I did see The Matrix in theater (voluntarily) now that I recall, but way more lemons I was coerced into seeing involuntarily. Reminds me that right around that time, Viagra (sildenafil) was becoming popular having been FDA approved for sale in late 1998. But some horror stories about erections lasting hours or days had scientists scrambling for an antidote that was finally discovered in 2002 when Touchstone Pictures released Sweet Home Alabama.
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Avatar and Gravity were worth seeing in theater just for the 3D. Fahrenheit 9/11 was fun on opening weekend just for the opening weekend people it attracted. Snakes on a Plane opening weekend was fun just because the whole crowd knew what we were signing up for and cheered for it.
Other than that meh. I still go to see movies here and there, but cant argue against someone now going to the theaters. Home setups are that good these days.
But I have no regrets for going to theaters for a certain brand of movies
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I go for the Marvel movies and Star Wars, thatās about it. Basically stuff I donāt want to wait for because i dislike being spoiled.
For something different: this came out around the same time I decided to walk the Camino de Santiago. I hadnāt seen it when I walked, but literally every cafe owner, hospitalero, and non-American pilgrim asked me if I was here because of the movie. Apparently, there was a big uptick in American pilgrims in 2012 because this came out in fall 2011. I found it slightly annoying because it made for some overcrowding along the way, so I had reason to come into this with a little bit of resentment. Like anything that depicts something that actually exists, there are some nitpicky things wrong with it (like some of the stops are out of order from the real camino, thereās no traipsing across fields and vineyards, etc), but overall, itās actually not a bad film, and they definitely filmed on location all along the route.
I think the personal nature of it to Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez (their family is Galician, and theyāve done the camino themselves) shines through, and makes it a better movie.
Um, The Room.
Obviously
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Probably would be a solid rec if IMDb didnāt exist.
Its a solid rec regardless. If you can go see a midnight viewing, its very much got a Rocky Horror vibe.
FFS donāt bring that shit here tooā¦
:D
Do we here really think that itās a lack of quality original content thatās killing the movie theaters? Because I strongly disagree with that notion.
I mean that may be a reason but Iād suspect a survey would reveal it isnāt even in the top 5.
For the price of about 40 movie tix I can get a top notch 4K HDTV in the 50-60 inch range. For the price of another 30 tix I can add a top notch 3D surround sound home theater system to it. With that, I can pause the movie and go take a shit or make popcorn and not miss any action, and also fade stepping on/sitting in gum and getting murdered. Hollywood isnāt killing the theater, theaters are.
I donāt think itās either. Movies are a thing but they arenāt THE thing, anymore. The creativity is happening on the small screen.
Itās the cost and that people can have suitable viewing experiences at home by waiting 3 months. I have dozens of thoughts on how the studios are constantly cannibalizing revenue streams with bad decisions, but donāt really want to get into them.
Share your top 3?
Think Namath is close to it. The theater experience isnāt worth the effort relative to staying home.
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One:
Budgets in the late 90s killed the movie industry. I essentially boycott every James Cameron movie because of the precedent that Titanic set (there is a moderately funny side story to this I wonāt get into), that ultimately Avatar set as well. There is no way you can tell me that you canāt make a great movie on $100m. Once you get past $150, you are damning domestic profits and solely are in search of worldwide grosses for 95 percent of movies. In Hollywood accounting, your movie has to make double to be profitable. Every movie with a $150m+ budget, unless itās a turd, will make close to or more than $300m worldwide. Domestically, thatās a huge long shot. There are exactly 84 movies that have made $300m domestically all time (55 of those are since 2009), 37 that have made $400m, 13 that have made $500m, and 10 that have crossed $600m.
Of that top 10, the ācheapestā movie is Jurassic World at $150m. The highest is Avengers: End Game at $356m. Adjusted for inflation, Avatar probably pushes close to $300m. Titanic was budgeted at $200m, and that was 22 years ago, probably good for close to $350m today. There was outrage industry wide (me among them) at Titanicās $200m budget, and many people thought Cameronās career was ended by that movie before it came out.
To pound the point home about Titanic, exactly zero movies had grossed $400m domestically by 1997 unadjusted, and none of the closest ones were really close. Imagine telling your studio, āyeah, Iām over budget, give me another $50m so we can send this sucker to $200m, weāll make it backā, when zero movies had made double that much domestically and studios arenāt in business to make $50m profits on $200m movies. Sure, he hit the lottery, but that was the terrible precedent that he set when any other outcome would have completely ended his career and he would have been the Michael Cimino footnote in Hollywood history.
