Our love of movies 'to be continued ...'

The movie-theater industry has been here before.

In the early 1930s, with the transition from silent films to talkies.

In the 1950s and 1960s, with the meteoric growth of television.

In the 1980s and 1990s, with the ubiquity of video stores and a smaller window between theatrical release and home-video debuts.

In the 2000s, with the growth of in-home theaters.

In the 2010s, with a horrifying mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the advent of streaming services.

And now, in 2020, with a pandemic and the announcement earlier this month that Warner Bros. would release all its 2021 movies to theaters and HBO Max simultaneously.

In every case, doomsayers poked their heads from behind the curtain to prophesy the end of theatrical films, to predict this or that cultural upheaval would be the one to drive home the final stake, more assuredly than any intrepid vampire hunter in the final reel of a Dracula chiller.

And yet, audiences always returned.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost, and he might have been talking about a living room or basement screen, no matter how large, no matter how sophisticated the sound system.

Movies are a communal event, designed to be seen in cavernous, darkened rooms. We should be sitting next to friends or that special someone, but we should also be surrounded by strangers, if only to experience the same thrills, chills, tears and guffaws simultaneously.

Going to the movies reminds us of a shared humanity we just can’t grasp in our individual houses, even when watching an event like a Super Bowl at the same time as other people in their own homes.

Movie theaters are a place where we cannot bend a schedule to our will. We have to arrive at a set time or risk missing out. We must obey certain civilized norms — no loud talking or excessive gum cracking — for the good of the community. We cannot freeze a scene mid-frame to pick it up after a restroom break.

Like life, a movie in a theater keeps coming, whether we want it to or not.
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Yes, watching a film at home brings certain benefits. We can jump to the scene where the heroine wins, skipping her heartbreak in the middle. Or rewind a funny moment and snicker at it again. Or freeze an image to study its intricate composition or gorgeous background.

But these advantages come with drawbacks. Home screens, no matter how large, diminish cinema’s biggest moments. A battle in Middle-earth will never be as epic, a lavish embrace as romantic, a pratfall as embarrassingly funny.

And we lose the uncertainties and reminiscences that come with watching movies at the movies.

A broken projector led a friend and me to make a second trip — with free passes, no less — to see “Congo,” the most memorable moment in an otherwise forgettable 1995 sci-fi thriller. My wife and I still recall any number of visits to Mount Union Theatre, now sadly just a memory itself, sometimes for date nights, more often with our daughter, for the latest Disney animated opus.

However, I can’t recall any of the circumstances surrounding the last movie I screened at home, other than watching it between the inevitable phone calls and snack runs, starting it on Friday night and finishing it on Sunday afternoon.

Sure, right now many of us are scared to worship in those dimly lit cathedrals, munching popcorn and slurping sodas while exposing ourselves to a potentially deadly virus.

But this reticence won’t last. Just as our parents or grandparents returned to the fold despite the dominance of TV (from fewer than one million households with a television in 1949 to 44 million in 1969), just as audiences cautiously crept back after the Aurora shootings, so too will we find our way back to theaters in the next year or two.

Maybe not as often, to be sure. The current pandemic may have accelerated the pace at which movie-going will become a niche business, attracting audiences only for the newest big-budget spectacle begging for an eight-story-tall IMAX screen.

And some theater chains may not survive the lean months ahead, driving audiences into the arms of streaming services more deftly than any announcement from Warner Bros.

But at some point, we will return. Because the industry has been here before, and it’s too early to write “The End” across our love affair with cinema.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter