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The past few years I am finding the Avengers, Star Wars and James Bond movies hard to sit through. I really don't need 3 hours of over stimulation of all my senses. There are better things to do in life.

Seriously.

I wish that I at least liked the one thing that was what the whole world apparently decided all at once was the only way to do things.

I'm not even that snobby but I think these films are garbage from the perspective of what I've liked about movies over the last 60 years.

They're also the type of film for which there is the largest difference between watching them in a theatre and watching them at home.

The reason "movie-theatre movies" are the way they are, is that everything that's not a "movie-theatre movie", people would rather watch on Netflix.

yeah I like movies too but whats IN the movies now is hard to rationalize.

I find myself loathing the listed run times of 1 and a half to 2 and a half hours, while I'll gladly watch a miniseries on Netflix where each episode is just as long.

I'm usually thinking: how are they going to cut corners on character development this time, jam pack the action scenes and twist in, without me feeling exhausted of the whole ordeal?

I like the theatres because many of my living arrangements weren't conducive to turning the sound up so high that I can feel it in my body

but now, I catch most theatrical releases while on planes - which may be unique to me - and just regret every time I actually do go to the theatre.

I try to watch everything but I can't watch a blockbuster. The stories are too easy to guess and the rest is mainly special effects.

Speaking of, amusing realization: Detective Pikachu has almost the same structure as Men in Black: International

> The stories are too easy to guess

Boy, you'd really be put out by classical theatre and opera (and commedia dell'arte, and rakugo, and...). Everyone in the audience of such shows has likely already seen the exact same story performed before, line for line! (And don't get me started about church services...)

Seriously, though: sometimes the point isn't to tell you something new, but to deliver a polished retelling of a well-known story that the production company loves, for a new audience.

Once in a while something like Blade Runner 2049 comes out and spurs me to the nearest IMAX theatre.

That won't pencil out for everyone, though. If you convert "four times a year" to "one blockbuster a season" you are going to get gaps in which the theaters scramble to find other ways to use the space and keep the lights on - the "throwback" nights, video game nights, etc.

The current value proposition of a theatrical release is primarily in the big screen and the big auditorium, and secondarily the access to content(which can be seen on screens of many sizes). This was basically also true when VCRs took hold, and it drove the wave of late-20th century blockbusters; it's only different now in that the value of the theater is more niche, and there are fewer barriers to wide distribution.

IMHO the thing that could support theaters going forward is a common 21st century theme: customization and unbundling. Keep it a primarily passive audience experience(we've seen the "interactive movie" trope before), but introduce an element of performance and "VJing", taking the emphasis off making one prerecorded film and moving it towards remixable material inside a common framework. Given that so many big releases now are CGI-centric, the production pipelines are already in striking distance of doing this, and live effects can supplement it. It just needs the intersection of technical capability against a business model open to this structuring of IP and talent - which might put it out of reach of the current studios but create opportunities for new ones.

Sounds like I'll be able to cut out the theater going experience from my life entirely then as those types of features are becoming increasingly more corporate and consumerist feeling.

The internet wins for "consume when you want" but TV is always going to win for "live" whenever a large audience is involved. Just from a sheer efficiency standpoint, the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering.

That's why this model can work fine for niche live events that few people want but not so much for mass market live broadcasts. It's this reason that you've got to caveat "TV Shows" vs "Live TV" when you make that statement.

"Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't.

If anything, I'd see the major broadcast networks and ESPN continuing to get stronger, while everything else on TV gets weaker.

The only TV shows that people have to watch "live" are shows with a community built around them, ready to react and discuss it as it's happening (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc). This is where movie audiences are similar because that opening weekend crowd for an anticipated movie tends to share the experience.

I honestly wish they'd bring back midnight showings instead of 7pm Thursday showings, because that midnight crowd energy is impossible to replicate.

> the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering.

The technical solution for that is multicast.

The internet doesn't really support multicast, but there are workarounds; the best known is BAMTech, which grew out of live streaming MLB baseball and was purchased for $1B in 2016 by Disney.

I have no idea how they do it, but I imagine it's not that different from Netflix. Put a box in ISP's everywhere that acts like a multi-user PVR. One stream per channel going in to the box, thousands going out.

> "Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't.

Um, no? You could argue that it isn't technically caching, and the system doing it isn't technically a CDN, but there's no reason why a broadcast can't be streamed to, say, 1000 SDN nodes, which each spool the stream in memory and serve it to 1000+ different recievers. A SDN node (server) is different infrastructure than a television station, so there might be issues with capital outlay, but I highly doubt it's more expensive once sunk costs are tallied.

Latency for Cable TV is 3-4 seconds. That is possible to match, or at least be close to, with chunked delivery using CDNs. Most "live" internet is definitely delivered via CDNs, you just tend to be 20s behind real-time because it's delivered in 6s or so chunks.

There is a not at all farfetched (anymore) scenario where Amazon or Netflix circle back around and roll out a series of movie theaters or "event cinemas" and try to sell people on it as some sort new real world experience where they're able to capture everything down to the concessions and market their own tentpole franchises.

They won't even need to make any investments in infrastructure, because they'll easily be able to cheaply snap up existing franchised cinema locations as they see the writing on the wall.

Coming soon: "Delivery Option: Save $5 on your next ticket at Amazon Cinema by having this package delivered directly to your nearest theater!"