By 1999, the industry was in disarray as tickets were getting too expensive, and budgets were getting too high because of studios thinking what Cameron did was okay due to the result (weāre in pre-comic book movie era here). What saved them?
Two:
DVD. At the risk of giving away too much info, I made a choice to get into this side of the industry right at the forefront of it. I was hired at a company that hired me for a different purpose. I was quickly thrust into working on material for this emerging format, and it was a lot of cool stuff working on incredible movies and product (one of the first movies I worked on was the movie that had scarred me as a 7 year old child, making a full circle moment). I thought at that critical moment that I could actually make a huge mark on this emerging industry with my work if I approached it right (these kinds of opportunities to make marks are rare, though I would have much preferred mixing sitcoms at the time).
When presented a choice a few months into the job about what direction I wanted to go, I immediately chose DVD (this was 2001, when a good title would be a commentary track and an 8 minute featurette). I still worked on a lot of TV shows plus other stuff at the company, but my main focus was on DVD (the rates the company billed were higher than most major post-production houses could get on anything below network TV, so this was considered high end work though in support).
Working on that stuff has by far created my most memorable movie industry experiences, as I have worked side by side or been given notes (or approved with no notes) by many peopleās favorite directors. By mid 2002, DVD had blown up, and it was a massive industry, with the golden age from 2003 to 2005. Whatever remotely mainstream category you can think of, I have worked on at least 5 percent of it, and in many cases it will be closer to 10. Iāve had a āhall of fameā career in that industry if such a thing exists, and I do not regret the decision to largely have put my focus there for a good chunk of my career, while still doing lots of other things outside of it.
DVD saved the movie industry from itself when budgets were out of control, and everyone wanted to own their favorite movies with tons of extras. Of course, it dawned on people that it was stupid to be buying this stuff as opposed to renting it, but why would the movie industry understand that when their double and triple dips were still flying off the shelves?
Three:
Blu-ray completely cannibalized DVD several years too early. I would argue this decision destroyed the movie industry as we know it forever. The benefit to DVD was that any movie could be on it, and on the TVs everyone had back then, everything would show up as full screen. DVD took hold not because of new movies, but because of catalog titles. Now catalog titles would show up with black bars on the screen, and all their flaws would be there for the world to see in HD. Oh wait, the industry forgot to wait for the consumer.
At the introduction of Blu-ray (my first HD project was in 2004, and was only done that way because of a major expensive mistake by a director), hardly anyone owned HD TV sets. The studios then decided to have a format war (HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray). HD-DVD was easily better than Blu-ray, but Sony wasnāt losing a format war twice. That created a major issue in the industry, and essentially killed the idea of HD product being integrated seamlessly.
Remember what I said above? The studios were looking at Blu-ray like a cash cow. Weāll give it to them in HD, with $500 players and charge them double what a DVD would cost. Theyāll bang down the doors to get this product. That thinking was about as solid as their thinking on budgets in the late 90s. Again, hardly anyone had HD sets at the advent of Blu-ray, and they would not get these sets until they came way down in cost. And, people were like, āwhy did I buy these DVDs? I should have rented thoseā. So, Blu-ray essentially became a renterās product with no rental outlets.
What happened? The players became the cost of DVD players, and the discs became the cost of DVDs. And all catalog movies (except for the biggest ones) had all their flaws exposed in the format. Blu-ray was designed for the modern movie, and hardly anyone wanted to buy or watch modern movies at that time. So, the double (quintuple) dip became going back and doing restorations of big older movies that people loved. GJGE studios. Blu-ray should really have not been a thing until at least 2008. Also donāt forget that the difference to the average consumer of a VHS and DVD was night and day. Getting the average consumer to notice the difference between a well transferred DVD vs. HD was not nearly as easy. DVD looked good enough for the average consumer.
