Ankler Preview: Like a Candle in the Window
The candle burned out long before the legend ever did..
Blowin’ In the Window I
Here's the thing that's never happening again: major movies reserved as the exclusive property of movie theaters. Disney’s announcements this week on Black Widow, etc, settled that.
You might think that's a shame, you might think TVs should've never been invented, you might think—as I do—that the race to streaming is going to turn out for lots of people to have been a mad charge off the edge of the cliff. But thanks to the pace of technological change, the rapid consumer switch to subscription services, the burgeoning cutthroat competition in this space, and the way the finance world values entertainment companies, this is where we are and the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.
But, and I say this as a lifelong member of the Cult of the Movie Theater, this is a good thing. Theaters have spent twenty-plus years in which their entire growth plan was to protect their monopoly—generally through threats, never through innovation or improvements. It's not a coincidence that this period has seen film surrender its place at the center of world culture, to cease being a necessity in consumer entertainment diets and become a luxury item, rarely experienced by most.
If the theatrical experience is really going to be something bigger, something special—make it something bigger and special. If you've been to a mall multiplex in recent years, waited on interminable lines for stale $20 popcorn and then been forced to sit through car commercials, having to wait the better part of an hour to see the movie you paid to see, that doesn't feel like a bigger, more special experience.
A special, bigger-than-life communal can't just be a mantra industry professionals chant to reassure themselves. It's got to be something that actual moviegoers think and feel. And now and then tell each other, unprompted.
I've always thought that the biggest danger of this trend is that when entertainment stops being MOVIES! . . . and becomes "content," when it ceases to be a special experience and becomes background clutter, the whole downstream world is threatened. If Hollywood characters cease to be bigger than life and become just atoms in the content stream, that is really when we're all doomed and they can break up the entire thing and farm out the work to whatever far-flung sweatshop has a little extra capacity this month.
So if we're going to avoid that, here's where the rubber hits the road. Movie business: You want to be custodians of a special experience, so make it so. Very special. In a world that is flooded with ephemera, make a trip to the movies something that is the highlight of people's month or year. From the moment they buy the ticket to the movie they see to the time they exit the theater.
The era when this experience could stumble by on monopoly protections officially ended Tuesday. Like it or not, people now have a choice on how they experience every movie that gets made. If you believe moviegoing is something special, show us what you got.
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