This seems so dystopian. Victory Cinemas. Victory Gin. Victory Cigarettes.

:s/Victory/Amazon/g

Indeed. "Spaceballs, the flamethrower!"

I could see a prime-theater partnership network. 'The Official Prime Cinema Experience'.

Now with Personal Seat Licenses! For a low one-time fee you can own your seat at the Prime Cinema! Buy or sell your seat tickets using the Prime Cinema Seat Marketplace! Purchases made with the Prime Cinema Credit Card get 5% off. Alternatively you can simply add the PSL to your Amazon Prime Mortgage balance as a one-time courtesy!

> Amazon Prime Mortgage balance

Good stuff right here. Scary that all of these things are a real possibility.

I would have paid $$$ to see Roma in the cinema, after first streaming it to my phone via Netflix.

Cinematography genius!

Edit: I would still pay $$$

Completely agreed. I would absolutely pay movie-ticket prices to watch Netflix or Amazon shows in a comfortable theater setting.

The Alamo Drafthouse used to do this in Austin, except it was the AMC dramas “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” It was free - $5 to save a seat that then went towards concessions - but the networks threatened legal action on the basis that it skewed viewership numbers or some such.

What was really clever about it was that Drafthouse was playing the previous week’s episode without commercials while the new one aired, then edited out the commercials for the current week’s episode and played it right after.

Those were good times.

I guess that using VR goggles you can have that theater experience in your home.

There was a period in the video game industry, right at the tail end of the arcade era, where video games were launched in the arcade in order to boost sales of the games in the console market.

I imagine Amazon and Netflix will look to a similar strategy with movie theatres in order to boost demand for both individual films and their services in general.

>It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that.

That's mostly been me with going to theaters for a very long time. And I do watch a fair number of movies.

Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically.

Anecdotally, many years ago, I was in the film group at school and we had 4 different movies over a weekend, filled large auditoriums etc. My understanding is that there are now occasional film showings but, as a whole, this doesn't exist any longer.

A lot of going out to see movies in a theater is habit. Take the habit away and you can see a big fropoff.

> Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically.

Lower-budget productions, in general, are increasingly being produced as cable or streaming TV shows instead of movies nowadays.

Vox even did an article on the phenomenon the other day, pointing out that it's resulted in a number of shows being poorly-paced because they were originally written to be movies before they were padded out to be TV shows: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/19/18660602/tv-streaming-...

I will say one thing in defense of flow-tv: you can be reasonably certain that what you have seen is the same as what every else have seen, so you have something in common with everybody that you can talk about.

In a fractured world where everybody has different truths and things they have seen, TV may be the one factor that ensures everybody at least have access to the same stories, even if they disagree with them.

Of course that is the experience before cable tv, not the experience of having 9000 channels, and none of them worth watching.

“Event cinema” is precisely what caused this decline, transforming cinemas from clean, pleasant, affordable places to watch films with great audio and visual quality to today’s smelly, expensive, sticky auditoriums where digital video is crappily projected onto a wall and the sound is broken half the time. They decided to offer garbage and people decided to eat it.

How do you figure?

I would be willing to bet that today's theaters are both cleaner and have better projection and sound than any prior decade of their existence.

Lol you would be wrong, just Google it. Theatres used to have ushers to keep the noise down and to keep the rooms from getting trashed, sound engineers to cater the room to specific films, attendants to make sure everything went right—now it’s just on autopilot, with mixed results.

Pre-multiplex maybe? Or an atypical urban theater catering to film buffs. Or Imax. But my recollection of most theaters 20-30 years ago is most of the screens being postage stamp size, audio being subpar, and the level of staffing not much different from today.

This was also my experience going to the movies in the '90s in North Texas. Don't forget that this was before stadium seating was invented, so good luck being able to see the screen if the person in front of you is taller than you. I hated going to the movies back then.

Cinemark started a revolution when they invented stadium seating (but even then, the original incarnation was problematic because it wasn't wheelchair-accessible until Cinemark settled with the DOJ).

So, assuming you're right, how do you figure that change was directly caused by event cinema? I'm still curious to hear your answer.

Your comment about television isn't in the same category; tv and Netflix et al are content delivery mechanisms whereas this article is talking about the content itself, not delivery.

Netflix (and Amazon, Hulu, HBO, etc.) are both content delivery and studios. The two functions don't need to overlap but it appears as if that's what's needed for differentiation and stickiness.

Television is host to a few different categories of media that should be considered separately. Miniserieses, episodic character shows, serial stories, and sports will continue to find audiences no matter the platform, because the experiences aren't necessarily fungible (though at the limit that platform could be "piracy"). Fungible experiences like TV news networks and one-step-above-white-noise daytime television are dead on their feet, long since replaced among younger demographics by free content on the internet. The future of TV is going to be difficult-to-replace high-effort content like HBO, whereas channels stuffed with low-effort content are going to be crushed under heel by the convenience and momentum of YouTube. The makeup of cable packages is going to have to radically shift to account for the fact that the already-subsidized long-tail channels are going to continue to lose their audience, likely moving cable towards a more a la cart model that will be increasingly hard to convincingly differentiate from services like Hulu or Netflix, and will (one hopes) eventually transition to no longer demanding a distinct cable or satellite connection due to lack of justification (though of course plenty of people already get their internet over cable infrastructure, and that won't change).