In 2009, there was a threatened actorsā strike that never happened. 2008 was frenetic in the industry trying to beat it or get around it, and one of the big movies I was on was delayed. That functionally killed the entire home entertainment industry as we had known it up to that point, and it has never recovered. Many of us went independent after the industry cratered and always figured we would create the business models the studios loved based on all our great work at a much better price point, but it has been extremely slow going getting that as budgets have become tiny to the point that many of the bigger companies wonāt even touch the stuff. The studios still love us, but they go with factories becauseā¦reasons. We end up more often with scraps or fixing problems on major movies or important movies that the big companies donāt do to a proper standard. More shortsightedness.
Four:
Iāll give you a bonus, because bonuses are part of what was discussed above. Back in the day, you could not get a movie on a VHS until probably nearly a year after it had been released in theaters. That meant that if you wanted to see that movie you had to see it in the theaters, and obviously VHS didnāt compete with a theatrical experience at that time. In the DVD era, Lucasfilm retained that model. No one else did once it got going (lead time in the early years was probably 5 to 6 months for the theatrical release, but got much shorter by 2003). In DVDās heyday, you could sometimes get an A-title blockbuster movie TWO MONTHS after it had been released in the theater (when we work on day/date titles the delivery is almost always either a week before or week after theatrical release). Add Blu-ray into the mix. Add big cheap HD displays into the mix. Add home Atmos systems. Add short theatrical window into the mix. The sum is you get the death (or dying) of the theatrical industry. Itās easy to lay blame at the foot of the theaters, but this is practically all on unsound business practices by the studios.
How do they solve the problem? They donāt. Theyāre absolutely botching the best ideas of streaming out of greed. Theyāre treating it like VHS, with no bonus content, and expecting us to lap it up (yes I get Iām complaining about a new revenue stream not being created for people like me yet). And what are they all doing? Creating exclusive content you can only get there. Again, cannibalizing movies and their network TV business models. This is why they will just put comic book and sequel after sequel movies into theaters until they make nothing. Those things are subsidizing the entire studio slates right now.
Iām a huge advocate for back to basics movie making. There are some extraordinary talents in the industry right now who do a ton on a little. We need to find a way to make the $65 million dollar budget the budget that everyone wants to work on again. In 1997, $60m was an A-title budget (The Game was in that range). Today, itās not. Right now most of the industry is massive $200m budgeted movies, occasional mid $100m budgeted movies, an odd $100m here or there, and either $5-7m budgeted movies or $30m budgeted movies. Arrival is a perfect example of the kind of movie I want to see on a $60m budget. It looked big, and felt big. Its costs were reasonable. Until people start putting butts in seats on that budget range, it wonāt take over. Until people stop putting butts in seats on $345 million budgeted movies, those wonāt stop either (domestic break even on that is $690m lol and only 4 movies have done that).
Those are huge ones for me, and there are others. But thatās enough.
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That would be so funny if it were true, but itās not.
Yeah I donāt see a single compelling reason to go to the theater given the quality of home theaters. They need to offer a transformative experience that I canāt touch with consumer gear and they just donāt do that in 2019. Itās going to take holograms and lasers to get me back in. But even if they pull it off, Iāll lose interest way before the 37th iteration of Batman, so the content also matters in the same way that a next generation gaming console needs good games to be successful.
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Maybe Iām in the minority, but I really enjoy going to see a movie with a huge crowd of strangers on an opening night.
Iām probably a weirdo, but I still enjoy the ritual experience of going off to a theater to see a movie. And I hate crowds; I usually go a week or two after the opening night so itās mostly empty. It might be because I donāt have the distractions I would have at home. Maybe I just enjoy that transgressive thrill of smuggling Junior Mints into the movies.
I feel like Gen-X is probably going to be the last generation or reliable theater-goers. Like we have fond memories of always going to theaters to see movies growing up and weāre becoming set in our ways. Canāt imagine digital natives ever having any fondness for the experience.
Iām going to see The Lighthouse tomorrow and Iām super hyped for that.
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Sneaking Junior Mints into the theater is one of those simple joys in life that Iām way too old to be doing but I love nonetheless.
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Can you articulate the psychology of this? Would the experience be lessened for you if you saw it by yourself in the same theater or with only one other person whom you know?
I have no idea how theaters make any money selling candy.Are there people who donāt realize you can just sneak stuff in? Itās like in the Constitution that you have the right to smuggle candy into movies.
PS: you can also just buy coffee from the shop next door and walk into the theater with that.16-year-old kid collecting tickets isnāt going to give a fuck.
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