, if I were in charge of a studio I would try and do something similar to what I have done over the past twenty years. That is to blend things together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. While I am no Aristotle, my default for writing has largely been to have multiple stories combined into a larger story. The goal was always to tell a more important story by having told all of these individual stories. Like this style or not it has become the method to my madness. What does this have to do with getting butts into theater seats?
People are finally tiring of superhero movies, which were the main driver of theater ticket sales for the last decade. I had to be forced to go see the last one I saw and it was awful. Barbenheimer was the big draw last summer. These two films could not be any more different if they had tried, but collectively they generated buzz. Yet they were outliers.
My head is in both worlds, that of film and television/streaming. For me, I don't know why there isn't more cross-platform collaboration. If someone was dumb enough to give me control of things, I would create a spectacular two-hour movie that can totally stand on its own and release it in the theater. Good luck, right? That's what everyone is trying to do.
True. Except I would have that incredible movie be the pilot episode of a series, where the other episodes are shown on a streaming platform. It's a gimmick to get people into the theater. One of the biggest complaints I have and that I have heard from others is that there is nothing to watch on streaming platforms or that most of it is garbage. To be fair, a lot of it is hard to find or is released so far apart from one another that there will be times during the year when it seems like there is nothing on.
If you can knock the pilot/movie out of the park, you will have people wanting to watch the series. I wouldn't stop there though. I would also incentivize people going to the theater by having their ticket stubs enable certain perks online and on the streaming platform. Top of the list would be to eliminate commercials from the streaming platform during the viewing of the series but also link to transmedia content online to make the whole experience more immersive.
This way you tap into more than just a simple movie-going experience. You want people excited to be at the theater. To then walk out with more than you came in with is also exciting. As long as the movie is good then that would get people invested in the series as well.
It's a thought. Will anyone come along and do it? I'll try and do it for sure, but will any producer see the possibilities like I do? What if the movie flops and the series only does ok? Would others try the same thing? Maybe not. But if you could lay down a marker for the future then maybe, maybe executives might see the benefit of thinking outside of the box and take positive new steps to try and save the theater-going experience. Movies have been around for over 100 years, and yet it's still just an image on a screen. Sure the process of filming has changed but it's still just moving images with sound. It's like bread and water. You've got to spice up that meal somehow or some people are going to get bored of it.
This idea is only one option. It coincides with my own style of writing, so it was natural for me to think of it. I do think there needs to be a better link between the theater and streaming experience instead of making it an either-or option. Hollywood wants more people to see their films in the theater instead of waiting for them to come out on streaming so they can make more money. But we also run the risk of a generation of viewers also missing out on the movie-going experience. No one wants to see theaters shuddered and closed.
I often write about movie theaters in my stories. They mean a lot to me. They are a place of discovery, like a library, or a museum. But they are also a place of pure entertainment like a ballpark, a racetrack, or a carnival. We owe it to society to try and keep theaters open. But we can't do that without adapting.
Technology is advancing at lightspeed. Streaming is only our current favorite format for consuming scripted entertainment. Soon we will all have holodecks in our homes and we will all be able to get lost in worlds of our own creation. How will movie theaters be able to adapt to that if the people in charge cannot even adapt to streaming services?
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