The late, great, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert once said: ‘Old [movie] theatres are irreplaceable. They could never be duplicated at today’s costs – but more importantly, their spirit could not be duplicated because they remind us of a day when going to the show was a more glorious and escapist experience. I think a town’s old theatres are the sanctuary of its dreams.’ A decade after Ebert’s death in 2013, cinema is confronting its own mortality. A few weeks ago Cineworld was reported to be considering abandoning a quarter of its UK sites, and has already closed several Picturehouse theatres in London.
On 25 June, the UK Cinema Association (UKCA) warned of further closures due to ‘increasing operational costs and declining admissions’. UKCA chief executive Phil Clapp said: ‘We haven’t been able to show enough films to get people back in through the door over the last six months’. America lost thousands of screens between 2019 and 2022, according to the Cinema Foundation’s state of the industry report. Ebert’s ‘irreplaceable’ cinematic ‘experience’, it seems, is facing an existential threat.
Cinemas have confronted huge challenges in the last few years
Covid-19 is an obvious one: if cinemas cannot open, they do not make money. But the enforced lockdown closures only compounded deeper, structural problems. In the late 2000s and 2010s, the ‘Golden Age of Television’, the rise of streaming services and ‘straight-to-streaming’ film releases, and the takeover of Hollywood TV and film production by private equity firms and vulture capitalists all contributed to the diminishing influence of cinemas in contemporary life and culture. In a detailed report on ‘The Life and Death of Hollywood’ published in Harper’s in May 2024, the historian and critic Daniel Bessner wrote that: ‘the machine is sputtering, running on fumes’. One reason cinema is struggling is because the ‘Big Five’ major film studios — Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures — have gambled heavily on streaming, effectively betting the house on at-home viewing and de-prioritising box office releases. ‘The streaming ecosystem was built on a wager’, Bessner says, in which ‘high subscriber numbers would translate to large market shares, and eventually, profit’.
In reality, though, the subscriber model is facing its own crisis, and ‘the streaming gold rush […] is over’.
Netflix lost over a million subscribers in 2022, and responded by cracking down on password sharing. On 5 July, Forbes reported that Apple TV+ and Hulu lost over half a million subscribers each between December 2023 and May 2024. Starz, meanwhile, lost nearly 850,000 customers. This creeping disillusionment might be a sign of streaming’s ‘enshittification’, a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the lifecycle of online platforms: ‘First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.’ We have entered the age of ‘Trough TV’.
Streaming platforms are raising prices and increasing the number of adverts — even for paying subscribers — all the while cutting content from their libraries in order to save on residuals and licence fees. The enshittification of streaming is in full swing.
It is a grim outlook for viewers
But it presents cinemas with a perfect opportunity to fight back and reclaim our attention. The time is now for theatres to fill the void left by viewers’ increasing dissatisfaction with streaming and market the ‘spirit’ of cinema. What Ebert called the ‘glorious and escapist experience’ is paramount. Unlike streaming — indeed, unlike virtually any activity today – going to the cinema is an intense and focused experience uninterrupted by adverts, second-screening and other irritations.
Cinemas must market the unique experiential appeal of box office cinema to get more people through the door. They might even consider engaging in ‘comparative advertising’, a strategy which involves mentioning a competing brand or service in your own marketing. It worked for Apple, whose famous ‘Mac vs PC’ campaign (2006–09) highlighted technological differences between the two computers in simple, practical terms. With streaming struggling, cinemas could be brave and bullish about marketing what makes the cinematic experience special compared to the distraction and disaffection of watching streaming services at home.
Another important factor is the opportunity to market the wider cultural significance of theatrical releases. Last year, cinemas capitalised on the ‘Barbenheimer’ effect — the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer of 2023 — by playing on the contrast in genre between the two films. This was ultimately converted into sell-out opening weekends and broken revenue records, with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie taking over $1.4 billion. What this shows is that cinemas can be proactive in marketing the event and the experience of new releases, without hoping the film alone will sell tickets.
It also demonstrates an enduring public appetite for film. Attendances are recovering after the pandemic and the stream of petitions to save beloved cinemas in London, Birmingham, Berkshire, St Andrews and elsewhere suggests that cinemas should not adopt a defeatist attitude.
Cinemas also need to update what they offer around the film itself
They often occupy large properties in prime locations in urban centres or out-of-town retail areas, and they should be doing more to maximise these spaces. Concessions or rotating collaborations with local restaurants and breweries, for instance, might help freshen up the predictable hot dog, popcorn and fizzy drink refreshments. Or cinemas might sponsor clubs, seminars, or other community-building events that encourage an extended engagement with film and wider culture.
The best independent cinemas are the examples to follow: FACT in Liverpool, HOME in Manchester, Broadway in Nottingham, and Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds are not just cinemas, but cherished cultural and community hubs. Above all, cinemas must not be afraid to think big and sell the magic. In a lonely, atomised world coloured by the isolation of working from home, streaming on demand and social media communication, people need to be reminded of the ‘irreplaceable spirit’ of cinema and the value of communal experience — perhaps, even, of Ebert’s ideal of cinema as a ‘sanctuary of […] dreams’.
Featured image: Jeff Pierre / Unsplash
